This is the final post in my August series on practicing. You can find previous posts, here, here, here and here.
This week’s post is basically a summary of all of my previous posts, in a way. When you go slow, take the piece apart, look for repeated patterns and ideas and repeat them over and over, at some point you need to put it together!
When you put the piece back together, it does need to be intentional and deliberate, just like you did in practicing the individual components. At least, not if you’re wanting to build confidence in the entire piece.
If the piece is supposed to be at a faster tempo, you don’t want to take it apart, work at it and then jump right to full speed, do you? Baby steps are the answer! When I’m working on speeding up a piece, I’ll work either by 5 or 10 BPM to build up my confidence. Once I feel like I’m comfortable there, I’ll bump the BPM up to the next level. And so on until it’s full speed.
As I’m putting the chunks back together, I’m working on overlap between those sections so that they are smooth and fluid. You don’t want to hear confidence, then a drop in confidence for a beat or two because that’s the overlap between sections. Consistency is the key!
Overall, the goal is to work at the individual components to put them together to make beautiful music. And beautiful music comes from confidence. Confidence comes from work and repetition. For some pieces this may not take a long time. For others, it may take weeks, months, even years to master. These tools have helped me to grow and improve as a musician. The students I’ve shared them with over the past 23 years have grown and improved as musicians too. I hope that this series gives you encouragement and the tools you need to be the best musician you can be!