Slow Down
One of the biggest mistakes musicians make at the beginning is to try to learn new music at too fast a tempo. Inevitably this leads to making a lot of mistakes, and by making the same mistakes over and over again you're effectively teaching your brain how to play wrong.
That's because as you learn new things you're building neural pathways, which means you're actually building new parts of your brain! Once you've practiced mistakes often enough they become ingrained in your mind by these new neural pathways, and they are much more difficult to correct later.
This is where your metronome comes in. It's best to learn any new scale, rhythm, or song at a very slow tempo to begin with, so that you can fully analyze it and play the notes cleanly with your current skill level. Playing along with the metronome ensures that you will be playing in solid, even time at whatever speed you practice. Once you can play the new material perfectly at the slow tempo, speed the metronome up a little and practice until you can play the material perfectly at the new tempo. Then speed the metronome up again. This process ensures that your technique will develop without built-in flaws. Your technique is built from the ground up, and a weak foundation will come back to haunt you later when you can't build advanced techniques on top of it.
There are software programs now that do what used to be impossible — they slow down the speed of music without changing the pitch, giving you the ideal situation for learning new, and especially difficult, pieces of music. One good example is the Amazing Slow Downer. Find it at
If you're playing a piece of music and you hit a rough spot that you can't play through without mistakes, stop and cut the tempo in half on your metronome. This may feel exaggeratedly slow at the time, but it makes it easy for you to play the notes correctly, and as you play them correctly you're building those good new neural pathways. Focus on the exact place where your mistakes are occurring, rather than going all the way back to the beginning of the piece just to work on your trouble spot. Once you can play the notes correctly, you can insert your clean, new phrase back into the piece at the original tempo.
Eventually these fundamental techniques become rote and you can stop focusing on them — they'll automatically become part of your technique and your muscle memory.
Muscle memory is a phenomenon where your brain and the muscle groups you need to play your instrument (including your hands, fingers, mouth, tongue, and throat) form a bond that can function while bypassing your conscious mind. Expert players have spoken of times when in performance they forgot an upcoming passage and, while their brain panicked, their body played right through the section correctly!
While your goal is to build up speed in your playing, it's not enough just to be able to play fast — you have to be in control of your technique at whatever speed you're playing to be a great player. Make sure that you're not practicing phrases faster than you can play them cleanly and correctly — perfect beats fast every time.
