Why Fixing Mistakes Doesn’t Ruin Your Fluency
1. Fixing
After a recent video where I reacted to a video entitled “Learn Piano as Fast as Humanly Possible”, I realised that some people might believe that stopping to fix mistakes might make it more difficult to play with fluency. If you are constantly stopping in practice to solve a problem, how do you know you will be able to play it through?
Well, the reality is that stopping is essential for learning. Many players will fall into the habit of “playing” rather than “practicing” because playing through a piece and ignoring mistakes is much less mentally uncomfortable. While some mistakes will resolve themselves by being repeated enough in a wider context, the vast majority of mistakes will require deliberate attention.
By stopping and fixing mistakes as they appear, you are ensuring that those mistakes don’t become the new normal and a part of how you play that piece of music. It’s also much more difficult, having learnt all of the notes in a piece, to go back and fix 100 errors when the benefit of doing so seems less than just moving onto a new piece. Whereas if you play a section when you first start learning the piece and notice 3 errors (maybe a missing dynamic, some wrong fingers or a missing staccato), then stopping and fixing these 3 errors is quite manageable and will improve your efficiency when learning the rest of the piece, which will inevitably contain similar features.
The real question is, what are we trying to do when practicing? The answer is almost always “to get better at the piano”. That means being able to do something that you couldn’t do before, and the only way to achieve that is by problem solving and deliberately changing the way you have previously played something. Many people believe that just by playing more notes, over time you will get much better… which is true. However, that is because you are seeing the same problems appear and improving them, but over a much longer time horizon.
Let’s say you miss a staccato in a piece of music. Well, the next opportunity you might get to play a staccato in a similar context might be much further into the piece, or maybe even the next time you play that section on your next run-through. This means that per practice session, that problem is going to be seen far less often and therefore it will take much longer to resolve. It may also potentially mean that you are reinforcing the mistake. By stopping and actively solving the problem, you are attacking it before it fossilises and becomes not only much more difficult to fix, but also ensures there are fewer problems to solve at any one time.
2. Fluency
So, if solving problems immediately as they arise is the better way of approaching practice, does that mean you will find it harder to play fluently?
No, it doesn’t, and there are two reasons for this.
Firstly, sight reading practice is an equally integral part of learning the piano, and one of the focal points of sight reading practice is playing through without stopping. If you approach sight reading in the correct way (by only reading pieces you’ve never seen before, only playing them once, analysing what caused the mistakes and making that the focus of the next sight reading practice), then making mistakes in that context isn’t a bad thing. Sight reading is practicing a methodology rather than a particular piece of music, and therefore nothing can become fossilised in the same way. This is where we can practice playing fluently and continuing through mistakes, because we are going to later acknowledge what caused them and not return to that exact context.
The second reason is that as a piece gets better and better, there will be fewer and fewer mistakes appearing. This means that the sections you are able to connect together will become much larger. Inevitably there will be a few mistakes that are unique each time you play the piece, but these will be much further apart towards the end of learning that piece. This is the point where you can assess whether the mistake was a “real” mistake or a concentration lapse.
Fluency on the piano doesn’t come from playing pieces through from start to finish many times. Fluency comes from reliability, and reliability comes from reinforcing the correct way of playing. Those who feel like playing through a piece of music is the way to make it reliable in a performance situation are usually simply repeating an unstable piece rather than stabilising it.
3. Context
Of course there is a place for playing through a piece of music. If you are performing the piece, playing for someone, looking to find a new batch of problems to solve, or just want to play for fun, then playing the piece is not detrimental.
However, the benefits it can have for your playing are much more limited than practice, and in many cases it can actually have the opposite effect and make it harder for you to correct things. Our natural tendency is to take the path of least mental resistance, which means that we can more easily default to just playing sections of music rather than really problem solving. So while there is certainly a place for playing music through, to get the most out of the piano you should be able to more selectively choose when and why.
In essence, fluency doesn’t come from never stopping… it comes from no longer needing to stop.
Matt
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