Why Good Playing Breaks Down in Performance
1. Where Things Fall Apart
In 2010–2012, as well as playing the piano, I also had a fascination with playing fingerstyle guitar. I had watched guitarists such as Andy McKee, Don Ross, and Tommy Emmanuel and thought that their playing was “pretty sick” (in the good sense). So I spent far too many hours teaching myself some of their songs and arrangements.
For those who don’t know what fingerstyle guitar is, it’s a style of playing where you play an acoustic guitar but include the melody, the harmony, and the rhythm at the same time. You will often see players hitting the side of the guitar to create the sound of drums, tapping the notes with their right hand, and using other various techniques like these. Here’s a video of Don Ross playing if you are interested (Michael, Michael, Michael).
As you might imagine, it’s quite difficult to learn these types of pieces on the guitar. There is a lot that needs including in a short space of time, and at the time there was much less availability of sheet music or TABS. The TABS that were available were also incredibly difficult to make sense of because there are so many different things to include!
This meant that I had to learn these pieces in very small sections. I would learn a couple of seconds of the piece by watching and listening and then play it over and over again to remember it. The problem was that the chances of making a mistake were very low within one of these fragments I had learned, but the chances of making a mistake moving from fragment to fragment were very high.
This is a phenomenon that also translated to my piano playing as I went on to focus on the piano and learn complex pieces. We typically learn pieces in sections, and it is moving between these sections where the mistakes usually occur. You might see this in your own playing if you are trying to play through a piece in its entirety. The places where the music is most likely to break down are not in the sections that you have practiced, but between those sections. So you may end up thinking: “Why can I play this part but not the whole piece?”.
2. Why Transitions Are Weak
Generally, when we practice, we practice in sections. Music often has very clear 4 or 8 bar phrases, and there may also be an overarching structure such as an ABA structure or a Verse-Chorus structure, for example. This means that as we practice we will naturally default to learning in these clear chunks, but we often don’t practice the bridges between them.
Interestingly, the transitions between sections are often where the biggest changes occur. There may be a new dynamic, it may lead into some completely new material, there may be a texture, tempo, or technique change. In some cases one section might require the next sentence to make musical sense (for example, if there is a big crescendo that leads to the next phrase).
The transitions between learned sections require anticipation of the next section, and if you haven’t practiced doing that, then this is where the music will often break down. Your hands need to be familiar with how you are going to get to the start of the next phrase, and your mind needs to be comfortable continuing without needing a break to reset.
This means that if you only practice in sections, you can create a false sense of security. It will appear like you have everything under control, until you try to play the piece through and find that you can’t play from start to finish without errors or the need to slow down or even stop at these transition points.
3. How to Strengthen Them
So, how do you fix this?
Well… it’s quite simple really: practice the transitions!
There is no doubt that it is good to practice and learn a piece of music in sections. It allows you to understand the structure of the music as well as narrow your focus. However, there are several ways that you can iron out those weak places where you are more likely to fall apart.
Firstly, never practice a section without playing the first note of the following section. Let’s say you have a 4 bar phrase. Many players will practice the 4 bar phrase and then stop and go back to correct any issues. In this case, I would suggest playing the 4 bar phrase and the first note of the next bar. This means that when you come to practice the next phrase (starting on that first note of the bar), your hands and mind are familiar with how to actually get there. This is something that a teacher of mine drilled into me several years after those fingerstyle guitar days.
Secondly, if there is a particular intersection that is challenging, practice the bar before and the bar after the two sections. As I mentioned, often the end of one section and the start of another is where you will find the biggest changes in style, dynamics, and themes, so there may be places where these changes need isolating and really focusing on.
Thirdly, add variation to how you play the transitions. A technique I often like to use for strengthening my understanding of music is to swing the rhythm. Swinging the rhythm might mean that instead of playing a series of eighth notes (quavers), you play dotted eighth notes (dotted quaver) and a sixteenth note (semiquaver) instead. You can also reverse the swing as well (sixteenth then dotted eighth note).
The important thing here is that you try to include practicing between sections as much as you practice the sections themselves. By doing that, you will find that you won’t have any weak points, and you will have no problem playing a piece of music all the way through!
Matthew Cawood
(This is from my “Monday Music Tips“ weekly email newsletter. Join my mailing list to be emailed with future posts.)