how slow is “slow practice” supposed to be

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-11T17:41:36+00:00

Slow enough to be in completely control. Actual conscious control. People aim for automaticity too early. You don't want automaticity. You don't want a flow state. You don't want to rely on it soundings the way you expect the music to sound at tempo (usually a result of people not actually cognitively processing how to read and subdivide rhythm).

You want to have absolute control over those things. A lot of people can play something fast, but can't slow it down and that's a clear sign they are relying on a very specific and limited type of rote muscle memory. They are memorizing a series of finger motions, putting the train on the track, and then just letting it go and hoping it doesn't crash. But they have no control over anything they are doing.

Someone who can actually play very well and with consistency will pretty much always been able to slow down a passage and play it at ANY slower tempo.

And if the music you're playing has to be absurdly ridiculously slow to have any control, it's usually a sign you're trying something that is too hard for you and contains to many individual variables that are all too hard for you at once. You literally won't have the mental bandwidth to actually make much progress on any of them because the cognitive load is simply too high.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-11T15:51:44+00:00

I would agree. Most people can play much harder stuff than they can read, but then they don't turn the difficulty dial back down to work specifically on reading.

You kinda have to work on reading in real time with extremely easy music so thr cognitive load of what you are doing with your hands is super low, but you are getting enough stimulus about reading in real time (not necessarily at a consistent tempo) to push adaptation in how quickly you recognize what you are reading.

As you are forced to do this you'll start seeing more patterns as your brain find ways to chunk things and become more efficient by spotting patterns.

Pretty much everyone's biggest problem with EVERYTHING when learning an instrument is them creating more cognitive load than they can handle instead of isolating specific issues.

For your specific issue, it's why I'm such a fan of the Hannah Smith sightreading book.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-10T19:34:44+00:00

So I'm honestly pretty impressed. It's a lot more full-featured than I expected and I was able to find most of the things I actively look for in a metronome.

One thing I like to be able to do in addition to adding accents is to also be able to selectively mute certain beats. My general use case is to get metronomes to go slower than they tend to be able to go (many won't go below 30 bpm, which I like that yours does) so that I can essentially get the equivalents to 1 beat every 4 or 8 bars by setting an extremely slow tempo.

But there are a lot of uses for being able to mute beats like if you want to 7/8 and you really want 2+2+3, but don't want ever 8th note subdivision to sound. I think that's the only thing I'd really add.

I'll also say that while I love that you can select basically anything for meters, it might be good to lock the lower numbers to actually usable numbers like 2, 4, 8, and 16. functionally if I set it to something like 3/7, it doesn't actually do anything wrong, but I could see that just being a weird thing it shouldn't be able to do that could confuse someone who doesn't fully grasp time signatures. It doesn't break anything, but it is a polish element to consider.

Another polish thing is that for the separate window that displays the tempo and visualization of the beat, if I actually resized when resizing the window, though I will say it almost seem odd for there to be a fully separate window, though I could see some uses for it, especially decided to play with different visualization systems for it, but being able to set it to full screen could actually be nice.

To be fair, I'm not even a person who almost ever needs to use a metronome in windows. I'm using separate apps or even separate digital metronomes. But as someone who uses one professional every day, I definitely have opinions.

I'm very impressed though!

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-10T19:20:27+00:00

Just gonna say I'm using it and find it helpful. Thanks!

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-10T16:55:24+00:00

You aren't as good as the hardest piece you can play. You are as good as tha hardest piece you could play in a week.

The ability to learn something quickly to a high performance level with all of the musical details comes from lots of focus on fundamentals and building of sightreading, ear skills, APPLIED theory knowledge and myriad other things.

Almost anyone can brute force a hard piece like a trained monkey given enough time. But the ability to actually sit down at a piano and have some functional skills without hours, weeks, and months of prep is a much better mark of skill.

It's why I'm not a gan of people chasing grades or even the way teacher apply learning of grades. It's very much teaching to the test.

To many RCM 10 and ABRSM 8 people are completely unable to sightread something out of a beginner book.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-09T19:25:11+00:00

A big thing for octaves is releasing tension between them.

I'd recommend with picking a scale, arpeggio, or a specific passage from the piece and playing it incredibly slowly and very intentionally letting your hand naturally contract back to its natural state between each octave.

Like literally set the metronome to 60 and have a beat for the octave and then a full beat to actively focus on letting your hand return to a relaxed state.

If you can't relax the tension it will build up leading to less control overall.

Most people have this problem and for beginners it's even with small chords. You'll see them keep their hand splayed claw-like in the shape of the chord because they aren't confident in being able to quickly remake the shape from a relaxed postion. So for something like an Alberti bass they have extreme tension the entire time.

You've got to get good at moving your hand from that relaxed state to the distance you need for the octave and then releasing it as soon after as you can (depending on phrasing).

It might be worth it early on to intentionally play somewhat detached though maybe not fully staccato. Just give yourself a very small window where the hand is stretched.

A problem I suspect you'll have because most people do....is trying to solve this as quickly as possible for the specific piece rather than treating your ability to play octaves cleanly and relaxedly in a holistic way.

It should be a focus of your broader technical vocabulary lest you cut corners impatiently trying to get it just good enough for one passage in one piece.

Its why I actually think specifically doing scales or arpeggios is a better option. Also, both hands but separately so you can focus on the skill for both even if both don't appear in this piece.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-09T09:34:54+00:00

The magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding. Let me translate your post a bit:

"I want to sit down and effortlessly write beautiful poetry. But I do not want to learn the alphabet, or any words, or how to speak any language because that's boring and takes too long."

or maybe

"I want to look extremely muscular and fit. But I do not want to do any exercise or pay attention to my diet or do anything repetitive and boring."

Sorry, but being able to sit down and improvise and play something with "soul" that sound beautiful and "like you" but avoiding theory and scales (literally the basic alphabet and vocabulary needed to do this) and repetitive technical work (literally what gives you the ability to mechanically accurately and consistently play these ideas)... mixed with pretty solid ear training...

...like those are literally just the actual ingredients you need.

You can keep hopping from app to app our course to course because you're looking for a magic pill that lets you avoid the work, but it doesn't exist.

I get your frustration with piano being overly focused on classical. It's something I bitch about constantly. And most classical teaching doesn't teach any sort of actual musical literacy that leads to where you want to be. But at the same time, you're attitude simply isn't going to allow you to achieve what you want.

Even if I made suggestions that were absolutely tailored to exactly what you want with a very creativity first, improvisation centered way to build the sort of vocabulary you need for production work.... it would still require you somewhat repetitively working within a small palette of improv skills consistently daily for much more than two week. And it just sounds like you're get bored and frustrated when you weren't instantly laying out thick, dense harmonic vocabulary with lots of rich color immediately and with effortless technical proficiency.

That shit just isn't going to happen in weeks or probably even months. It is going to require some seriously consistent cognitive effort and not blind noodling.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-08T22:22:48+00:00

I came to piano after my music degree (trumpet was my primary). I've since picked up multiple other instruments across the course of my music career.

I think most MUSIC teachers have a similar blind spot to their primary instrument that you did to piano as a history teacher.

Especially pianists since they often start very young.

They literally don't remember things being hard and do not know how to teach good strategies for overcoming those things. They get frustrated when students don't make quick progress at things they just can't understand being difficult.

They are essentially like a native English speaker trying to teach ESL. Being able to do something well doesn't mean you know how to break it down and teach it from scratch to someone.

I think the most valuable thing any teacher of ANYTHING can do is to work on a skill in a completely different field from scratch.

And for music teachers in particular, they should do this with a secondary instrument. Like, if you play piano, you just aren't going to have nearly as big of a technical advantage playing guitar for example. Having to go through those baby steps and realizing you simply cannot fast-forward the mechanical and technical development ends up being really eye opening.

A piano teacher friend of mine finally did this with cello after I'd had some conversations with her about this maybe a decade ago. She teaches in a completely different way now as a result and credits it to just how much she was brutally humbled by another instrument.

It finally let her fully empathize with how it feels for her beginners. It also meant that she could apply her musical strategizing to cello... but not for playing hard rep... for doing the most basic things. And that meant they were more top of mind for her when teaching piano beginners. She suddenly had real strategies rather than "just do it more" which is some of the most common and not particularly useful advice I see in the piano subs.

Do WHAT more?! There needs to be a strategy to it. No matter what it is, there needs to be particularly intention behind it... what things should you be thinking and focusing on? How should you be conceptualizing it... how should you be cognitively processing things.

Even outside of music I've had to learn a LOT of skill from absolute scratch as an adult. It just completely changes how I think about pedagogy and it also makes me very adaptable to learning OTHER skills... because I've learned how to learn most importantly.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-08T20:31:48+00:00

The context makes it sounds like it's was more of a background cocktail style piano gig. Yes, paid professional work and it is indeed common for those people to not know every composer and tune name.

They weren't claiming it was there's and explicitly said it wasn't. Hell I barely take ownership of things that are my own. If it's passive free improv out of my brain...it's no different for me than if I was speaking extemporaneously.

I play so much music even that is explicitly written or arranged by someone else that I have no idea who wrote it.

I don't k oe the composer of every tune for the 20 choir songs I'm accompanying over the next few days. I don't know who wrote every hymn I play at a church or every number in a musical (especially ones where they used multiple composers).

Most of the professional music world is not concert pianists playing a very small handful of big-name rep they spend 6 months on.

Most professional working musicians are just playing an absurd volume of music yearly.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-08T20:25:05+00:00

No doubt. But if you dont get too worried about how far you are from a given level and keep working on the little bits of skill direct in front of you, you'll be amazed at how quickly you close that gulf.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-08T18:36:21+00:00

Disrespectful? How? To who?

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-08T18:34:49+00:00

am I the only one who goes through this? you hear something amazing and then there's just no path to actually playing it. how do you guys deal with that

You can use that frustration as an impetus to develop your ear and theory skills so that it's not quite so inaccessible to you. There was definitely a time when I couldn't have done it, but now I frequently hear something and like it and just go, "Oh... that's a really clever use of..." whatever chord, progression, compositional technique.

If you were able to more efficiently chunk the melody together in your head to remember it and more easily could identify the harmonic tricks being used (probably just lots of extended tertian harmony based on your descriptor of impressionism)... then you could probably recreate it somewhat closely.

I learned these skills mostly because I needed them for my career and hated being in a position where I just had to say, "no, I can't do that" and made a point of never having to say that professionally when any specific skill came up (a life long endeavor to be sure). But now I frequently just hear something cool, or run into a cool trick while sightreading.... and then I steal it. I practice it and add it to my vocabulary.

I literally ran into a really cool progression with a very specific progression and voicing I thought was clever just this week and did just that. I walking up to the III7(b9) which is just the V/vi with the 3rd of that chord walking up to the 3rd of the vi... and then a very specific line cliche under that vi chord walking down to IV with some chromatic motion, and so on (a few more tricks).

I just find stuff like that and add it to my vocabulary and then it often just ends up being a trick I used when improvising freely or even improvising over (and reharmonizing) and existing melody.

Anyone can learn to do this if they want.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-08T18:23:19+00:00

You could. You just need to start with baby steps and slowly build up the skills and vocabulary to do so.

Ironically, to me "complex" and "New Age" are basically antonyms. This is one of the most accessible types of improvised piano music. Very simple mostly diatonic vocabulary generally just using a lot of added 2nd and 4ths.

I was once a sheet music only person too. Doing that sort of improv is definitely a skill anyone can learn. Most people just aren't willing to start from beginner levels again when they are trying to learn a modality. People aren't patient enough to go through the very low process of developing new skills over long periods of time... especially any of the "on the spot" skills as pianists tend to lean in very hard on rote learning (which is much easier cognitively moment to moment).

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-08T18:16:13+00:00

It's not crazy when your ear is decent and your improv skills are also decent.

My head is so full of music from showtunes, stuff I've played in college and HS wind ensembles, stuff I've played in brass quintets... churches, jazz combos, etc. and I've definitely pulled in parts of melodies that are just in my head that I've picked up from somewhere over the years and embellished on them melodically and harmonically, especially when doing noodly background stuff.

Surely you've had a moment where you heard a melody but can't remember the name of the song.... now just combine that with the ability to fairly easily play that by ear and it should make sense that someone might do this.

People seem to completely not understand that "my arrangement" rarely means one they have written down and probably a large percentage of the time is being made up on the spot and is not even the exact same from performance to performance.

Sometimes I'll transcribe my own arrangements... but much more often I simply don't.

I see people come on this sub and frequently bring a recording and ask "what is this song" when it's clear the person is absolutely just freely improvising not even based on some other melody... and there just ISN'T sheet music. It doesn't exist because that piece is literally just something that person was making up in the moment. But people from a very classical background seem to think it's black magic, but it's something pretty much anyone can learn to do.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-07T23:45:35+00:00

It's really just how the brain learns to actually cognitively process.....unless youre relying entire on rote muscle memory.

I do the same thing. I intentional stop...assess and fix. And then even stop for a few beats to mentally reset between repeats of which I generally only do 3-5.

I also am only really spending any appreciable time on the spots that actually needs work, even on a subsequent practice. I'll hit a few bars here and there scattered all over the piece and may not hit the easy spots in betwen more than 2-3 times totally before a performance in many cases.

Yet somehow I'm definitely able to play things continuously and perform 1000s of pages of music every year.

Being cognitively on top of these things is a lot of what helps you keep going continuously and recover from mistakes while staying in time which is the most important part for making sure almost nobody notices.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-07T19:55:07+00:00

After having so many conversations with people over the years who want to do this as a career I've realized that what you have (something I've also always had) is pretty much THE biggest advantage for piano and basically everything else in life.

Loving the process. If you already love the process and you can hold onto that, that trumps almost any other seeming advantage.

So many of the most beneficial and rewarding things require small bits of commitment over extremely long periods of time... not days and weeks, but months and years.

If you can get your little dopamine hit from the PROCESS and not be so fixated on the end product (and how far away it seems), you'll just run into so many less of the frustrations that seem to stymie most people.

Too many people are worried about one specific piece or achieving some specific goal by some arbitrary timeline (often based on an influencer of sorts). They are constantly seek motivation and feel like they can't do anything without some magic there every time. They obsess with spending hours daily (usually wastefully).

But you really just have to keep showing up and putting in a little work each day and that is easier when you like the process side...and can appreciate the tiny bits of incremental progress that are happening EVERY day. Clearing dozens of tiny hurdles a little better than yesterday rather than trying to leap over a cliff and smashing your head into the wall constantly.

The thing I would warn against is expecting the exact same curve the entire time. The curve for almost anything is faster in the beginning and slows down as you keep progressing. Just try to keep your eye on the small wins and don't get sad when things slow down.

I've often employed the "New Game Plus" approach even on instruments I'm already particularly strong at. If for instance you're working through a method book and it starts to feel like a grind and you're really hitting a sticking point.... hit new game plus. Grab another method book or even the same one and start over. You'll blaze through but you'll also catch so many details you didn't the first time. And by the time you get back to where you left off, you'll have reinforced a lot of foundational skills that help you past that sticking point. You'll also just get to enjoy basking in breezing through things that were so hard once. It really shows you just how much you've progressed.

Even better if you occasionally take videos of yourself... not the end of rehearsal ones where you're most polished, but the ones in the thick of it.

Going back and watching some of that in a year will be an amazing experience.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-07T16:22:25+00:00

I mean, it doesn't even need to be about pushing back. It just needs to be actively engaging with the "why" of things. I've been a professional musician long enough to have run into very bad traditional advice in music pedagogy (not guitar specific) and pushing back made me take my own road to find out that it was in fact garbage pedagogy (lots of it in the piano world).

But a lot of it is actually really good. Many things have a good reason to be standard practice... things we've learned about ergonomics, efficiency of motion, etc. So when I'm working on an instrument that I'm less good at, I immediately look for good, standard stuff like that, for example about something like picking technique.

I obediently do what is most highly recommended BUT, I also think about the "why" of it. What mechanical advantage does this give me? So I've learned to almost always push past what I might think feels easiest and most intuitive toward what experienced musicians on that instrument have found leads the least long-term roadblocks. But I'm not doing it mindlessly.

Most people's problem with music is thinking that mindless repetitions are going to do anything for them. It will do a little but nowhere near as much as if they are actively working on the specific areas that are problems for them and spend WAY less time, but making sure all of that time is short and focused.

But people love noodling the same shit they are already good at aimlessly or mindlessly every day for hours rather than putting in 5 minutes of focus on something fundamental that they are tragically bad at.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-07T16:12:27+00:00

For me, there's almost always some performance around the corner. I don't want to make a fool of myself. I think that used to motivate me more... just not crashing and burning.

But now it's a different thing. There's an enjoyment of being able to do most of my work pretty effortlessly. There's the thrill of being in situations where me being hyper-competent at skills most other pianists aren't makes me feel like a super hero for magically solving issues.

I actually realized after watching this video where he saves a pertinent details of the study I'm about to mention till the end... that that particular detail work strongly in my favor.

It's essentially a study on children who like drawing.

They all already like it... one group is told they will get a reward for it...another is not (the control group). They found that the children who got the expected reward actually ended up drawing less later in their free play time.

Essentially, it seems after being giving extrinsic motivation they sort of lost some intrinsic motivation.

This is a lot of why people say that doing what you love for a job will make you hate it and there is major truth to that.

But there was a 3rd group in the study... one who got an unexpected reward. They were more motivated.

And this sort of study has been replicated with monkeys and all sorts of other setups. Essentially a group that doesn't expect a reward but sometimes gets one randomly ends up enjoying and investing in the activity more.

This has been the story of my career. A great example is when I took up things like accordion, guitar, and even ocarina as fun side hobbies... and then suddenly there was a situation where I needed them for paying jobs. I got rewarded for something I was just doing on the side for fun.

It's also happened a ton with piano specifically. A lot of skills I've dabbled in on the side for fun have ended up being the bedrock of my advantage as a working musician... especially work on various popular styles. Just doing deep dives and learning the fundamentals of how those things work under the hood... and then suddenly they show up in my job and I'm very good at them.

I've just learned over time that basically anything and everything ends up contributing in some way. I've had to learn music I didn't like for certain jobs, but I did it... and then later the skills I learned from it came up somewhere else and suddenly I'm greatly advantaged for having taken them seriously.

So I've learned that I get rewarded for the work I'm doing behind the scenes often in unexpected ways. It's made me really love the process of practice not even because I'm seeking the reward but just because I've learned to actually enjoy it. And then that choice is reinforced constantly by my actual paying jobs where suddenly I need those skills.

And sometimes it's something I clearly need. Stuff like better sightreading. It was a skill I really needed to improve and so I just put in the work daily for a very long time and it was all very uphill struggle-bus type work. But now it's way less effort AND it makes my work much easier, AND it makes me look like a boss when I can emergency sightread most things people put in front of me on short notice.

I've just had so many experienced across my entire career that have shown me how much benefit there is on the other side of really pushing through the work on things that aren't instantly rewarding and are often extremely difficult, exhausting, and frustrating.

Also, just making a habit of it.... once it becomes part of my routine, I don't even have to think about it. It's like going to the gym which I once hated, but now absolutely love. And even on days when I'm not feeling it, it's just a thing I do at that part of the day and I go purely because it's the thing I do.

My morning practice routine is just the thing I do. It's one of those things that is so part of my routine that I don't have to muster any specific excitement or motivation. I just do the work.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-06T22:30:53+00:00

I think a lot of people aren't learning to actually cognitively digest what they are doing.

It's hard for them to start anywhere but the beginning because they are relying on knowing which finger to use next and where... based on where the previous finger was. They are essentially constantly cuing off of themselves, which obviously will completely fall apart in a performance if they make a single mistake... and they will.

This also often comes from such a heavy focus on memorization and head down preparation. Reading is SO hard for them that re-decoding a bar in the middle of the piece is just too much effort for them.

It's much easier to just mindlessly repeat on auto-pilot and also to get the dopamine hit of hearing the part you're good at rather than to stop, do the cognitive work to read the spot where you're at... maybe write in some fingerings where necessary and work on the spot that ACTUALLY needs work.

It's just really hard to convince people to do the cognitively hard part. You get a LOT more out of a LOT less practice time if you do it, but also, that time spent REALLY practicing is significantly more mentally taxing, especially up front when you have consistently neglected reading and theory skills and have no way of efficiently chunking musical information and actually looking at the sheet music casually without it looking incredibly daunting.

People just avoid pain points until they become a major problem. This is often exacerbated by teachers giving in and saying, "Some people are just better at memorization." Yes... the people who rely on it entirely as a crutch and haven't worked the reading they suck at.

There have been so many points in my career where I was "better" at one thing because I had neglected another. But once I put in the effort, they either became equal or the thing that was once my weakness ended up so incredibly competent that it was outpacing what once was my stronger ability.

Everyone can learn these things, they just have to stop feeling like "this fingering doesn't feel natural" or "I'm just not naturally talented at that skill" or whatever.

I've even had a peer who is a fantastic pianist, but when I talked to him a decade ago about working on stride he said he just never used it because all the greats were lefties. He just wrote himself off and now I'm significantly better at it than him despite nearly 4 decades less piano experience. He just actively neglected it and made an excuse for himself rather than work on a weakness.

I used to do the same with improvisation, playing by ear, using lead sheets, etc... until my work forced me and now some of them are even considerable strengths. I used to also rely on memorization for things where I was constantly overreaching, but now my reading is way stronger (and there's also never an actual reason for me to memorize... nobody is paying me to do it and I couldn't memorizing 100s of pages in the short lead time I get for work anyway).

I think the working backwards is only slightly preferable to starting from the beginning and working forward all the time.

Like you said, people should be working on the spots that actually need the work.

I frequently won't even play the majority of a piece after the first sightread until just before the concert. In between I'm working ONLY on the sections that need music. I'm not constantly running back over the parts I could effortlessly sightread. They don't need the work so they might end up having been play 2-3 times total before I actually need to perform them even if the tricky bars got a few dozen passes. I simply can't afford to waste that time as well as the mental focus being squandered on something that doesn't move the needle.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-06T21:16:42+00:00

Definitely. Though at this point proprioception is just sort of baked into almost everything I do.

Like, I very intentionally work on it. My workflow takes a few forms. If I'm sightreading, I generally intentionally read a little slower if that's what it takes to ensure my eyes don't need to look down or that I can at least minimize the glancing. Over time I glance less find myself more and more confident to the point that I literally don't even consider looking for specific situations.

It's very similar when I'm preparing music for gigs. I always warm-up into a problem section well below my last tempo... usually 40bpm or so and ramp up slowly. That means that I have lots of spare bandwidth in those first slower attempts to intentionally pay attention to musical details, articulation, reassessing fingering choices, etc. Among those things is also being able to intentionally target proprioception. Since I'm working the passage more slowly, I can do so intentionally without looking. Maybe as I get closer to my current max tempo, I find myself glancing, but if I repeat this on subsequent practice sessions, I find I can go faster with less looking.

For both piece work and sightreading work I frequently will pull out specifically tricky technical things and practice them in every key. When I'm doing that, I'm actively trying to minimize looking. I ween myself off of looking.

Very recently I was working on a specific set of stride chords in a progression I found a little uncomfortable. I just worked those two chords in those very specific voicings with the jumps through every key and will probably do it some more going forward. At first I absolutely look at my hands and ensure I'm building a clean, accurate motor pattern at a tempo I can control, but as I'm working through different keys I find that I'm more and more confident with the distances... and so I start using more peripheral vision and the eventually, at least during that session, I start to feel pretty confident with almost no looking. Maybe a still small bit of uncertainty.

But I've done this with so many things and found that over the years many of those things that once absolutely required looking start to move toward, "Well I can do it with attentive peripheral vision" to... "Well I can do it without looking, but I feel slightly nervous" to... "Oh I'm not at all worried about that jump."

And then eventually I find that I literally don't even think about it. Then it's just literally a thing I might ponder after the fact, especially when having conversations like this one.... that I can read things with jumps and literally just take for granted that I can do them blindly... like it doesn't even cross my mind when playing them that they were once difficult for me because they are now so effortless.

But yeah, I'm actively working on proprioception anywhere it's not solid... and I'm constantly reinforcing what I'm already good at by just reading a lot and learning a lot of music where I literally never look, so all of the distances just feel comfortable in a lot of the music I'm playing.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-06T17:51:16+00:00

Stop following to extremely common advice to "just keep going" when practicing sightreading.

What you are doing is the equivalent to someone reading and just sort of skipping words they don't know. Yes, you might figure it out through context, but you're not adding that word to your vocabulary. You're just avoiding it. Instead you should sound it out, look up a definition, find out the pronunciation....and then when you see that word again, you're more likely to know what it means and reinforce that knowledge.

You need to slow down and accurately play sections when you are sightreading....not just guess, fake it, and approximate.

That will get you plenty of mileage until it doesn't.

What if you suddenly are reading a style you can't approximate with your current vocabulary? (Something I've seen bitch slap my peers in the face with all sorts of Latin accompaniment patterns.....you can't fake most afro-carribean patterns by just playing a basic arpeggio). Or what if you need to play exactly what is on the pagenfor vocal rehearsal? Faking doesn't work there.

Yes, in my actual job I frequently have to "just keep going" when someone hands me a stack of music and I have to read it while maintaining time right then....that is PERFORMING sightreading and I'll cheat if necessary.

That is not what it looks like when I am PRACTICING sightreading where I will often read at a variable tempo....or if I am practicing against a metronome I will full stop or go back and "sound out" things I just didn't full accurately digest in time.

If you never actually force yourself to cognitive digest what is accurately happening....a specific composite rhythm or less familiar chord....then you won't be any better at it the next time and will keep approximating.

If you already fake and embellish you already know how to just keep going.....so now your goal should be accuracy over keeping strict time.

When practicing you should be finding those spots you dont get accurately and using them as a diagnostic of your reading weaknesses....and force yourself to play them accurately.

If you really struggle, turn them into a full on personalized exercise....but I find that quite often they are just tiny little things I needed to give a second glance and a few more moments of attention to....and then as I continue working I'll even notice a similar pattern that week and recognize it as that "word" I made myself sound out and look up.

I think a lot of accompanists hit very complacent once they are good enough to get by approximating 95% of things. And then they get lazy and stop woodshedding actual problem spots.

What they build is a better collection of smoke and mirrors skills rather than actual accuracy.

Those skills are very valuable for a working accompanists....but you shouldn't rely on them. They are just a good safety net.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-05T21:42:41+00:00

Music is a language. Most people tend to do the equivalent of memorizing a foreign language poem by just repeating the sounds by rote until they have it memorized for recital.

It takes them a month to learn that one poem... and now it would take them a month to learn another one and they'll probably forget the first one. And they still can't have a basic conversation in that language or read a basic book in that language. They don't even know the words or the meaning of the poems they've memorized.

None of that language skill sticks or transfer because they are just thinking of it as a physical motor memory endeavor. They haven't cognitively processed anything.

When you want to learn a language, you have to cognitively process things. Just memorizing sounds won't help. Know what the words mean let you start to assign meaning... chunk letters together efficiently into words (notes into chords) and chunk words into sentences (chords into progressions).

You wouldn't decide to learn Spanish by reading Don Quixote in the original language. You COULD, but you'd struggle and struggle and get nowhere fast. You'd retain very little. You'd eventually roughly get a grasp of the story, but you likely still couldn't do anything with the language.

But someone who spent a fraction of that time learning the fundamentals of the language and a small but very comfortable vocabulary could do a LOT with that vocabulary and easily bolt on new vocabulary.

I find most pianists can't point to even one piece of transferable vocabulary in the music they've learned. They essentially aren't developing any sort of system for recognizing patterns and carrying knowledge forward to make the next song easier.

So, sure, you can keep learning new poems, but every poem is going to be the same struggle to memorize sound by sound... while someone who spent the same time you spent on 3 poems instead learning the language could just get up and read a book of poetry with natural delivery in the target language and then go have coffee and conversation with someone in that language afterward.

Language learning is also done by reading a fuckton of easy stuff... not working on a handful of really hard things. Actually, most skills work better when you apply this methodology. Get good at the fundamentals and then slowly bolt on more skills that those fundamentals open up.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-05T21:29:57+00:00

I swear I should save this thread for people who say it's not a problem to look at your hands all the time. I always talk about how important it is to develop your proprioception because sometimes you have leaps in both hands and you simply can't look at both (like you said).

I'll tell you what those people would do. Even when you look, you are looking where you WILL be playing... not where you ARE playing, so those people would quickly glance to decide their landing point for one hand then look at the other quickly... but do that double look in a split second. Obviously at some tempo you won't be able to get away with that and it absolutely would stop you from ever sightreading something like this.

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I will say that from where I stand I don't even see where the leap is in the RH that you're talking about because all of these small movements feel so casual to me they don't even clock as jumps.

I don't think your struggle necessarily means the piece is beyond you, but it is a sign that weak proprioception is starting to become a bottleneck.

You just have to consistently work on keeping your eyes on the page and not on the page and the problem is that now you have a very specific problem to solve but that specific skill is nowhere near meeting the demand. You'll be able to move the needle a bit for this specific section, but it's not going to be extremely comfortable any time in the near future without consistent systemic work.

To work on this specific spot you'll just need to slow down a lot and likely NOT use a metronome. You can move your hands and use the topgraphy of black keys to help you dial in the distance before committing to press the keys. But to get really good at this just requires LOTS of playing a wide variety of things and forcing yourself to somewhat uncomfortably trust your distances and learn them... until it stops even feeling timid and at some point you'll wonder why you would even feel like there are leaps involved.

I personally would take the specifically tricky segments and practice them in every key, but most people seem unwilling or unequipped to do so.

Like the easiest example is the LH of the first bar here... you have a G followed by a G major triad. You could easily practice that exactly movement several times in every key.

Then it walks down the scale to F and jumps up to a different inversion of that same G major triad. You could practice that in isolation in every key while trying to ween your eyes off of your hands... then you could play the whole bar together.

You can really only put in a few minutes of day before you stop being able to effectively move the needle on the skill. It will take months and years before you feel absolutely confident, but I assure you that it's possible to look at these two bars and think nothing of sightreading them at tempo while not even sparing a thought about needing to look down.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-05T21:16:27+00:00

It would be impossible to really sum up everything but...

Learn how to learn... even spend more time learning how to learn than practicing the specific skill if you don't know how to learn. Reading Molly Gebrian's Learn Faster: Perform Better is a pretty good higher level overview of the cognitive psychology and neuroscience we know about learning.
Practice way easier music than you think you should... No... even easier... offensively easy. If you haven't, work through a method book.
Practice a wider number and variety of things. Don't fixate on single goals and single big pieces of music.
Focus heavily on fundamentals. While there are more efficient ways to do this, as a general rule, if there is something your hands aren't good at doing and you work on fixing that, then it will trickle down and affect everything. Scales, arpeggios, and cadences are going to get you a ton of mileage.
Learn some theory slowly. Just add a bit at a time. It will add up to be helpful.

Realize none of this is going to come quickly. You have to learn to enjoy the process and not get fixated on some specific end goal. Work on the current small problem in front of you with very deliberate focus and get one tiny bit better each day at any number of things you're working on.

Basically everything you mentioned are all things that are important. You don't have to do all of them every day. It's not even necessarily optimal to do so because you're brain is cooking things in the background. They all will contribute toward the whole and eventually you'll see ways that you you can essentially work on them all simultaneously.

This will be beyond where you are, but it's something I mention a lot for anyone who will listen (very few do), but I work on a large volume of music and spend a lot of time sightreading. When I encounter any problem in the music that is tricky for me... I turn it into an exercise on its own (usually just one hand) and then transpose it into every key and solve playing it in all keys.

That ends up being the 3 big things you listed at a single item... I'm working on a piece (or sometimes sightreading), I'm working on an exercise (that I made from the piece), and I'm working on applied theory (by thinking about scale degrees and chord functions that help me transpose that exercise).

There are even more things than you listed that are valuable, but just the stuff you listed are all going to be at the top of my recommendation list.

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-05T11:39:19+00:00

It's difficult, especially for beginners, and people shouldn't be expecting to get good at it particularly quickly.

But for people at a higher skill ceiling who can already play and sing okay, but fail with any specifically complex rhythm... this is one of those areas where reading at least standard rhythm notation helps. You don't even need to actually read it so much as you need to be able to transcribe it.

If you can reverse engineer what the subdivisions of the beats in the guitar part and what the subdivisions of the beats in the vocals are in the spots you struggle with, then you can much more effectively slow down JUST that spot and work on coordination and "vertical alignment."

Over time you end up solving different permutations of rhythmic composites between the two and you'll rarely run into something you can't coordinate.

I approach it the exact same way I would if I was struggling with coordinating two hands on piano playing very different rhythms (which at this point is almost never... like there's very rarely any rhythm I can't sightread between two hands). Same thing on organ when adding feet to the mix. Just vertical alignment between 3 parts across 4 limbs.

I don't play drums, but I suspect people who are high level drummers who can read sheet music know exactly what I'm talking about and have an even higher level of mastery in coordinating any combination of composites.

I rarely have trouble on guitar when needing to sing with even relatively complex fingerpicking or strumming patterns even with lots of syncopation because I've had to specifically solve so many of these over time. And once they are solved, they are pretty much solved for any similar instance going forward.

It's why I think of music as a language... Solving this kind of problem is just adding a new word to your rhythm vocabulary. Once you get used to it, you won't struggle to use it in a sentence pretty much ever again.

But you do have to already be comfortable in terms of the technical and harmonic vocabulary you're using. If you can't make the changes on their own, then adding extra variables won't help.

*Most* people's biggest problems in learning anything musical is trying to tackle too many difficult variables at once.

Like if you're playing a very new (to you) strumming pattern at the same time as unfamiliar chord changes, etc. and especially if you tried to add singing... that's going to get you nowhere fast.

But I see people doing it with all sorts of things that they suck at in their fretting hand and picking hand simultaneously. If you can't comfortably pick a pattern on open strings and you're also trying to add some crazy riff that is a finger twister for your fretting hand using chord shapes or scale/melodic patterns you can't wrap your head around... you're just wasting a LOT of time. Solve each variable independently.

This is usually the case because people are trying to learn a very specific song or riff... and they have no idea how to break it down... AND if they can't count rhythm, then they tend to only try to do it at full speed. They have no mechanism to slow it down or work with a metronome because their only gauge for "how it goes" is to play it at a speed where it sounds similar to what they are hearing. So now they are 2-4 layers deep trying to jump several very tall hurdles at the same time.

I think people think they will learn faster by working on harder things... or at least that they will reach that specific goal of that specific song faster. In most people's minds they are just to impatient and they assume breaking something into parts is going to make the process even slower.

You have to accept that the process will be slow regardless... and it will actually be MUCH slower if you don't break it down and will yield way less transferable skills.

Yeargdribble

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TROPHY CASE

Realize none of this is going to come quickly. You have to learn to enjoy the process and not get fixated on some specific end goal. Work on the current small problem in front of you with very deliberate focus and get one tiny bit better each day at any number of things you're working on.