The Power of Ten ...

Image from Rhino Daily

I wonder why we sometimes know perfectly well how we are supposed to practice and yet still go blithely on doing something else?  Maybe because it's more fun or requires less effort?  It is certainly no fun continually  messing up when playing through pieces.  I have a piece that I really like, and can play through adequately, but each and every time there are lots of little missed or damped notes, buzzes, or hesitations - and realistically this probably represents the places where if I try to play those particular measures in isolation I can get them totally right only a percentage of the time.  Expecting all the 'rights' to come together when I play through the entire piece is thus asking for the impossible, yet that's what I do. I've tried isolating sections, slowing them down to get them right and speeding them back up, but those errors are still creeping in when I play through the piece.

This week I determined to try to practice tricky bits until I could play them perfectly 10x one after the other.  I first really heard about this technique during a flatpicking workshop - "practice a movement slowly until you can do it right 10x before speeding up!"   I decided to apply the system to my problem piece a little differently.  This piece is already at tempo, and as I said, I can nail the physical movements most of the time, just not every time. So instead of slowing these sections (a measure or 2) down, walking through them slowly, then gradually speeding them up, I slowed down only slightly and started on the repetitions, with a couple of seconds breather between each one.  Oh my!  At the beginning I was lucky to get to 4x before an error would creep in and I'd have to start again.  As I worked through this process in several different problem spots I began to notice a pattern - Initially I wouldn't be concentrating too closely, so around the 3rd or 4th repetition I'd mess up. After a few of rounds of this I would find myself really focusing on the problem - homing in on the bit that required extra attention with a laser focus.   This super-focusing is actively cultivated in sports - I read about it as a means to increase batting success in the  US womens softball team.  Anyway, once I figured out how to apply this focus consistently the perfect repetitions would shoot up to 8 or 9.  Then there would be a few more go-arounds until I stopped myself thinking about the finish line. Then I'd try playing it within a larger section.  I did find in some cases, after I got one part to 10 reps I would have to repeat the process in the transition to the problem section... but in most cases I found I was now playing through the larger section consistently without errors.

So how did things work when I play through even longer parts or the whole thing?  So far so good - the errors haven't gone away entirely (some of the tricky bits are just hard for me to do) but they are definitely reduced, and more important, If I do make a mistake, focusing fixes the problem.  I don't know why it works - it could be that I've repeated it correctly enough times that muscle memory now remembers the right way, or that my brain unconsciously remembers to focus.  Regardless, it's looking like a technique I will add to my regular practice.