Reply To: How can I deliberately practice technique?

[Noa Kageyama]

A couple things you could experiment with:

1) I wonder if rhythms might help? As in, practicing the passage with exaggerated dotted rhythms, whereby you will be playing some notes extremely quickly in succession, followed by a pause to gather your thoughts/let your fingers catch up and get ready for what’s about to happen next. Does that make sense? I’m thinking a video is probably easier to understand – here’s Nathan Cole demonstrating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikyu1eEJsk4

2) While playing, it might also help to really take a close look at both muscle tension and excess movement. Even with something like typing. Pay attention to how much movement you are producing. Is it really necessary? For instance, how high off the string do you really have to pick up each finger between notes? Could you keep them closer to the string without tightening up so that they don’t have to move up and down quite so far? Having to move further distances than necessary takes time, and can also cause excess tension because of how hard you have to work to keep up.

Let me know how those go!