Re: Re: Audition Preparation


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Posted by Andy on June 24, 2003 at 10:19:29:

In Reply to: Re: Audition Preparation posted by Tony on June 22, 2003 at 14:55:53:

Great suggestions!

You have touched on several very important topics. First of all, striving to achieve a result based on playing a passage as well as the best musicians in the world would play it. This type of "imitation" is a very powerful, and I think, overlooked source of improvement.

Also, the act of perfect repetition is also important. All too often, we sit in a practice room and play through a passage several times until we finally get it right. We then think that we've got it, and go on to something else. In fact, what we've done is practiced the mistakes several times, and have played the passage correctly only once. The mistakes are what will be remembered. In order to really learn something, you have to work on it until you've played it right more times than you've played it wrong.

Finally, the idea of slowing up the tempo is great. In order to improve, we must work at a level of difficulty where we can have success more than half the time. Then as we get more proficient at that level of difficulty, we can gradually introduce a greater challenge. This can be done not only with tempo, but register or dynamics. For example, if a passage is too high (or low), take it down (or up) an octave or a fifth, whatever. Play it there until you've got it, then transpose it up (or down) a half step and work on it again until it sounds really good. Repeat the process until you can play it where it is written.



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