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Hi Luca, I only got a link to this video in my email and not the deliberate practice one. You can also leave a link to iCloud or google drive or dropbox or whatever is easiest for you here too.
In terms of overlearning reps, the idea with the at-tempo chaining process is to actually not think that much, but stay loose, aim for physical ease/effortlessness, be attentive and give your body a chance to intuit its way to a solution. I don’t know if there’s an “ideal” number of overlearning reps, but fwiw, I think Rob found that his number was something like 6-8, if I remember correctly. As in, whether it took him 3 reps or 12 reps to get to the first “correct” repetition of the note grouping, he would have to do another 7 or so overlearning reps beyond that to lock it in deeply enough that it wouldn’t revert back or fall apart after adding the next new note.
In terms of when to move on, the at-tempo practice is definitely not going to get you to “concert-ready” or anywhere near perfect, so please do give yourself permission to move on once the passage is relatively smooth and hiccup-free and essentially good enough to be played at tempo. Chaining will help you get a passage to a pretty decent playable at-tempo state, but it’s not going to be performance or audition-ready. You’ll still have to do some deliberate practice, or slow practice, or note groupings, or interleaved/variable/other kinds of practice to keep honing and refining the passage. Rob has said that he thinks of the chaining as getting him about half of the way to performance-ready, and deliberate practice or more conscious problem-solving as getting him the other half of the way there. And even then, performance-ready doesn’t mean a passage is literally perfect.
An analogy one of my teachers used with me (I got stuck trying to perfect the first page of the Bach Chaconne for about a month) was to think of working on a piece like filtering water. You don’t want to go to the river and use your finest filter, because all of the rocks and mud and larger particles are going to wreck that filter. You want to use the filter that filters out big things first, and then use a finer filter to filter out smaller particles, and eventually progress to the finest filter that filters out the bacteria and stuff that you can’t see. All this to say, make sure you don’t get too focused on trying to perfect the first measure of this piece/excerpt at the expense of bigger problems that might exist elsewhere in the piece! The goal is to solve the biggest problems first, then increasingly smaller ones.
