Practice Makes Perfect

      If you are having difficulty with a particular passage of music (try as you might, you just can't seem to consistently get it to come out right), try following these simple, yet effective "rules".  The following article contains execllent guidelines to successful practicing for performance, or just for overall improvement of your musical skill, and it works for all instruments and levels of playing ability.

Practice Makes Perfect

by Jason LeBrun and Mark Schiffer

(originally published in the March 2009 Windway, SFARS newsletter and republished with permission from the authors)

The summary of the rule is:  If you can play the selection five consecutive times* correctly, increase the tempo on the metronome; if you play the selection five consecutive times incorrectly, slow the tempo down.

*this could be as few as three or as many as ten times, depending on your time or patience ~ ghh.

Here's how it works:  Select a passage which is causing you problems.  If the passage is particularly long, break it down into overlapping bits.  It's important that they're overlapping:  if they don't overlap well enough, you will not learn the "breaks" between the bits.

Set your metronome at a speed at which you are fairly certain you can play the passage.

Now start the 5-in-a-row process.  Keep five pennies next to your music stand and metronome. Play the passage through completely. Each time you play the target passage correctly, move one penny to the right; each time you play it incorrectly,  take a penny from the right (+) pile and move it back to the left (-). The object is to get all your pennies on the right.  At that point, move the tempo up a click or two. For anyone who is very goal oriented, having the visual challenge helps focus your concentration, especially when there are more pennies on the right than on the left.  You may want to write down the tempo you’ve achieved on your music so you have a record of it. This is also a nice visual reinforcement of the progress that's been made. 

If you are consistently making mistakes at your initial tempo, you're probably starting off too fast.  If you play the passage with mistakes five times in a row, move the metronome down one click.  Whenever you reach + 5 or - 5, increase or decrease the tempo, respectively.

Continue this process until you've reached the target tempo for the piece.

Once you reach your target tempo, it's advisable to continue the process for an additional 2-3 clicks of the metronome (faster). This is because a) there's a variance at which a conductor will start a piece and b) you may get nervous in performance, so it's better to leave yourself a little bit of technical “wiggle room”.

This process may seem tedious at first, but it works really well because you don't cheat yourself into thinking you've mastered a part after playing it correctly only once.

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