Welcome to the Potluck Creative Arts Lesson Line, a newsletter providing special information for students taking Simply Music piano lessons through Potluck Creative Arts. This introductory piece for the Lesson Line is the first of many writings to come where you’ll get useful tips to help make your piano lesson experience as successful as possible!
Where to begin? With what is one of the main mantras of Simply Music, and what should be the main mantra of nearly all learning. “Slowly, slowly, slowly.”
We often talk in lessons about how important it is to go slowly when practicing, because that’s the quickest route to learning things quickly. This is counterintuitive, going against our usual thinking, but so many important truths do exactly this. So let’s start making this make sense.
You’re at the beach. You grab a stick, and you decide you want to draw a circle in the sand. You do it quickly. Do you get a perfect circle? No — you end up with something a bit different from what you decided you wanted. You try again. Now you not only have something other than a circle — your fast drawing didn’t even give you quite the same shape as before, so the edges are getting ragged. Do this enough, and you’ll end up with something kind of like a circle, but really sloppy.
Practice a song quickly every time, and you’ll end up with something kind of like the song, but really sloppy.
At the beach, you decide you’re not satisfied. You want a real circle, but you’re too far away from the ocean, so the water won’t help get the sand back to where you started. You could start a new circle, and that would be fine for that circle, but you’ve put a lot of time in this first circle and want to get it right. So you spend a lot of effort trying to smooth out all the sloppiness. The more you try, the more you realize how closely and carefully you need to work, taking away a few grains of sand here, adding a few grains there, to smooth out all the rough edges you’d initially created. It takes a huge amount of very focused work to get from your sloppy shape to the circle you wanted in the first place.
Just the same, you can always start learning a new song, but you’ve put a lot of time in this first song and want to get it right. But it takes a huge amount of very focused work to get from your sloppy song to the song you wanted to know how to play in the first place.
So let’s go back to the beginning and see what happens when we work differently — slowly.
You’re at the beach. You grab your stick. And the very first time you try to draw your circle, you do it slowly and carefully, deliberately at every step of the way. You may make a couple of mistakes, but because you’re going slowly, they are very small and don’t have too much effect on the overall shape. You end up with a fairly decent looking circle.
You then want to make your circle deeper, so it will be very impressive and really last. You go again, and this time it’s a little bit easier, because you’ve got the outline of the first circle to work from. You see what parts are more round, what parts had little mistakes, and you’re better able to get closer to a perfect circle this time. You do this a few more times, each time taking it slow, each time making fewer mistakes.
And all the while, because you’re tracing the same route each time, the circle you’re drawing is getting deeper and deeper in the sand. Soon enough, it’s so deep that you suddenly find it takes hardly any effort to draw a perfect circle, because you’ve carved out a trench that now actually guides your stick. Now, all of a sudden, you are able to draw a nearly perfect circle much faster than you did before. You practically don’t even need to draw. Even if you don’t touch the sand at all, your stick just flows round and round in the shape of a circle.
In our brains, every time we repeat actions, we’re reinforcing a path of neurons, carving shapes in our head just as surely as if we were using a stick in the sand. Carve it one way, quickly, and the neurons will shape a path that makes things come out sloppy. Carve it the other way, slowly, and the neurons will get right in line and soon enough, instead of you “telling them what to do,” it will be the other way around. They will guide you effortlessly through the desired actions. Those actions have now become second nature to you and they almost feel like no action at all.
When learning every new song, every part of the song, every note in each part, take it slow. Every time. If you do, you will quickly be rewarded with never having to go that slowly again — and not even needing to think much about it when you do play. You’ll be able to play your songs easily. Maybe even with your eyes closed. Either way, your song will sound great to anyone listening, and, even when you’re the only one who hears it, playing it will give you a joyous feeling.
Keep playing a new song at all fast enough to make mistakes while you’re learning, and you’ll learn the mistakes. The feeling you get when you play won’t be so great, and if you decide to go through the difficulty of unlearning your mistakes and relearning your songs, you’ll spend a bunch of time feeling even worse before you eventually get to that joyous feeling.
Now, if there’s something you’ve learned poorly, it most certainly can be worth the effort to unlearn and then relearn, worth going through the extra unpleasantness rather than sticking with something that just doesn’t work well. But wouldn’t it be better, whenever possible, to learn something easily right from the start and get to the joy as quickly as possible? And wouldn’t it be even nicer, after practicing this way of learning enough, to just have slowness itself come naturally, so that you didn’t even need to think about it when first learning anything new?
That’s the opportunity you have if you go slowly, slowly, slowly.
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