You practice a piece of music so quickly that you consistently make mistakes. What skill are you actually training? How to play with mistakes.
When you first learn a piece of music, you constantly make mistakes. If making mistakes while practicing meant you were just learning to make mistakes, then it would be impossible to learn not to make mistakes.
You want to play slowly enough that you are just barely not making mistakes, and notice any mistake and practice that specific passage or figure until you can play it correctly. Maybe not everything needs to be perfect before you move on—sometimes you want to build up an overall structure before filling in all the details—but you will have to spend time unlearning mistakes if you just play the piece start to finish over and over again without paying attention to what you’re really practicing.
My teachers never put it in such LW-y terms, but this is standard folk wisdom. This, and that mistakes aren’t random, with practice decreasing the standard deviation of where your finger hits or something, but are instead usually the output of buggy mechanics. My teacher’s teacher liked to say he’s thankful for every mistake he makes, because it means that’s one more mistake he never has to make again. A former LWer also wrote about this.
But then the answer to “What skill am I actually practicing?” is “How to play really slowly.” I’d agree that “Playing slowly to learn to play faster” is probably a smoother upgrade than “playing with mistakes to learn to play more accurately”, but that’s not obviously true.
I’ve seen it suggested to practice at normal or faster-than-normal speeds, but only very short segments that you can play for sure without mistakes (one or two measures, repeated 10 times). Anecdotally it’s worked pretty well for me, but so have other techniques (playing the whole thing slowly, playing at normal speed with mistakes...)
Of course, then the answer to “What skill am I actually practicing” is “how to play this tiny part of the song (and then stop)”...
Yes, so you then practice the transitions between tiny parts, as well as starting at random points. Students who make unrecoverable mistakes in performances from memory often have to backtrack to the beginning of the previous part, because that’s all they ever practiced starting from. (Even when you’re not trying to memorize a piece, you’re still building up a mental model and you don’t always want things coarsely chunked.)
When you first learn a piece of music, you constantly make mistakes. If making mistakes while practicing meant you were just learning to make mistakes, then it would be impossible to learn not to make mistakes.
You want to play slowly enough that you are just barely not making mistakes, and notice any mistake and practice that specific passage or figure until you can play it correctly. Maybe not everything needs to be perfect before you move on—sometimes you want to build up an overall structure before filling in all the details—but you will have to spend time unlearning mistakes if you just play the piece start to finish over and over again without paying attention to what you’re really practicing.
My teachers never put it in such LW-y terms, but this is standard folk wisdom. This, and that mistakes aren’t random, with practice decreasing the standard deviation of where your finger hits or something, but are instead usually the output of buggy mechanics. My teacher’s teacher liked to say he’s thankful for every mistake he makes, because it means that’s one more mistake he never has to make again. A former LWer also wrote about this.
Not if you play slowly enough.
But then the answer to “What skill am I actually practicing?” is “How to play really slowly.” I’d agree that “Playing slowly to learn to play faster” is probably a smoother upgrade than “playing with mistakes to learn to play more accurately”, but that’s not obviously true.
I’ve seen it suggested to practice at normal or faster-than-normal speeds, but only very short segments that you can play for sure without mistakes (one or two measures, repeated 10 times). Anecdotally it’s worked pretty well for me, but so have other techniques (playing the whole thing slowly, playing at normal speed with mistakes...)
Of course, then the answer to “What skill am I actually practicing” is “how to play this tiny part of the song (and then stop)”...
Yes, so you then practice the transitions between tiny parts, as well as starting at random points. Students who make unrecoverable mistakes in performances from memory often have to backtrack to the beginning of the previous part, because that’s all they ever practiced starting from. (Even when you’re not trying to memorize a piece, you’re still building up a mental model and you don’t always want things coarsely chunked.)