Slow Piano Practice
When you’re practicing a piano piece, there is no such thing as going too slowly. In fact, you should always end each and every practice session by playing slowly… at least once.
Even if you have not reached the stage where you are plaything with hands together, you should still practice the separate left and right hand slowly. Before switching, ALWAYS end your left or right hand practice with a slow run-through practice.
You may not know it, but this is such an important rule in piano practice because it has such an incredibly large effect on your technical improvement. However, musicians still have trouble figuring out why it actually works. All we know is that it DOES work.
As a hypothesis, many believe that slow piano practice is so beneficial because the piano player has the ability to completely relax. Additionally, it’s easier to pick up more bad piano habits when you play at a faster pace. With slow piano practice, you can virtually erase these bad habits.
Even though you may be at the beginning stage of learning your piece, playing slowly is a great way to test whether you have actually learned the piece.
But how SLOW should you practice? What may be slow to you may actually be medium speed to me.
Ultimately, this is your judgment call. It depends on the individual, their skills, and their learning capabilities. You will begin to realize that when you play slower than a certain speed, it will begin to lose its effect over you.
It’s very important to keep in mind that when you are practicing piano slowly that you maintain the same hand and finger motions that you will use when you play faster. If you play below your optimal slow speed, this will seem impossible.
Ideally, you want to choose a slow speed you can play as accurately as you want, around ½ to ¾ speed. As an added bonus, playing at your optimal slow speed will also help you memorize your piano pieces. As you technique improves, your slow speed can be increased.
Want to hear a fun fact? Some very famous pianists have actually been known to practice ridiculously slowly. That’s right, the genius composers that we all know and worship today over our pianos actually took their time with practice. Some were documented to practice at one note per second, which seems completely insane.
As a final note, it’s important to think ahead of the music when you are practicing slowly. If you practice too fast, it’s easy to mentally fall behind the music, which can easily be adapted as a bad piano habit. Why is it bad? Because you lose control. You need to think ahead and try to maintain that distance as you get back up to speed. When you think ahead, you can actually foresee what is awaiting for you, which can prevent flubs or blank-outs so you will know what to do when you get to that measure.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
As you sit down to your piano for a practice session, try practicing everything at a fast pace, and see what happens the next day you sit down to practice. After that, try practicing a certain measure or passage fast only, and another measure or passage (of the same difficulty) slowly. Compare your improvements the next day when you try to play them. Since this effect is cumulative, after several days of using the fast practicing as well as the slow practicing, you will begin to notice a huge difference in your improvements. Since this is a time consuming experiment, practicing slowly is all you really need. Patience, my friend, patience is all that you need!
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Tags: Bad Piano Habits, Fast Practice, Pace, Patience, Piano Practice, Practicing Piano, Slow, Speed
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