Latest / Dits & Dahs / wanna play fast? then play slowly
Transcript
- Sue: I had a phone call with my brother today. For balance, he's almost a decade older, is also very musical, although professionally he made his mark as an electrical engineer, as did my father. Has decided at this time in his life that he would enjoy reacquainting himself with playing a musical instrument. And he started off in the family in junior high when I was a toddler, playing the Elto saxophone and made our dochsend howl with his practising ⁓ I was three or four at the time, would go down into the basement and take the music off the stand as if that was gonna make the music sound stop. But he also has learned to play guitar. And I think for the most part, other than learning how to read music from school, he has taught himself. But he also understands that the process of learning and involves the revelation that the student is actually the teacher. And so when he asked about how to learn A particular passage of music I went into what I know. And I'm sure share this with you just as a allegory to something spiritual, I'm sure. In the process of reacquainting yourself with an instrument, your body memory might be a little weak, and in order to retrain it, You have to be able to parse out a very, very short excerpt, maybe a bar or two, and play each note in full awareness with your fingers and brain moving in synchronism. In other words, what you're listening for is the connection between the notes being clean. And it means that in order to play that three times through without making any mistakes, you've got to figure out how slow a tempo you need to play it. But once you do and you are successful, at being able to play it three times perfectly, then you can start building on playing that excerpt closer to tempo and increasing the metronome markings if you're the metronome setting if you are in fact using them. To slowly gain speed up to what is the performance tempo. And the most important thing when you're teaching yourself is to be kind and patient, to be forgiving. Teacher can't do that for you, but the realization that you are your own teacher And it's always been thus. And once you do that, you have yourself the most important lesson learned, which is being aware. And it takes our brain a while to acclimate to the sequence of notes in the slower harmonic rhythm. But once you're aware how to do it cleanly, you've taught yourself. Depending on what in life you're trying to teach yourself to do as a new routine, this technique works. It's about slowing things down so that you can critically listen to whatever it is that you're doing, not judging yourself. But being aware of the things that are going on and allowing calmly your reactions to play the music or learning a script or whatever to really take hold. Because ultimately, you want your body memory to do the work. But it can't do the work at performance tempo. It must learn it slowly. This is probably where my profound forgiveness of self comes in from my music training, and it's one of the reasons why I always recommend someone having through that process interests you more musically. Let me know. In the meantime, thanks for sharing your energy. I appreciate you. Okay, girl.