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Everyone say go slow..practice slow..
Why slow?Can anyone give me a thorough answer,please..
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02-04-2019 03:45 PM
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Honestly, it's lazy advice. Or rather, incomplete.
The key is to play clean. Don't play faster than you can play it clean. Then, once you can get it clean, increase tempo in small increments, keeping it clean.
So this means for some stuff, yeah, you're gonna start slow. Maybe a lot slower than you think you need to!
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If you can't play it slow, how are you going to play it fast?
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I won’t be thorough, but to learn technique you must repeat motions that are correct. If you practice at too high a tempo to play a phrase correctly, you are only training your fingers to play incorrectly. It’s better to practice technique at a tempo you can execute cleanly, then gradually increase tempo as your skill moves up.
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Play what you can hear the way that you want to hear it.
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Playing guitar is muscle memory.
You get good at what you practice.
If you practice mistakes you get good at mistakes.
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This is correct; because when you play faster than you can hear, your quality control becomes deaf.
Originally Posted by lammie200
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Can you go through anything complex without stopping often and taking some time to ponder about it?
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It's just that you see so many playing fast and sloppy.
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Jazz is something that takes both an ability to think of good ideas, and to translate them instantly and play them at any speed. You need BOTH fast and slow ability. A lot of people hear what they like (fast notes) before they know how to form those ideas at any speed.
So the advice to practice slowly is really sound advice to develop the ability to think clearly. It's harder to learn to slow down and think with clarity if your kinesthetic ability allows you to just play a limited vocabulary fast.
When you're playing improvised music, really good improvised music, you're thinking like a composer: You take inventory of all possible ideas, weigh your options, build on what you just played, respect an awareness of motifs that have been used, build and use variation to create a sense of arc and surprise. That's a whole lot more than the ability to play fast. Add to that the necessity to play within the space of what others are doing and it's not going to be just practicing scales and arpeggios at your max that makes you a good player.
When you solo, you're navigating the harmony of the piece. Not just running them to make the changes. You're making intelligent decisions to make and create a way through the piece that you've not only not done before, but that reflects your own thoughts and the things you can bring. Take a piece of music. Set a metronome at a speed you think is good. That's your band. Then SLOW it down a notch, bring a presto to andante, and see if you've got as much to say, see whether your phrasing fits the piece and does it justice, and see if you're really KNOWING the changes of the piece. This will tell you a lot about the importance of being in control of all your faculties at any speed.
Hey, if you really want to see what slow can do to make you a better player, go REALLY slow and write a chorus of a solo. This is the ultimate in highlighting the conceptual issues of a good solo, because you get to really think about what you want to do, and you have all the time in the world to savour the musicality of your process. It's the other end of the spectrum and it may be the most helpful use of your slow time that you'll have!
Let me know how it goes!
DavidLast edited by TH; 02-04-2019 at 07:45 PM.
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Bruce Holzman is said to have made some of his students (or at least his little brother, Adam) cry by stopping them over and over again and forcing them to play SLOW and LOUD until they have the piece, study, or section thereof, secure and under control.
So yes, playing sloppy and fast is common but so is playing quietly - when we know that something is weak/not secure. We may tend to play "afraid", when what we're afraid of is really our own shortcomings. It's not unlike someone speaking sheepishly.
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Some interesting ideas on the subject here:
Practicing Slow | Anton Schwartz - Jazz Music
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Aside from the issue of simply having all the notes speak cleanly, there's this.
It's much easier to make melody at a slower tempo. At very high tempi, players are more likely to be playing well rehearsed lines or lines that lay really well on the instrument, making them easy to play.
So maybe there's value in learning to play a tune starting slowly and gradually work up to speed, maintaining the notion of making melody.
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Yeah, I didn’t mean to sound flippant, but you have to critically hear what you are playing. If you are playing so fast that you can’t control it, or repeat it, it ain’t really music IMHO. Originally Posted by pauln
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I picked up a booklet recently by classical guitarist/pedagoue Ricardo Iznaola. He actually comes out and says what almost no jazz teacher I've ever heard advises, which is to practice any new piece at no tempo at first, taking it in small sections and getting the fingerings and motions under control. Then he says to work up to playing it in flexible tempo, where you will adapt the speed of the passages to ebb and flow according to difficulty, with the overriding goal to stay relaxed and accurate. Then you isolate the more difficult passages to bring them up to the desired tempo before adding them back into the piece. In this way steady or - more accurately for classical guitar - desired performance tempo is the last element to be added.
The default answer for jazz practice seems to be "always use a metronome," but the problem I've seen in myself and others is without the "pre tempo practice" this often leads to either excess tension, sloppiness, or both. One jazz guy who did recommend a similar method to Iznaola's was Pat Martino. He said he never practiced with a metronome, and would learn everything one note at a time until he got it down, then he could play it at tempo. Food for thought.
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That’s certainly true for me. The faster the tempo the more I rely on easy to grab patterns for improvisation instead of being led by my ear. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
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I don't think that this OP was about taking it seriously slow.. as slow as you could go. But that's another cool way to do. Can't even call this practice really. Much earlier, it helped me with classical guitar technique a lot. With those really inhuman pieces. But when learning how the harmony works, it helps also to go uberslow. Because below a certain speed limit, the ears open up and start to hear a lot more details. Give them as much time as they need and they pick up these.. tensions between notes for one good example. Not how the notes sound against everything else (thats no news with speedy tempos also) but even more subtle - how they.. eh, hell with it. You try, it's personal
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i think that's only half of it. in my opinion, the tempo is slow but your fingers move as fast and snappy as if you're playing fast. Moving to next note as late as possible in other words. That has helped my technique a lot, did it when i played classical.
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Yeah, it's about playing clean, and not bringing messy articulation into faster tempi than you can handle (the world most certainly does not need another sloppy fast guitar shredder!
).
But here's something else to consider: When you do practice s-l-o-w, with a view to playing the same thing much faster eventually, then you need to check that the right hand picking is something that can be sped up cleanly Fast economy pickers know that you can't just alternate pick unbroken 8ths at 120 bpm and expect that the same right hand approach will cover you at 320 bpm...
Sounds like catch 22, right? If you start out picking fast it's bad for picking clean, and if you start out picking slow, you still may not be able to guarantee clean picking at the faster tempo. Solution? Do what most fast pickers do (If you want speed), after you work out parts cleanly at slow tempi, try speeding them up and see where the right hand (and sometimes the fret hand) gets caught out. Yes, I know you can't just automatically play something at breakneck speed if you've been working steadily at a slow tempo, but after a while you just get a feel for when the picking will work at faster speeds. In fact, you'll end up developing a system and realise much later that this "system" is actually what most people mean when they refer to "economy picking"
Or you could just be a freak and force yourself to strictly alternate through all your lines. Problem is, most who play like that sound kinda shreddy with no interesting string skips, which is kinda lame and probably suits metal or fusion better than Jazz styles. If you wanna play the jazz language that the horn and piano players play, you gotta do it all - alternate, sweep, slur, hammer and slide. Work it out slow, check it fast, adapt, rinse repeat. For years and years and years.
Good luck!...
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Agree! Like: what is playing fast? It's changing notes quickly. You can practice that at a slow tempo too. The advantage being that you can see/hear/feel where the obstacles lie. In the beginning a big one is finger independence. Making each note last as long as possible and making the next one snap does a lot for this. Originally Posted by joe2758
But I also believe in just 'going for it'. Try to make something happen as fast as you can regardless of the mess. This can lead to good places sometimes.
I don't think there's any one single thing or way to practice that will make you a great player. You need everything you can muster.
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Cos they can’t think of any better advice Originally Posted by jujupavle
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Mindless practice is just as bad as sloppy practice.
Practicing slow is to achieve a specific goal
But from the point of view of getting a good technique and legato on your instrument, an exact synch between hands and a fast and exact transition between notes is always required. At any tempo.
Until that happens, a player will be unable to play fast at all. When it does, speeding up a musical figure when learned will be relatively easy.
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Ricardo whatshisface is right. Jeff Berlin gives the same advice. You won’t be able to play the thing in tempo right away, so don’t try.
If you haven’t gone through the stage of playing it perfectly, but out of time, you’ll be screwed with the metronome at any tempo.
(Berlin goes further and says don’t practice with a metronome, but I’m not getting into that debate again lol.)
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