As if often happens, you may spend hours trying to learn to play your favourite music piece but it seems to be getting only worse. The problem often hides in ignoring the important mechanisms of our brain functioning. We repeat what we want and the way we want. In most cases, the image of learning a new music piece looks more or less like this: we play the work from beginning to end in the needed tempo, it seems. However, we don’t manage to wade through. Stumbling at a difficult place, we try to start from where we left or a bit earlier if we can’t resume from where we stumbled. Familiar situation, isn’t it?

We continue publishing helpful articles for those who learn to play a music instrument on their own, without a teacher’s assistance. Below you will find a few most wide-spread mistakes during such self-teaching.

Choosing a Wrong Tempo

Each of us wants to finish what’s been started as soon as possible. And that is clear – everyone would like to enjoy the result of all these efforts the sooner the better. On the other hand, many know that it is necessary to start learning a music piece in a slow tempo. But most often a ‘slow tempo’ is seen as the one that ‘I can handle now’.

In our perception, the scale of tempos looks like a ladder upstairs: the farther, the faster. As soon as we feel comfortable in the new tempo and ‘can handle it’, we try to play in a faster tempo, repeating again and again. This method leads to what musicians call “overplaying”, when even the easiest parts can no longer be performed well.

Advice:

There are a lot of techniques for reasonable distribution of tempo at the practical classes of piano, guitar or any other instrument. We would like to suggest one of them. It is possible to handle the three tempos – slow, medium, and fast – in such a way that in the fast tempo it would be still possible to perform without mistakes. In the beginning, the difference between the three tempos should not be significant. It’s essential to go back to performing in medium and slow tempos. The amplitude can gradually be increased, but the important condition in all the three tempos should be the correct performance.

Performing with Mistakes

It’s important to make a firm decision NOT to put up with such performing. Because our brain memorizes our actions and is guided by a simple formula: “if we do it, I must memorize it”. Of course, hearing the false note we realize that we’ve made a mistake. But our brain has already managed to memorize the false phrase pretty well and for long. To erase the mistake from the memory, we would need to repeat the correct version multiple times.

Advice:

Get some patience and try not to be in a rush learning the piece. You should be concentrated on the intoning of music phrases. As it is quite hard to stay focused for a long time, it is necessary to make pauses every 20-25 minutes of the class. Be prepared: there will be mistakes anyway. But keep in mind the fact that careful and correct performing will save you a lot of time and will eventually lead to the necessary result.

Repeating the Piece from Beginning to End

Performing of the entire piece is the purpose, not the means. Therefore, no matter how bad we want it, unless you are sure of every single note, don’t get tempted to repeat the new piece from beginning to end as it will inevitably lead to memorizing mistakes that we talked about in point 2.

Advice:

Learning a music piece is not just playing the instrument, it is a thinking process that consists of analysis and synthesis. Every music composition has its structure. Take a pencil and divide the piece into parts that are complete music- and meaning-wise. First make large parts. To find them, pay attention to the change of tonality and tempo that often takes place at the transition from one part to another. If the composition takes up more than one page, each big part will most likely be divided into smaller parts.

Start learning from finished phrases and smaller structures. After the first phrase is learnt, move on to the second one. As soon as you can perform two parts separately, you can unite them in one. But before that, practice the transition from one part to the other, covering a few notes from the first measure of the first phrase. Joining the third with the forth works the same way, as well as joining the first two parts with the second two. Thus, gradually extending the learnt fragments, you will build up the entire piece. The most important here is not to be in a hurry. Try to listen closely to the repetitions and look for new colors every time.

Underestimating the Role of the Music Beat

Unfortunately, this ‘invisible’ mistake is most often left unnoticed by the performer. From the outside, it can be perfectly heard that in most difficult places the musician starts playing slower, destroying the measure borders, but to the performer it seems that the entire playing is even and smooth. This is called “time unsynchronization” – the discordance of the real time and its perception by the musician. Most often the difficulties are caused by short durations, nontypical note groupings or the complicated rhythm that can’t be promptly processed by our brain in real time.

Advice:

Learning technically complicated parts use the principle of analysis and synthesis described in point 3. Learn difficult passages and rhythmically complicated (as it seems at first sight) fragments separately. With the help of a pencil mark the notes that fall within the metric parts of the bar. First try to slowly sing the difficult fragment and find out how the notes are placed within the metric parts.

Learning difficult passages should better be started from the off-beat. First learn the off-beat and the strong beat, then the remaining passage leading to the next strong beat. Feel the intonational aspiration to the strong beat.

And the main recommendation: carefully choose the music piece for learning. There will always be time and strength for learning the music you love. And it means that you will be able to surprise your friends and relatives with the splendid performance of your favourite pieces. In the future, we will get back to describing the most common mistakes in learning new compositions and will prepare some other advice on how to avoid them. Stay with us!

Photo: “Piano on the Street”. Author: Asher Isbrucker. Source: Flickr.com, License: Creative Commons 2.0.