“If the notes are on the paper, it is your job to play ALL of them.” -John Gardner
Too often, when I have heard high school (and college) students perform a piece, there are then inevitable technical passages. Rarely do I hear long technical passages played cleanly and correctly. The word ‘slop’ comes to mind. The reason the performance contains slop is because the practice contained slop.
Here’s how a typical high schooler practices:
Start at the beginning
Play to the technical passage
Slop
Stop
Go back to the beginning and start over.
Repeat the above steps.
Cleaning technical passages
* Stop repeating what you CAN play and concentrate on what you can’t. I suggest circling those 3-5 most problematic spots in a solo. Then, when you start to play the piece, instead of starting at the beginning, start with the problem passages. Play them first — and last, twice as often as the rest of the piece. Don’t always start at the beginning just so you can sound good.
* Always, ALWAYS stop and fix it.
* Break longer passages into smaller pieces
* Play the first 4 sixteenths plus the first note of the next beat.
* Do that until you can play it PERFECTLY 3 times in a row.
* Play the next set of 4 sixteenths plus one note. Get it perfect 3x.
* Play beats one and two. Perfect.
* Play beat 3.
* Play beats 1-2-3.
* etc.
* Slow it down, get it right and speed it up GRADUALLY.
* Use a metronome (free apps available for iPod, iPad.
* Start with a tempo at which you can play it perfectly.
* Increase the speed on the metronome no more than 5 beats per minute.
* Don’t increase until you are consistently clean and correct.
* Change the rhythm. What you are doing is practicing small groups of notes quickly without playing all of them quickly at the same time. By reversing and changing these rhythms, you are playing different groups of notes quickly.
* Play 16ths as if you’re playing dotted eighth/sixteenth combination, exaggerating the quickness of the 16th.
* REVERSE. Now play pairs of 16ths as sixteenth/dotted eighth. This is harder to do.
* Then play them as three triplet sixteenths and an eighth note.
* REVERSE to play eighth plus three triplet sixteenths.
Practice your performance, record yourself, critique your performance, mark your music and repeat the above cleaning steps.
A youth baseball quote I recall from years ago comes to mine;
“Be sure you catch the ball before you throw it.”
Musical translation:
“Play it right before you play it fast.”
Font: https://www.virtualmusicoffice.com/5-steps-to-cleaning-technical-passages-for-instrumentalists/
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