Wh Playing Slowly Is a Skill (Not Just a Practice Tool)
1. Control
Playing slowly is one of the best tools for fixing many problems when learning music. Many players (knowingly or unknowingly) have some inherent belief that being able to play a piece of music is more about being able to play at speed than it is being able to play with control, musical precision, and enough time to make choices.
I used to also prioritise getting the notes pressed as quickly as possible (albeit without conscious thought) in an attempt to get the piece of music learned quickly. However, this meant that I was missing some fundamental skills and an opportunity to actually improve much quicker.
Playing slowly gives you much more time to be deliberate about the movements you are making. This means that if you are having a technical problem and you are struggling to make particular movements, these become immediately obvious. Your tone might be uneven, with some notes being louder than others, you might have a wobbly rhythm, or you might be forcing your hand to move unnaturally and therefore causing some tension. All of these problems are much harder to ignore when playing slowly.
I think that this is why many people unintentionally avoid practicing slowly. It can feel like you are miles away from the end result, and seeing many mistakes in slow motion can add a lot of mental resistance that you maybe don’t feel when brushing over those mistakes at a quicker speed. But playing slowly isn’t just better for learning notes, it highlights whether you can actually control them.
2. Awareness
Focusing on building a piece of music up to the speed that you hope it to be also prevents you from bringing awareness to every aspect of the piece. When you play slowly, you hear tone more clearly, you notice the balance between your hands, and you are more able to correct the micro-movements. Initially, these movements might need to be very deliberate, but as they become instinctive, building the speed of the music will have these movements and interpretations baked in.
If you begin a piece of music by trying to play at speed, you miss this important phase of learning. Even for the best musicians, a large amount of time is spent deliberately and slowly shaping the piece of music so that they can bring conscious thought to what they want the music to sound and feel like.
The reason for playing slowly is not always a technical one; often it’s a way of being intentional about how the music should sound. Playing a crescendo evenly at a slow speed without momentum is a much more difficult task, yet it allows you to really think about the gradient of that crescendo and why it’s there in the first place. Taking away the momentum means that other features, such as the chord qualities, determine the shaping of the music, not just the forward momentum of the piece.
In essence, playing slowly but well is often much harder than playing fast without thought. It teaches you how to think about a piece of music and how to translate that to your hands, rather than brute-forcing your way through a piece without any reasoning. This means that playing slowly helps you learn the piano much quicker.
3. Integration
So what is the best way to include playing slowly in your practice?
Well, slow playing is a form of deliberate training. It’s a tool to help highlight and fix technical problems and musical unawareness.
So firstly, if you feel that you are trying to force your way through something that is technically challenging, then use slow practice to focus on how you are moving your fingers, hands, wrists, and arms to best support that technical movement. Often, sections of music that require particular techniques require several visits to the piano in order for them to start feeling natural under your fingers. The key here is to try to build in the musical shaping while also focusing on the technical movement itself. As the movement starts to feel more natural, the speed will emerge and your hand will start feeling like playing quicker is a logical next step.
Secondly, in order to practice deliberately with musical intention, when first learning a piece of music, practice deliberately at 50% of the speed. Think about the quality of the music and what it is supposed to feel like. Is it supposed to feel manic, calm, nervous, sad, etc.? Playing at a slow speed can help you work out what the purpose of each of the notes is and exaggerate it. For example, if there are staccato notes, you can play these really short and spiky at a slow speed so that when you speed the music up, you naturally have a really bouncy section of music without much thought.
Speed is a byproduct of being incredibly comfortable with the notes. It is most often not something that should be a goal in itself, and it is most definitely not something that should be the primary focus. So if you find yourself focusing on forcing the notes, slow everything down and try to enjoy the process of acquiring the movements and discovering the intentions of the music.
Matt
(This is from my “Monday Music Tips“ weekly email newsletter. Join my mailing list to be emailed with future posts.)