Back when I took piano lessons, I pretty much all the time wanted to be over and done with practicing so that I could move on to the next thing. One of the hard lessons that I had to learn is that if I wanted to make excellent music, I had to work at it, take it slow and figure out the trouble spots.
So, the question is, how slow is slow? When you’re starting out, I think half speed can be a good place to start. I don’t make that a hard and fast rule, but if the piece is supposed to be at 120 BPM, back it up to 60 BPM to start. Why go slow? As I regularly tell students, you’re developing hand-eye coordination for every piece of music you learn and play, so the slower the speed, the easier your hands and eyes can keep up.
One of the best things for practicing that I’ve learned and regularly talk about for practicing is to start at your slower speed, build up your confidence and musicality as you succeed at that slower speed. Then, the next step is to bump up the tempo 10 BPM. It won’t feel much faster, but you start the process again. Master the music and musicality at that speed, then repeat. Move up another 10 BPM. Yes, it’s more time, but your confidence and musicianship will continue to grow and over time, you will find that it won’t take as long to speed up the music as you gain experience as a musician.
Learning music isn’t a race or a competition. It’s taking the steps to grow in confidence and musicianship, challenging yourself and your skills to grow and improve. But when you go slow and steady, practicing regularly and growing in your musical knowledge and experience, you will see your growth skyrocket….at your own speed!
Growth isn’t linear. It will be surges forward, slight steps backward, and so on. The only way that growth happens, though, is through learning more about music, having the experiences you get from making music and when those things happen, it’s fun to look back after 3 months, 6 months or a year and see how far you’ve come. But the best way to have that growth is to be slow, steady and consistent.