I am not nearly the first, nor will I be the last, to extol the virtues of slow practice. The technique has been much-discussed, especially in recent years, as a way to learn and internalize music at a deeper level than a regular run-through at performance tempo allows.* More than simply a method to gain facility in specific faster or technical passages, slow practice has been revealed as an effective tool for building a musical interpretation of a piece. I will add my own two cents to the chorus of performers and educators praising slow practice in the form of the internet’s favorite way to consume information: a list!
It does work on faster, technical passages
As my teacher Toby Hanks put it, practicing is about identifying and isolating specifically what is difficult about a piece, then eliminating that difficulty in order to learn the music before reincorporating it. If a piece is difficult because of its fast tempo (as so many are), then the first order of business is to play it slowly. This is a time-honored practice tool for a reason: it works.
Most of us learn our music slowly, but many of us do it in an inconsistent way, fluctuating in tempo (consciously or not) and slowing down only when the speed of the notes requires it. This type of “slow-ish” practice is not the subject of this post. In order for slow practice to be effective, it MUST be done with a metronome. This allows us not only to learn music in a manageable way, but to understand the proportional relationships between tricky, faster passages and the musical material surrounding them.
It also works as a way to build musical phrasing
In order to have complete command over your musical interpretation of a musical work, you need to develop a fluency in the language of both the composer and the piece. Until the necessary level of fluency is reached, musical elements will fall through the cracks when you play through the piece. Articulations, dynamics, and phrasing ideas that you meant to incorporate will not happen, or will not line up with your intentions. Certain parts of the music or its interpretation will get away from you as you concentrate on the more immediate challenge of playing notes and rhythms.
Practicing a piece slowly will allow you to focus on each individual aspect of the music in a more manageable time frame. How slow? Ridiculously slow. Half tempo. Maybe even slower than half tempo. Slow practice should occur at a tempo at which the performer can reasonably expect to incorporate musical elements like dynamics, articulations, phrasing, and note groupings with ease. Whatever tempo is required for your brain to process and participate in each level of the music in the piece at hand will be your slow practice tempo. It may be extremely slow, or even tedious, but nothing will get away from you.
The good news is that the human brain is an amazing machine. It learns through repetition, and when that repetition is careful and consistent it forms an imprint that sticks.** Contained in that imprint is not only the surface level of the music (notes and rhythms), but whatever musical inflections you had time to add during your slow practice. I have personally seen incredible results from simply alternating between slow practice and up-to-tempo practice of a passage or an entire movement or work. The beauty of this method is that your brain will do all the work for you. You don’t have to question, analyze, or even think as you transition between tempos. Simply observe that what you imprint on your brain during slow practice tends to show up in the up-to-tempo version. For this reason, most of your thinking should be centered around imprinting exactly what you intend to imprint at the slow tempo.
It helps in recital prep
We have all been there: that point in recital preparation where the repetition of the music you’ve chosen to perform starts to really wear on you in the practice room. How many times can you repeat a piece in the same way without it becoming routine? How can you possibly maintain an attention to the musical details contained in the piece over several months of preparation? How can you continue to notice new musical nuances after your thousandth run-through?
Enter your good friend, slow practice. Playing through a piece slowly will force you to perceive it differently than the up-tempo version. The details that are easier to gloss over at a faster tempo are difficult to miss when performed slowly. You have no choice but to focus on the musical ideas you intend to incorporate, since they should be magnified in the slow tempo. Slow practice of recital repertoire is a way to check and reaffirm the imprint of a piece on your brain.
It doesn’t lie
Speaking of months-long, methodical recital preparation, slow practice is a way to answer the question, “Am I doing what I think I’m doing?” Too often we can be lulled into complacency by the type of repetition that is necessary to learn a piece of music. Are you really performing that crescendo? That accent? Are you really allowing the final note of that phrase to resonate? Is that interval in tune? Have you really nailed down the awkward fingering pattern in that passage? These are questions we often don’t even think to ask ourselves when running through a piece, especially once we’ve become familiar with it.
This brings us back to one of my early points about slow practice: It MUST be done with a metronome. A click is necessary for an honest, effective imprint to be formed. It ensures that the rhythmic building blocks of a piece (individual subdivisions of beats) are firmly in place. A metronome also just makes good sense: if your brain has to compute tempo along with everything else, how effective can it be at slow practice? Playing a passage at a slow tempo, with metronome, will illuminate exactly what is happening too fast to process in the up-tempo version of the passage.
It helps build endurance
For some of us, and for brass musicians in particular, it can be a struggle to build up the muscle endurance necessary to play a recital’s worth of music. In addition to all of its other benefits, slow practice assists in this area as well. Although a slow run-through of a piece may diminish a player’s endurance on that particular day, it will help to build it in the longer term. It can have a similar effect to that of swinging a weighted baseball bat before swinging a regular one. When switching from slow tempo to performance tempo, a piece will often suddenly feel lighter, easier, and more free-flowing. It’s a mind game, but we’ll take what we can get.
It is kind to your brain
Think about what your approach would be in a music lesson with a child who exhibits frustration with their music? Let’s say the child is struggling with the notes and fingerings in a certain tune, to the point that they can’t play it at tempo. The first thing I’d do is look for a way to alleviate the student’s frustration by changing the goal. Instead of asking them to play the tune at tempo, I ask them to play it at a tempo at which they will be able to manage the notes and fingerings. Teachers do this not only because it helps to learn the music, but because identifying a manageable goal allows the student to experience the accomplishment of achieving that goal.
While we would do this for any young student without even thinking about it, we don’t always give ourselves the same consideration in the practice room (where we are both the student and the teacher). Because we know our long-term goals for a certain piece, we don’t always identify our short-term goals in the practice room. If the goal is only to play the piece at a professional level at performance tempo, then we will fail many, many times before we succeed. But if the goal is to be able to play a specific passage musically and at a manageable tempo? Then we give ourselves a chance to succeed. So to return to the question of “How slow to slow-practice?”: slow enough that you can succeed at the immediate goal you have set for yourself. By moving the goalposts from hour to hour, or from day to day, we can build our musical interpretation of a work from the ground up through small but significant successes.
Slow practice does not ask more of your brain than it can reasonably handle. Instead, it allows you to trust that your brain will do what it is meant to do with the information that you carefully encode into it. Slow practice is a process that respects the complexities and intricacies contained in each piece of music. It will honestly tell you exactly where you stand in your preparation of a piece. And it will give you the opportunity for small, daily victories, allowing you frame your practice room experience around the positive progress you make.
*https://bulletproofmusician.com/is-slow-practice-really-necessary/
https://www.musiciansway.com/blog/2011/02/a-different-kind-of-slow-practice/
https://www.thestrad.com/10-views-on-the-benefits-of-slow-practice/18.article
https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/what-is-slow-practice/
https://www.frankhuangpiano.com/single-post/2018/06/23/3-Benefits-to-Slow-Practice
https://www.carolinaphil.org/zen-and-the-art-of-piano/slow-practice-fast-practice
The list goes on …