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Hi Noa,
Yea I totally understand now what you mean about being mindful of the connection between the final note I chain and the one that’s after that.
I think my main problem that keeps occurring is not being able to keep consciousness/ practice mindfully. For example, I’ll write the goal of what I want to do in a practice session, then what I’ll look at, and how I’ll try to tackle it. When I actually go to put the plan into action, I end up falling into a cycle of repeating without reflection or adjustment. The third step- the “how I’ll tackle it” is the spot where I mess up. Mostly because I don’t know yet the right way to solving most passages (technically or expressively). When I try to experiment to see what works, I end up feeling like I’m getting nowhere because I don’t really feel like I executed the strategy correctly, so I’m not sure if the issue is that the strategy doesn’t work here or it does work but I’m just not doing it right. For example I tested doing different rhythms for an already familiar (but messy) passage, and it felt a little different afterwards but it still wasn’t clean at the goal tempo and it even felt like it caused more unevenness in my fingers. I’m not sure if the problem was the rhythm strategy itself or that I just didn’t do the strategy correctly; I repeated and ingrained mistakes into the passage.
I think it stems from not differentiating mindless reps with relaxed reps- seeing if I can solve it through intuition reps, then doing overlearning reps. All of the strategies (slow, chaining, rythmns, groupings) have this repetition component. It’s a very ingrained habit for me to disengage my mind from both the relaxed and overlearning reps. After a couple of minutes it becomes harder to stay mindful of which rep was a good rep and how many overlearning reps I’m doing. Sometimes it feels like I get a good rep but then the overlearning reps right after are worse/ or different.
It feels like diving deep into the ocean to look for something, but I end up losing the safety line that leads back to the surface. I start playing and get so engrossed in the act of repeating a passage, that I end up repeating without reflection or analysis, just hoping it’ll solve itself; like when your eyes get stuck on a random point in front of you and you don’t want to look away because it feels weirdly comfortable, it’s exactly like that. How can I work on bettering this little by little?
Thank you,
Luca