FEATURED PRACTICE TOOL:

Once and Only Once

Do you ever find yourself stumbling as you play? By stumbling, I mean experiencing little hesitations, bumps in the road, interruptions of the flow. These kinds of stumbles may or may not involve “wrong notes.” Often they include little spasms of the “right” notes, played jerkily several times. The stumbles may be momentary and subtle. We may tell ourselves, “That’s never happened before; it was just a little blip, no big deal, and I’ll just go on.” Does this ever happen to you?

I thought so! We all stumble sometimes, and there may be thousands of reasons. Maybe we simply start too fast. Maybe our concentration and focus just aren’t quite holding water, even if the tempo we set is fine. Or stumbles may happen when we simply don’t know the passage quite well enough yet, when its neural pathway is only still a proverbial scratch on the surface of our brain.

Pick a passage where you tend to stumble, and try Once and Only Once.

Here is how it works (drumroll):

We play each note ONCE….. and ONLY ONCE! That’s it!

It is simple but powerful. We commit to playing no wrong notes. We think of the carpenter’s maxim, “Measure twice; cut once.” Or, in the immortal words of Susan T: “Just don’t play shit.”

But in order to play no wrong notes, what is needed? For this practice, we throw rhythm out the window. NB, this is the ONLY time you will read those shocking and dangerous words in this newsletter! But it is important here. Sometimes, in order to learn to put notes in the right places on the keyboard, we need to cut ourselves some slack about putting notes in the right places in time. So, just for now, we are not thinking in a tempo at all. We are playing one thing at a time, and we are ready, at a fraction of a moment’s notice, to stop in our tracks.

Before we continue, consider this: we are doing so much more than learning “the right notes” here! We are training our minds to become aware of mistakes before they happen. Have you noticed that you can usually feel a wrong note coming? If we can catch it, before it manifests in our finger meeting the key, we can overwrite the mistake and replace it with our correct, conscious intention.

Back to our designated passage: we are playing through, at a moderate tempo. We sense a twinge of uncertainty or doubt! We’re not sure if it is a wrong note coming on or not… but, because we are practicing using Once and Only Once, we STOP! Freeze! Hands stop in their tracks, on the keys. We don’t move. We look carefully at the score, or think carefully ahead if we are playing by memory. We become sure of what is next. Measure twice, before cutting once! We do not play until we have become sure. Maybe we discover that what we had been about to play was wrong; we fix it in advance. Maybe what we had been about to play was right—but clearly we weren’t sure! Well, now we are. So now we play, knowing with certainty and confidence that what we play is going to be right.

Voilà! No wrong notes! And a powerful practice in being aware of what is going on in our minds as we play, to boot. It is a granular, precise, focused form of thinking ahead.

And this kind of practice builds our confidence and security, because for the duration of the exercise (and within the parameters of what it addresses: notes, fingerings, almost anything but rhythm), everything we have played has been right as rain. Just as we knew, beforehand, that it would be.

If this practice isn’t working for you, i.e. if you are still stumbling: then (if I may say so)…. you are not truly using the tool. Play once and only once; take whatever time it takes to do that and nothing else. When we truly do it, it is foolproof, 100% satisfaction guaranteed!

Or—just try something else. That’s good too! The right practice approach is always out there.

Follow-up: At this point, though we are pleased with our progress, we sheepishly remember our unceremonious ditching of the all-important rhythm. After we’ve repeated our passage in Once and Only Once fashion a number of times, we’ll feel it getting easier and more consistent. At some point we will have the urge to put it back into a tempo. We choose our tempo wisely, play through the passage again, and assess whether or not the stumbling issue has improved. We take it from there, and practice on.

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New practice tools (including those addressing RHYTHM which we set aside for this, are always available to us. And new practice tools are posted here regularly!

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