HOW I GOT STARTED BLOGGING ABOUT PIANO PRACTICE
I was in a downward spiral of not practicing. Because I hadn't been
practicing, I wasn't playing well. Because I wasn't playing well, I didn't want to practice. And so on. I knew if I didn't pull out of the tail spin, I would crash and burn, destroying over half a century of playing the piano.
I got started with the blog after I declared to my men's group that I
was going to practice for a minimum of one hour per day for five days. I was leaning on my group to help me re-establish the practice habit. I knew that, if I just practiced it would soon get better, no matter how unsatisfying it might be at first. One of the members of the group volunteered to support me by reading my daily practice reports via email. I ended up enjoying writing the reports so much that I continued writing well beyond the five days to which I had committed. Yesterday, I finally got around to putting it all into a real blog so I could open it up to my friends and students and anyone else interested in the topic. And here we are.
And who knows? Maybe some experienced pianists will find it, take pity on me, and give me some valuable guidance.
Hey Brian, here's a thought. Ages ago I taught touch typing to some people, and I made a big deal about establishing ONLY correct neural pathways. As you pointed out in an earlier blog, if you practice wrong 8 times and finally get one run-through right, you've effectively "practiced" playing it wrong. In fact, I believe the result is even worse than that. What's happening is that you're giving your muscle-memory one or more ALTERNATE neural pathways for each note, or letter on a typewriter keyboard, so that for each subsequent INTENT to type or play that key, some decision has to be made. But it's not the decision that would make sense ("Does this targeting motion feel right?"). Instead, it's "Which one of these 2-3 motions is the right one?" There's really no way for the nervous system to differentiate unless one pathway is very well burned in, so to speak. That's "learning" at the physical level.
ReplyDeleteI found that if I convinced my students to type SO SLOWLY that they made NO MISTAKES, they got much faster than the students who were always trying to type faster (and therefore made a lot of mistakes). I added the element of typing rhythmically, so that there was a muscle-level impetus to continue on, a pressure to get the next note/key in time. This has been shown to significantly enhance learning, if it's not too stressful. So my students were typing at a steady rhythm that was literally so slow that they sounded like robot typists with badly stuck joints. In fact, they were going about 35 words per minute, which ain't bad for a beginner, especially with no mistakes (tests usually deduct at least 5 words per minute for each typo). This, of course, is all being done without looking at the keys -- very important. After a couple of days typing that way, they all were going 70 words per minute or better, still with no mistakes. Again, the speed demons were still SOUNDING like fast typists, but their mistakes pulled their scores down to 40 and below.
Allen
Yes, Allen! Precisely! I completely agree that it's better to learn only one pathway. While I strive to learn new pieces that way, I failed to express that point. Thank you for bringing it out.
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