How do you do this?
How do you play fast notes?
Hi everyone, I'm Jazer - I play the piano
In this video, I want to share with you one key concept that I think is the most important and most helpful to helping you to play fast notes.
This concept that I'll share today is something that I see a lot of beginners tend to miss, they miss this mainly due to impatience.
When you truly understand the power of this concept I'm about to share today, you are going to 5x your fast note learning progress.
It's maybe even gonna make you feel a bit silly for not having done this before. In the past I certainly felt this way when I truly understood the power of it before we get into this key
concept make sure you like and subscribe to this channel to stay in touch with more of these free
piano lessons and tutorials. So what is this key concept? The key concept of playing fast notes is
slow practice. I've mentioned this concept various times in other videos
but from experience of observing my students and even observing myself practice the slow practice
is something that requires constant reminders we live in the 21st century where we want to
get everything so quickly without waiting, we're always looking for the hacks and the shortcuts
and we never want to do the hard work you may find yourself thinking but slow practice is so boring
and so unstimulating, I want to address this today because if you think slow practice is boring and
unstimulating you may be practicing slowly in a wrong way. I will teach you today what exactly
to do during your slow practice to make it not only fun but actually helpful for your progress
guess how many notes I just played 50? 60? 70? I just played 112 notes now that's a lot of notes to
learn if you want to truly master it my suggestion for you is to hold off playing fast for as long as
possible when you're playing fast notes there are two things to consider number one are the notes so
literally learning note for notes what are the correct notes practicing them making sure you
don't play the wrong notes and number two this is something not a lot of people think about I don't
think even a lot of teachers talk about this but this is something that's been a game changer for
me to try to understand this and think about this all the time and this number two thing is
the connection points between each note connection points basically means how each note transitions
to the next notes so the how this goes to that goes to this goes to that goes to this goes to the
so not just the individual note so not just this note and that note but
how this notes then go to this note this action this is called the connection point
when you're starting to learn a part that's supposed to be fast
my suggestion is to practice really really slowly and try to really understand
these two things so I think obviously everyone understands that the notes are
very important but also try to understand the connection points as well okay so for example
this particular part
this is a part that I think a lot of students make mistakes because the connection point
between them is really awkward because the hands
the hands are changing position when you're practicing fast a lot of things are happening
faster than your brain can comprehend and it's not easy to assess which other parts that are weak
that actually need more attention so i suggest you to practice slowly so you
can actually see what's going on and work on those weaker connection points another great
reason for practicing slowly is not just for learning the piece but it's actually
really essential for maintaining the peace within your hands in your muscle memory let me explain
when you keep practicing your fast notes in a fast way you will start to get into something I
call Autopilot mode. Autopilot mode means you are playing notes without any conscious thought
so for example what I just did there I wasn't actually thinking about each and every single note
it was just muscle memory and it and me pulling out this thing that my fingers somehow remember
how to do, it's quite a strange feeling, it feels almost like your individual fingers
they have their mini brains and they know exactly where to go now it's really good if you can ever
practice a piece so well that your fingers can get to that point of being on autopilot mode
but for those of you who have played piano for a while, you will know that this auto pilot mode
note security eventually goes away over time there will come a point where you will start to
lose the notes so something like this
and you're sort of not sure what's happening you're going oh I used to be able to do this
but I've lost it this is where problems really start to show if you haven't practiced slowly
enough times there were two things we talked about earlier in this video which are the
notes and the connection points when you always practice fast and you go on this autopilot mode
it means you haven't thought about the notes and the connection points for a while so when
that day comes when you unfortunately lose those notes it's really hard to recover
and be able to play those notes again because it's like you've lost the foundation of that
part it's like your building did not have a solid foundation which is the slow practice
and the slow detailed analysis of the notes and the connection points if you ever find
yourself in this position, this is where you really want to go back to the slow practice
to build that foundation for your building okay to really understand oh it's this one this one
really understand how each note transitions to the next and how that transitions into the next
and how that then transitions to the next and so on and so forth one tip i have for you when
you're practicing slowly is to use a metronome I often find myself doing something like this
it's all this funny thing where i catch myself going whoa i'm supposed to be practicing slowly
how did I get this quick these days, I'm using a metronome watch it's a vibration
beat that happens on my wrist check out this video if you want to learn more
when I was beginning to learn piano I was very impatient and I always loved practicing fast I
thought that practicing slow was a waste of time if i was going to perform the pieces in a fast
tempo why would I want to practice them slowly but over time I've reflected that practicing fast
isn't really practicing practicing fast is more just
displaying how secure my autopilot is and the much more effective thing to do during
my practice sessions was to actually slow it down to understand again those two things
so the notes and the connection points I find that if I used that 10 minutes to practice slowly
I get a much better return on investment than if I practiced fast for that 10 minutes
I personally haven't even played this piece for a while and before shooting this video
that's exactly what it did, I took 10 minutes to look at this part again and understand each
note and each connection point before I shot this video. These days in my practice sessions
I usually do about 75 slow and 25 fast so that means in 60 minutes
75 percent is about 45 minutes so that means a big chunk of the practice is actually dedicated to
analyzing notes and connection points rather than just you know slashing out amelia notes
and not really thinking about anything consciously question of the day what is your experience like
with slow practice let me know in the comments below we've now come to the end make sure you
give this video a like if it has helped you. Happy practicing and I'll catch you in the next video