When learning a new song, Justin, and the vast majority of other instructors, recommend that you start off slowly until you can play through the entire song cleanly. Only after that should you gradually build up speed until you can match that of the recorded song. I’ve only heard one state the contrary. He said, if you start off slow, you’ll always play it slowly. I’ve started to wonder if, in some cases, he has a point. There are a couple of fingerstyle songs I’ve been working on for awhile that I can play cleanly all of the way through from memory, but only at about 85% of the appropriate speed. Now I’m having a devil of a time increasing the speed I’m playing them at.
I do not move fast. never have with much of anything. I have had a good snap response to a single movement, but not maintain speed at a repetitive movement.
So, what I have been doing is working to get over the pause point by just forcing myself to play at or just above the target tempo. This work is generally trying to get my mind to reach the correct notes even if I may mute one or touch an adjacent string. I will work on a tricky spot, often just 2-3 bars. I’ll play it very slowly, maybe 70%, get the hand movements into my head, then do one or two runs thru at 110%. That is likely to fail and I can go back to slow and do the hand movements again. I cycle through this and eventually I can play about 110% with some goofs, but 100% is fairly clean.
Once 110% gets fairly clean, I know that I can then start to fiddle with embellishments at 90% and get those worked in if I want.
For me, this is brute force and directly related to the time I put into it. I certainly start to make errors far faster than my speed goes up. However, once I get timing to work once, my head seems to grab that, and maintaining it is a lot easier and then I usually need to work to not miss a string or mute one unintentionally.
I’ve definitely noticed improvements when I push myself with an alternating fast/slow tempo thing. If I don’t push the tempo faster than I’m comfortable with, I don’t get the improvements. yeah, I’m gonna mess up, but the point is to push it so I’m just a little uncomfortable.
So my first time through, I’ll practice at a slow tempo. How slow depends on the song. I’ll bump it up by ~10% increments usually. But sometimes have done as small as 5% for songs giving me particular trouble. Then if I drop back down after spending some time at the faster tempo, I notice a lot of improvements with how cleanly I can play it. I’ll focus on playing clean and then push the tempo up again to force quicker movements.
I don’t stay at the slow tempo for a long time working on playing it clean. Yeah, spend too much time there and you’ll have trouble at a faster tempo. As soon as it’s not really uncomfortable anymore, boost the tempo to make it uncomfortable again.
I’m sure that I also heard one teacher explain (and I’m wondering if it wasn’t Justin) that it’s really helpful to force yourself on a quick tempo and forgive yourself for all the mistakes. It helps yourself to force and not give yourself time to think about what you’re doing. It helps in getting things in your muscle memory.
However, and this is something that Justin definitely mentioned: practice makes permanent, so always playing at a fast tempo will make the mistakes permanent. Slow playing is the only way to really play it clean. It also give yourself time to focus on technically refining, seeing if you’re doing it okay.
@sequences@Mustela You both seem to be on the same page here. I’ll give that a try. I also just had a thought. One of the songs I mentioned has the same picking patterns throughout. Perhaps if I practice that pattern on muted strings I will disassociate it from the song and make it easier to speed up. We’ll see. Thanks for your replies.
My experience is that if I try to play fast before I’m ready then it takes me longer to learn the song overall because the only way to tidy up the mistakes is to slow down. If I start fast and refuse to slow down then it will always be scruffy, committing bad playing to muscle memory.
If it’s a picking pattern or sequence of notes that I need to get under my fingers then even if it’s an electric song, I’ll usually reach for my acoustic guitar and play it as slowly as I need to teach my fingers the sequence. Again the more I rush, the longer it seems to take. If it’s a strumming pattern then muting the strings can help.
As for learning slowly and never getting faster I don’t subscribe to that at all. A lot of my practice lately has been on the Yousician app. I often start songs down at around 65-70% speed (if I need to go slower than that they’re probably too hard for me right now) and I’ll hang around 75/80% until I’m getting it right. Once I’ve got to the point that I’m consistently hitting 95%+ of the notes every time (and there’s no single section that I always get wrong) then moving from 80 to 85 to 90 to 95 to 100% isn’t that difficult. And yes, sometimes I am stuck at 80% for a period, but getting impatient isn’t the answer.
This is something I have pondered over and quite recently trying nail an awkward 3 bar lick. Only at 80 bpm but nearly all 1/16 notes with a slide a 2 hammer ons, with a couple of notes in-between. I suspected mainly guitarists would just rip it up, but not me.
I started at 60% and thought I’d got it, moved 80% and after 2 or 3 attempts realised I had introduced a couple of errors, I slowed it down but could then not get rid of the issue. I got very frustrated and gave up. I then recallled Justin talking’ in one of his lessons about how easy it was to embed a mistake, and hard to remove it. I remembered him saying take it apart and practice each bit slowly into perfect and then increase speed.
So I took the 3 bars on one by one at 60% and when happy increased to 90 % bit by bit. Then put them together 1 &2 then 2 & 3 and finally all 3 and I got to 90%. I then moved to 100% and after several tries nearly go it. I then did each bar at 110% and repeated putting them together, when I went back to 100% it was much easier.
Yes, you definitely need to start off slowly to make sure you get it right. I just think maybe I play through it too many times at a slower speed to where it sounds and feels normal. Maybe the trick is to get it right but speed up as soon as possible. I don’t know.
Great topic! Does anyone have this experience: you’re practicing slowly. You play the piece through once, maybe with one or two mistakes, different mistakes each time. The second time through you lose focus (even after a short break), and your mind starts doing things like composing this email. If you experience this, what is your guidance for managing it? Thanks!
I know what you mean. Fast car is the only song I can play the entire way through from memory, it’s my warm up song at the start of each practice session. But if I play it a second time I make more mistakes than the first.
It’s a well known phenomenon that you learn the basics fairly quickly but getting the last 10% takes the most amount of time. I can confirm this with songs that have 16th note strumming. I get stuck at about 80%, if I go any faster I quickly lose the plot.
Yes. When this happens to me, I tend to put the thing aside and come back to it weeks or months later. The hope is that this puts me back closer to 0 when I revisit it, and that I get the benefit of the steep improvement curve again. Do you know if research support this?
Like most people I have to start slow.
After I have the hang of things to a reasonable extent I then try to play at stupid fast speed - probably 120%-200% of the actual tempo, ignoring the mistakes as I know they are going to happen.
Then I try to slow down to the actual temp and hope that I can get somewhere near the right notes in the right order at the right speed!
I’ve realised over the years that If I am listening to music in my head (i.e. without actually listening to the music) I seem to slow it down by probably 30%, so then if I try to translate that to actual playing along with a track it throws me right out…That’s assuming that I can even play along!
This sounds to be exactly what I’m talking about. Even if I can play it at the appropriate speed, it sounds too fast. Maybe I should stop listening to the music in my head.
It sounds like the song in your head is at a slower tempo than the original, which to me is weird. How did it get there? You should probably listen to the original more often.
What I do is listen to the original song and figure out the BPM. That is my target and, after learning to play the piece slowly, I try to work up to it. That is also, btw, the version that plays in my head when I imagine the song.
I also found this quote very strange:
How in the world can you NOT start off slow? I truly don’t see the alternative to starting off slow. (It’s also a patently silly affirmation, since 99% of musicians start out slow and most of them don’t “always play it slowly.”)
Beginners put to much stock in BPM. There are no rules saying you have to play a song at X BPM. Playing it at the speed that you feel comfortable is more important than playing it to fast or to slow for your ability.
I play a lot of song slower than the original and with more feeling. Music isn’t about how someone else plays it’s about how you play.
The only time I’ve ever worried about BPM is when playing in a band or playing with others.
If you’re worried about playing to slow use a metronome when you practice. But when you play just play with feeling and don’t worry about speed.
