This Boring Practice Trick Will Save Your Performance

Have you ever shown up to a lesson or performance, and then played way worse than you practiced at home the day before?

I think we all have.

And the reason why is that you’re overlooking this boring but really effective practice technique that will make your playing consistent even in front of other people.

In this post, I’m going to show you what this technique is, why it works so well, and how to do it yourself.

The Practice Trick

So, what is this practice technique?

Playing slowly. Veeeerrrrryyy slowly.

Like, super slow motion movie scene slow.

Is it very exciting? No. But here’s why it works.

Why It Works

When you play by yourself at home, there is a lot of context in that environment that helps you out.

Muscle memory, or how things feel, aural memory, or how things sound, plus just the way things look, and the way you feel are all familiar.

Even if you’re not totally on autopilot, it’s way easier to play when your muscle memory knows this finger comes after this finger after this finger.

You get into a groove and you can play naturally.

Then even if there are some finger placements or notes that are a little less confident, your body can kind of figure it out for you.

But when you play in front of someone else, a whole different part of your brain wakes up and drowns out that context that you’re used to.

Your muscle and aural memory become inaccessible.

Add to that a distracting environment and a racing heartbeat, and it’s much harder to get into the same groove you got into before.

And then any places where you’re not super confident on a fingering or a note becomes something that can totally derail you.

Here’s where playing super slowly comes in.

And it’s not the same as playing slowly when you’re first learning a piece because you just aren’t able to play faster.

What it does with a piece you know well, is it removes that familiar context from the piece.

The notes become far enough apart that the muscle memory isn’t as connected, and it’s going to sound different too.

So that means, you can’t run on autopilot - you need to know each note and fingering to play outside of the usual context.

And so after doing that super slow practice, even when you’re in an unfamiliar environment and you can’t access your muscle memory, you’ll still know what to do.

How to Do It

Next let’s talk about how to do your slow practice.

Start with a small segment of music, and play slowly enough that you can really pay attention to each individual note.

It should basically sound like there’s a rest between each note.

Ideally we still want to keep the rhythm proportional, so you can still count with the same syllables as usual (ie. 1 and 2 and 3 and....), but make the time between each count much farther apart.

It’s not necessary to use a metronome to practice slowly, but if you want to try it, you can set your metronome to about 50 bpm, and use that as the pace for your 8th note.

It’s really important that you’re not just going through the motions when you practice slowly.

The point is to really know the music, so if you’re not paying attention while you play, you won’t get anything out of it.

Aim for accuracy, and make sure that you’re able to hit every note without scrambling.

If you can’t, make note of what the correct note and fingering are, and repeat the section until you can play it at the slow tempo confidently.

After you’ve done some slow practice, you can play at the regular tempo again and see if you’re able to play accurately.

If not, make a note of when you made mistakes, and practice those places slowly some more.

And of course you can also practice those spots using other practice strategies you know.

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