By Raj Jayavant · Updated
The place a passage falls apart is usually not the place that caused it. A fumble on beat three often begins with an awkward hand position set up on beat one.
Play the passage slowly several times and watch for the earliest moment something feels uncomfortable. That is the spot to work on. Fixing the visible collapse without fixing its cause produces a passage that works in practice and fails on stage.
Before drilling anything, consider whether the passage is hard because it is hard, or because you are approaching it wrongly. Common culprits:
If any of those apply, repetition will not help. It will make the wrong solution automatic. Try two or three alternative fingerings first and pick the one that feels easiest slowly. The easiest one slowly is almost always the one that survives at tempo.
Take the smallest fragment that still contains the difficulty. Often that is three or four notes, not two bars. If the problem is a shift, the fragment is the note before it and the note after it, and nothing else.
This feels excessive. It is the fastest route, because a small fragment can be repeated many times per minute, and repetitions are what actually change anything.
Take the fragment to a tempo where you can play it accurately every time. Then repeat it, staying at that tempo for longer than feels necessary, before starting to raise it.
The rule for raising it is three clean repetitions in a row, then ten percent faster. When a step fails, drop back rather than pushing. The detail is in how to practice slowly and speed up.
If you are working from a recording rather than notation, PhraseLoop lets you mark the fragment once and loop it at whatever speed you need, so the repetitions happen without you stopping to rewind between each one.
A fragment you can play perfectly in isolation will still fail inside the piece, because the surrounding music changes what your hands are doing when they arrive.
Once the fragment is solid, practice it with one bar before and one bar after. That is usually where the remaining problem lives, and it is a different problem from the one you just solved.
There is a point in every session where repetitions start getting worse rather than better. Continuing past it practices the deteriorated version.
When you notice accuracy dropping, stop working on that passage. Come back tomorrow. Difficult passages improve between sessions at least as much as during them, which is why five short days beat one long one.
A passage worked this way often feels no better on day two, noticeably better on day four, and fine by the end of the week. The flat start is normal and is the most common point at which people conclude the method is not working and go back to playing from the top.