Why Slow Practice Works - and When It Doesn't - PHH 203

Understand that you're listening. You're getting this advice from somebody to whom this does not come naturally. Remember, I'm the super speedy player. That's me. I just want to get it to tempo and I want to keep it there. This kind of super slow practice is just not part of my nature. So for me to be advocating this kind of practice, you know, it's got to be powerful.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, A harp on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us just go to harpmastery.comjoin-now. That's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. My harp background is in the Salzido Method. This is the technique method devised and taught by legendary harpist Carlos Salzato. It was at the time, which was the early part of the 20th century, a startlingly different concept of harp playing and harp technique, and the aim was to bring the harp into the modern world. The aesthetic of the method varied in almost every way possible from the French tradition in which Salzetto himself was trained. But we aren't discussing physical technique today, we're discussing practice technique, one practice technique in particular, and that's slow practice. Please understand that slow practice has always been a part of harp studies and for very good reasons, which we will discuss discuss shortly. Salzato, however, was known for teaching his students to practice slowly and loudly. Now, I need to quickly add a couple of disclaimers. First, the loud and slow practice, which is often attributed to the Salcedo Method, is a very broad statement and as such is not completely accurate. Second, and more importantly, it wasn't the only only kind of practice he advocated. Third, please remember that slow practice isn't only for Salzato method harpists. It's important for us all. That's the point of today's podcast why slow practice is vital for being able to play your pieces accurately and expressively at the goal tempo. So I want to explore with you what slow practice is all about and how you can start your own habit of slow practice. We'll talk about the practice strategies themselves, but I also want to focus on how to use slow practice to eliminate mistakes, to strengthen your technique, to eliminate hesitations and pauses in your music, and to be able to play with more expression and musicality. While I think slow practice can work miracles, there are also times when slow practice is not helpful and and I'll go over those with you too. While we're talking today about making things correct and working on details, I wanted to invite you to explore that detail kind of work in a different, different way as we start our April course at My Harp Mastery, which of course is available for you as a seminar. Right. So you can join our April seminar series. It's called Rhythm Makeover. And this isn't just about rhythms. It's about learning how to practice them, learning how to drill them, learning how to recognize them, and even more importantly, learning how to decipher them when you see them in a piece of music. There's no reason for any of us to be stuck with a piece of music and look at it and say, well, I have no idea how to figure out this rhythm. In the words of some of today's Internet gurus, everything is figureoutable and that includes rhythm. So that's part of what we're going to be talking about in our theme in our seminar series, Rhythm Makeover. So I encourage you, if you're a My Heart Mastery member, be sure to join us for those calls. If you're not a My Heart Mastery member, then join our seminar series and you can follow along with all the things that are part part of that course. Now, of course in the seminar series, you don't have access to all the other My Heart Mastery goodies, like our archive of courses and all the things that go with that. But you can join us for these four calls and learn how, learn how to do a lot with rhythm, including figure it out. So that's our seminar series. You'll find the link to join that course. If you are not a My Heart Mastery member, you'll find the link to join that course on our homepage or in the app and you can sign up right there. And of course, if you're ready to go deeper, I would encourage you to join our Harp Mastery Certified coaching program. We do still have openings. Our coaches still have some space in their rosters, or at least some of the coaches do. And this is your opportunity to sign up for lessons with a Heart Mastery Certified coach. Everything you need to get started is on the coaching page. I've linked to it in the show notes or you'll be able to find it on the homepage under programs and you'll see exactly how these lessons work. You get to choose your number of lessons and you can bundle them to save money. You can do all kinds of things. So it's a very flexible program and the people that have been in this lessons program are really enjoying it. As I said, we still have some room in the coaches rosters, so I would encourage you to check that out and see how working with a Heart Mastery Certified coach can move you ahead further and faster. So those are a couple things going on at Heart Mastery. There's always something interesting going on, but right now we're going to slow things down. We're going to talk about slow practice. I want to credit one of my Gold Circle students for suggesting this topic to me. She didn't suggest it as a podcast topic, but she had some really specific questions that were about, well, you know, I hear people talk about slow practice and I hear the coaches on the My Heart Mastery calls some of them are talking about slow practice, and slow practice is the way to go. And then I hear you talk about, yes, some slow practice, but yeah, fast practice. And you have to be able to play it at tempo. And her question was a really logical one. It was, well, just how do these things meet? Where is she supposed to go with all this information? Does it go together? Does it become a logical practice plan? And I think it does. And so thank you for calling this to my attention because I hate when there's conflicting or apparently conflicting information. And the thing is, it's not so conflicting. But I really hadn't done a very good job of communicating how slow practice and fast practice went together. Slow practice did not come naturally to me. I started as a kid and I think like a lot of young children, I just wanted to get in there and play it. I wasn't about doing things slowly and carefully. I know from my experience teaching that people who come to an instrument or start music studies later in life, like as mature adults, have a much more mature perspective. And so they understand the value of going slowly and carefully and doing things right. So I have learned that perspective, but it certainly wasn't the way I started. And so my teacher was also always on me for practicing slowly. And at that 16 and 17 year old age, when I finally started taking responsibility for my own harp playing, as opposed to just waiting for my teacher to tell me what to do, I started understanding what slow practice was about. And I started getting a lot of lessons from my teachers about what slow practice meant in terms of actually doing it. And it was so difficult for me because the slow practice that they were encouraging me to do was maybe at half tempo. And it took a lot of effort for me to not just start to zoom through a piece, but to understand that I needed to watch all those details and that the slow practice gave me time to do that. So that was the lesson that I had to learn. It may not be the lesson that you had to learn. I know fast playing does not come naturally to a lot of people, so there's a challenge there, making sure that you can speed things up and actually play fast. And you may have heard me say more than once, if you don't play fast, you will never play fast. So fast playing needs to be a part of your harp practice as well. But. But I want to explore a little bit more about exactly what slow practice means. Imagine slowing down a video of someone doing a complex task. When you slow that video down to extreme slow motion, you can see every movement they're making, and so you can duplicate it yourself at the pace that you need. That's what slow practice is like. Slow practice allows you to do every step, right? Now, remember that when you're playing and practicing something, you can't focus on everything at once. But if you're playing slowly enough, you can focus on the right notes, you can focus on the right rhythm, you can focus on the fingering, you can focus on your. Your technique, your mechanics. You can focus on the buzzing, you can focus on the expression, all of those things. Because this very slow tempo allows you to be able to check all those things as you go. So slow practice is really wonderful for helping you get everything in the right place, for helping you coordinate the hands together, perhaps. But it really means slow. It doesn't just mean under tempo. It probably means half tempo, and it might mean slower depending on the tempo of your piece. But it's the kind of practice that makes you go slowly enough so that you can see everything there. Okay, I couldn't keep that up. So that when you can check that your fingers are closing, when you can check that you're getting the right finger on the right string at the right time, and that it's playing with the right sound, this gives you the perfect foundation for being able to move the piece forward.

Moving the piece forward is essential, too, but that's not what we're going to talk about just yet. But that's what slow practice is for. As you're doing slow practice, do not ignore the musical aspect of things. It isn't just about playing the notes and making it all mechanically correct. You can think about the dynamics, play those different dynamics. This is loud, this is soft. Add that crescendo, add that decrescendo. Put in the retard. I know retard seems ridiculous when you're working at super slow tempo, but certainly you can add those things and bake them into the piece right at the beginning. So slow practice is great for that beginning stage where you can get everything lined up, including the expression that you want. And as I said before, bake it in right at the beginning so it becomes part of your experience with the piece right from the start. This kind of slow practice almost always requires the metronome, because without the metronome, you probably won't stay slow enough, or the beats will be so slow that it will be hard for you to keep them even. This is not a bad way to train yourself with the metronome as well. So if the metronome doesn't Go slow enough for you. For instance, if you want to put the metronome back to 30 to the quarter note, and your metronome doesn't go at 30, well, then put it at 60 to the eighth note and line it up that way. And that will help build in all that rhythmic security. So all that is good, and that's slow practice, allowing you to do everything right. Slow practice is allowing you to check everything as you go, not just to do it right, but then to make sure that you did it right, because you have time to check. This is something we don't encourage you to do at a faster tempo. Because if you're checking something, you're not playing forward, you're not thinking forward. But when the tempo is slow enough, you have time to see what you just did without stopping. So you can check the technique, the rhythm, the notes, your tone. You can check your dynamics. You can make sure that you're staying relaxed. You get to check everything. Slow practice allows you to coordinate everything. Doesn't that sound good? One of the things, of course, that might spring to your mind immediately when I'm talking about coordination is hands together. And certainly slow practice allows you to do that. It actually allows you to read the music in a very organized way. So that suppose you have a passage that has a lot of chords. When you're practicing slowly enough, you can make sure that you're reading each chord from the bottom up. Perhaps you're looking at the left hand and the right hand. Maybe you're placing them together, but reading them in the same order all the time so that your reading becomes very coordinated. And, of course, your placing can be coordinated that way as well. Slow practice gives you the time to do that. Also remember that gaps or hesitations or breaks in the flow of music as you play, those generally come from processes getting out of sync. For instance, maybe your reading isn't keeping up with your fingers, or maybe your left hand is lagging along, or maybe your pedals are late. These are things that are out of sync, out of coordination. And when you have the right slow tempo, you can align those processes. And what this enables, of course, is that as you speed up the tempo, you can rely on the coordination work that you've done to help you get to those faster tempos and play them well. Slow practice also eliminates frenzy. Right? I mean, you know what it's like when you're trying to play something up to tempo and it's really hard, and you're blah, blah, blah, and your mind seems to, you know, you see the smoke coming out of your ears. Your fingers don't know what to do. You can't even decipher what's on the page. And when you slow everything down, you have enough time to do what you need to do. You don't have to worry that you're not going to get to the right notes on time or that you can't find your place in the music. You have created all the time you need by practicing slowly enough. And you're still coordinating everything because the tempo is steady. If my mentioning the metronome a moment ago didn't give you the idea that tempo is important, that a steady tempo is critical, let me me emphasize that now. Slow practice isn't just slow. And whenever you want, slow practice is slow and steady. The metronome is your best tool here. Even if you're not ready to call it your friend yet, the metronome is your best tool for keeping you at that slow, steady tempo. Remember that if you aren't keeping a steady tempo, then you're not. But letting all those processes align, the coordination won't be there. You won't have the time to check everything, because some of the time you're going fast, some of the time you're going slow. That's why the metronome becomes. It becomes a foundation of comfort because it gives you the time you need to do what you need to do, which is one of the best, the best things about the metronome. When it can keep you slow enough to line everything up, to check everything, that gives you that sense of security. You won't have that frenzy the way we sometimes do. Okay. Slow practice requires a steady tempo, which pretty much means the metronome. Slow practice creates clean playing because you have the time to place your fingers accurately. It's going to help you eliminate that finger buzzing. It's going help you eliminate pedal noise. It's going to help you get to those pedals or levers in the right amount of time so that you're getting those changes very cleanly. So it's going to give you time to iron out all the messy stuff and just do what you want to do. And of course, last on my list here is that slow practice builds a strong technique and a full sound. Now, this is where the loud part of salzido practice comes in. He wasn't necessarily looking for loud in that kind of a term, but he was looking for his students to practice with a full sound. He wanted his students to be able to develop a bigger and richer tone. So he had them practice slowly with as full a sound as possible. And now I think that there is a really significant difference between the words loud and full. Loud can be harsh. That's not what we're looking for. Loud can sort of lead us to think that we just need to try really hard and pull those strings really hard. And that's not what we want either. We want relaxation. And slow practice will give you the time to think about that full finger action, which is going to give you a full sound with very little effort so that you can stay relaxed. It will give you the time as well to think about where you're gathering tension, if you are collecting it in your hand or your arms or your back or your jaw perhaps, and release that. But because you'll have the time at that tempo to think, think about your finger mechanics, your technique will become stronger, it will become more accurate, and you couldn't use that, right? And so at that loud dynamic, your sound will develop. I should have said at that full dynamic, your sound will develop. Now, okay, I talked about musical expression before, and how does that fit in with this? How can you do all those dynamics if you're trying to play with this full sound? Well, there are two ways to work at that. One is, obviously, do the dynamics as they're indicated. Play piano as piano. You don't have to play with a full sound all the time, but practicing with a full sound is going to help your pianos a soft dynamic sound richer because you'll find that core of the sound, and you won't just be kind of brushing your finger against the string, which is not the kind of piano we usually want to get. We want a soft dynamic that still has some tone to it. So practicing with a full sound will help you do that. Even when you're working at a softer dynamic, however, you can think about practicing at that full dynamic level and adding a crescendo or a decrescendo within that full sound. You'll never get to a real piano, but you'll still have those gradations of dynamic that will go along with the eventual dynamics that you want. So you can do that too. But the. The full sound idea is really great for working on your strong technique and your tone as well. Now, that's what slow practice can do for you. And obviously you can tell that I'm a believer, and I use slow practice every day in my practice. But let me show you what that slow practice is really like. Now, I would do this with the metronome, but I don't think you need to hear the clicking. So trust me, if I were doing this on my own, I would have the metronome on. But here's a little bit of the kind of slow practice I'm talking about with that Bach minuet in G. So the real tempo might be.

Something like that. I'm going to play it at a slow practice tempo, and I'm going to be watching my fingering, I'm going to be watching my technique. I'm going to be thinking there's a little bit of dynamic modulation in here that I'll be doing, but I'm pretty much going to be doing it at a fairly full sound, considering that I've got a microphone right next to me and which doesn't want to get overloaded here. So I'm going to to do it at that really slow tempo. Once again, I would be using a metronome. So here we go.

I'm watching my closing. I watched my cross under.

Watching another cross under here.

A little bit of a diminuendo here.

Placing.

Okay, so that's a little bit obviously of slow practice, and you can tell how super slow that practice is. Now, I don't always do that super slow practice. I do when I want to make something absolutely right and when I absolutely want to check it. This is exactly the kind of practice that I do. But for me, slow practice isn't just slower than tempo. It's really slow enough where I can watch every detail and be in charge of everything that's going on. I don't use slow practice all the time. I usually use it in alternation with playing at tempo. So I may learn a piece this way or I may review the piece this way. If it's a review piece. But as I get to know a piece better, then my practice ratio changes and it changes quickly. So it might be that I'm doing a passage three times at tempo, possibly even faster, just to build in a little headroom, and then once at that super slow tempo that I just played for you so that I can refresh all the details. If you're a person who thinks that playing at tempo and when things get really messy, it's going to mess up your habits that you worked so hard to instill. Let me tell you that it won't. And one of the reasons you can ensure that it won't is by practicing at that super slow tempo, you've practiced it at that fast tempo. Go back. Go back to super slow, where you can check everything and renew those habits. Refresh those habits and clean out all the mess again. It'll make you feel better and it will help your fingers as well. So if you have a piece that you want to review, then when you pull that piece out, play it slowly twice maybe and see what is going on. Or maybe play it slowly for the first couple of days and then you can start mixing in the real tempo. But that super slow practice will tell you everything you need to know and it will help you line all those things up. So that's how I use that super slow practice. Obviously it is super slow, so it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of focus to do it well, because you can't go on autopilot and have this work. So limit it to some particular sections of your piece or limit it to one piece that you're practicing. Don't expect to get through everything with this super slow practice, because you can tell it, it takes a while. But there are times when slow practice is not helpful. Slow practice, while it's going to make playing at tempo much more accurate and much more fluid, it doesn't magically lead to fast practice. It doesn't magically lead to at tempo. I mean, you can't say, well, I've done all this wonderful slow practice, so I know I'm going to be able to play this piece quickly. It doesn't work that way. You have to learn to play fast and you have to learn to play your piece fast enough. So this is where the tempo pyramid is useful. Uh, this will help you get that piece up to tempo. And as I mentioned a moment ago, the slow practice can help you calm things down again after you've been working at that faster tempo. And you can also use slow practice as sort of a, a way to review and correct something that has been at tempo for a while and just feels like it' getting sloppy. I do this often with a piece I'm preparing for performance. I might spend two days playing it through at tempo and working at tempo, and then the third day I'll pull it back to that super slow tempo and just correct everything again. That's a great use of slow practice.

The other slow practice trap is that it can be so comfortable that it can be too comfortable. Kind of like that sofa that's just really hard to get out of. It can make playing fast seem more difficult than it is. Too much slow practice can just keep you stuck in slow mode. So remember that slow practice is a tool. It's not the only thing you need so that you need to be doing your at tempo practice as well, you need to be doing your tempo pyramid. You need to be playing things fast and slow. Those two things together will bring that piece to its ultimate performance place, right? The slow practice to help you learn it, the slow practice to help you keep it correct, and the fast practice because that's where the music is. The music lies at the tempo it's supposed to be at where the flow is, right? So both of those things work together. Now, I'm sure that most of the slow practice that you have done so far has been sort of that medium slow practice, not the super slow practice that I described. But I would encourage you to try just a little bit of that super slow practice, especially when you have something that's really tricky and not coming together for you. Understand that you're listening. You're getting this advice from somebody to whom this does not come naturally. Remember, I'm the super speedy player. That's me. I just want to get it to tempo and I want to keep it there. This kind of super slow practice is just not part of my nature. So for me to be advocating this kind of practice, you know, it's got to be powerful in small doses so that you can really focus and watch what you're doing, fix what you need to, refresh what you need to. It's powerful, powerful practice when done in conjunction with more usual practice tempos. Does that make sense? I hope it does, and I hope you give this a try because it is a game changer in so many ways. If you can persevere through it. And if I can, I know you can too. We might end up talking about slow practice a little bit more next week, because next week on the podcast we're talking about reviewing pieces, how to set up a review system for yourself, and how to actually review a piece so that you can bring it back and do it well. How review is different from practice. So everything about review done right here on the podcast. Next week, don't forget, you can get a makeover of a different kind, a rhythm makeover, in our April seminar series, which is of course our My Heart Mastery course for April. It's the rhythm makeover. And you're going to be learning not just how to make sure that your rhythms are precise and accurate and how you can read them more quickly, but learning how to decipher a rhythm that you think you can't figure out. So we'll be working on all of that all through the month of April as part of our My Heart Mastery membership. And of course you can purchase this course individually if you'd like, as a seminar course. So look for that coaching open for you. We still have some spots on our coaches rosters, so I wanted to remind you about that as well. So I look forward to talking with you next week when we talk about review. And in the meantime, please remember that that every day is a day you can add more Harp Happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your Harp Happiness every day. See you next time.