Slow to Fast Practice - a Powerful Technique

Slow to Fast is a learning technique that helps us acquire new skills quickly. It helps to make patterns or skills repeatable.

Use this technique to

• Teach our brains to remember skills we want to last a long time
• Learn complicated skills quickly and reliably

When we learn a new skill our brains aren’t sure if it should be stored where it keeps important memories like how to walk, or things it needed once a long time ago like getting off a chair you sat in once a year ago. The Slow to Fast technique described below signals the brain to move it where you can get it quickly.

If you want to learn something and have it be part of your permanent skill set this helps greatly. It works great for scales and trills and all sorts of exercises or complicated passages.

If you ever get called at the last minute to sight read a concert you will appreciate this technique. When I get to the hall I look for complicated rhythms or technical passages, I do them slow to fast once or twice and I am almost always ready to play them in the show.

If you want to learn a long complicated passage, learn bits of it and then string them together. For example if you have a long passage of scales that are hard to play, start by playing just the first measure Slow to Fast. When you can play it comfortably add the next measure. Keep going until you have mastered the passage.

Some people like to learn the end of a passage and work backwards.

To practice Slow to Fast

• Play the bit very slowly. Start painfully like ‘when are you going to play the next note?’ slowly.
• Keep repeating it gradually increasing the speed.
• If something goes wrong then play then next time play it slower. It is more important to get it right than to just get through it.
• Continue accelerating until you can’t get it to go any faster.  Then go faster. You always want to drive PAST the point where it doesn’t work any more.  At the end it should be falling apart. If it still sounds good then go faster!
• Then relax for a second, take the biggest breath you possibly can and play the passage as many times as you can in that breath.

That’s it. A very quick and powerful technique! Use it every day and your improvement will skyrocket!