MUSICIANS

Short-term vs long-term development

These results suggest that in the early stages of learning a skill, emphasizing accuracy can absolutely lead to more accurate results in the short term – but this may come at the expense of long-term development.  Which actually makes a lot of sense.

Because whether you play the harp, guitar, piano, or harmonica, when you play a passage slowly, the efficiency of your motor movements doesn’t matter so much. You can still play pretty accurately even if you’re doing things with your hands/fingers/arms that won’t work at faster tempos. Maybe that means you are using excessive finger pressure, or lifting your fingers higher than necessary, but either way, you may be developing “slow habits” that will hold you back as you begin to increase the speed. Habits and mechanics that will eventually have to be discarded or unlearned, in favor of more efficient and speed-friendly mechanics which do work at the final tempo.

But…only engaging in fast practice and missing all the notes can’t possibly build great habits either, right? Indeed…being able to play something super fast is great, but not if it sounds like a hot mess.

So what are we to do?

Well, musicians have actually had an answer to this for some time – and it’s quite clever.

Rhythm practice – or note groupings

Sometimes this is called rhythm or dotted rhythm practice, but trying to explain it in words makes it seem way more complicated than it really is.

So rather than listening to me fumble my way through it, I’m going to defer to Nathan Cole, the First Associate Concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who will show you how it’s done.

(via)