But then the answer to “What skill am I actually practicing?” is “How to play really slowly.” I’d agree that “Playing slowly to learn to play faster” is probably a smoother upgrade than “playing with mistakes to learn to play more accurately”, but that’s not obviously true.
I’ve seen it suggested to practice at normal or faster-than-normal speeds, but only very short segments that you can play for sure without mistakes (one or two measures, repeated 10 times). Anecdotally it’s worked pretty well for me, but so have other techniques (playing the whole thing slowly, playing at normal speed with mistakes...)
Of course, then the answer to “What skill am I actually practicing” is “how to play this tiny part of the song (and then stop)”...
Yes, so you then practice the transitions between tiny parts, as well as starting at random points. Students who make unrecoverable mistakes in performances from memory often have to backtrack to the beginning of the previous part, because that’s all they ever practiced starting from. (Even when you’re not trying to memorize a piece, you’re still building up a mental model and you don’t always want things coarsely chunked.)
Not if you play slowly enough.
But then the answer to “What skill am I actually practicing?” is “How to play really slowly.” I’d agree that “Playing slowly to learn to play faster” is probably a smoother upgrade than “playing with mistakes to learn to play more accurately”, but that’s not obviously true.
I’ve seen it suggested to practice at normal or faster-than-normal speeds, but only very short segments that you can play for sure without mistakes (one or two measures, repeated 10 times). Anecdotally it’s worked pretty well for me, but so have other techniques (playing the whole thing slowly, playing at normal speed with mistakes...)
Of course, then the answer to “What skill am I actually practicing” is “how to play this tiny part of the song (and then stop)”...
Yes, so you then practice the transitions between tiny parts, as well as starting at random points. Students who make unrecoverable mistakes in performances from memory often have to backtrack to the beginning of the previous part, because that’s all they ever practiced starting from. (Even when you’re not trying to memorize a piece, you’re still building up a mental model and you don’t always want things coarsely chunked.)