Practice Tip 3: Practicing Music - Practice Slowly

Apr 4

You might ask about learning music, “How can I become better at music?”, “How can I practice effectively?”, “How can I practice every day?” “How long should I practice?” This is a series about practicing to encourage and inspire. Although it is meant for children, adult music students will enjoy it too.

Can you guess what it means to practice slowly and why it is one of the basic and most important practice suggestions that teachers make!? This is one of the first music lesson paintings I created. My music teacher friend told me that Itzhak Perlman signs his autograph with the words “Practice Slowly” along with his name.

If you can play the music slowly, you CAN play it faster! (But if you can’t play it slowly,…). Practice slowly by setting a very slow metronome for the piece or phrase. Gradually increase the metronome speed - perhaps over the period of weeks! Practicing slowly is one of the most important methods to go thru a piece, and the hardest to make myself do! But if you do this regularly in your practice, you’ll find it works well.

Reasons to practice slowly:

If you are starting a new piece, and want to make sure you don’t learn wrong notes or rhythms by running thru the music too quickly. If you make mistakes at the beginning, your brain will learn the part wrong, and it will be hard to fix a bad habit. If you can’t play the music slowly, you certainly will play it wrong when you run thru it quickly.
If there is an especially difficult few notes or phrase(s) in the music, practice it (or them) slowly each day before you practice a larger section of the piece.
If you are playing a fast movement, play the whole movement slowly with a metronome. You can listen to yourself better this way. You might hear two slightly uneven notes. Sometimes a note might “stick out” or be pointy because you accidentally emphasize it just a little. A way to smooth out the pointy notes in a fast section is to play them in a slur. (This is a whole separate practice tip that I need to paint.)
If you are getting close to a performance of a fast piece, practice your music slowly first every day before playing it up to tempo. This will not only solidify the music played correctly in your brain.