How You Practice

[Silly Moustache]

Originally Posted by Dave T

I have read and been told, when performing for an audience and make a mistake we should never stop but keep on playing. It is said most people won't notice but if you stop and correct it, or even worse stop and start over, everyone will notice and probably be annoyed.

At the same time I've read and been told, when we make a mistake in practice we should go back to at least the measure leading up to the problem area and go over it again and again until we've fixed the problem.

The problem I have is, in following the admonitions about practice I am programing myself to stop when I make a mistake. For now what I'm doing is when I first start to practice a song I go through it in it's entirety, warts and all. I try to make a mental note of the mistakes and once I've played it all the way through I go back to the problem areas and work on those few measures.

I'm not entirely satisfied with what I'm doing so, I am curious how some of you deal with this.

Dave

Dave, your first para is correct. You are performing for the benefit of your audience and not you. Remember that none of us go through a whole performance without something going wrong. "Play through and don't let a facial expression give it away.

Think of a song/piece as swimming. Before you enter the water, you are not playing. As soon as you hit the water, you are playing - you don't stop swimming - you keep going until the end.

I'll suggest a slight change to your second para. If you are working to poerf4ect a song or instrumental, anbd ther is something that you keep doing wrong :

1. Stop, and examine that part (as if it were a hurdle).
2. See if you can work out why you stumble over it - fingering? too many notes, poor lyric scansion?
3. Can you do it right more slowly , pr is it not possible to do it?
4. practice it until you do get it right, OR change it.

===It is better to do simple well, than complicated poorly =====

5. go back to the start of the piece and continue until you stumble. Repeat from 1.
In other words go through a number until the piece is a whole - not a sum of the parts.

Whilst you will be your hardest critic - your job when performing is to entertain your audience.

[Dave T]

My thanks to Tony, Andre and Silly Moustache. All of your comments/suggestions are helpful. I like the idea of "virtual practice" for a few days before I'm going to play for people. I'm going to pursue that idea.

Thanks again,
Dave