How Slow Can You Go

Something we all go through at some point, but I notice especially in younger students of a certain age group, is an extreme difficulty in playing slowly and accurately. Explain as many times as you want, but the concept that eliminating mistakes at turtle tempos will lead to the best performance at faster speeds just won’t sink in. It’s harder to concentrate on something and keep time accurately at slower tempos. Nick Gélinas, my metric mentor, has been suggesting exercises to me which have really exposed certain rhythmic shortcomings in my playing. These are HARD. So I’ve begun a simpler but similar exercise which is testing me in several ways.

I went out and bought a nice metronome. It can do subdivisions, different swing feels, and most importantly, it can go down to 30BPM. 30, if you’ve never heard it, is SLOW. If you made the click the downbeat of each measure, you’d be playing the equivalent of 120BPM as the 1/4 note value. So that’s what I did. I started playing Solar, because that’s the tune Nick always talks about with this stuff. I could play basic chords or the melody pretty consistently without messing up after a bit of practice so what’s the next step? Well, move the click to beats 2, 3 and 4 of the bar and see if that’s disorienting. I find 3 the weirdest because I can’t help hearing the metronome as an accent at this point and it’s an accent on the weakest beat. Of course, once this becomes very easy, the next step is to play the metronome on the offbeats of every beat.

But there is a fork in the road of this exercise, the first path is to work on being comfortable with the metronome anywhere in the bar. But I’m also working on keeping the metronome on the first beat of the bar, and trying to play more complex ideas without rushing or slowing down (mostly unsuccessfully at this point). It’s unbelievable how hard it is to keep really almost perfect time without hearing the metronome more often. With the metronome playing twice a bar even, it gives us a chance to correct subtle little imperfections in our time. But with the metronome playing only once a bar, those two extra beats make a massive difference in our ability to correct ourselves. For starters, a small mistake has 2 more beats (which is actually a lot) to become a slightly larger mistake. And if that weren’t enough, once you realize you’ve sped up or slowed down, without 2 clicks per bar, it is extremely difficult to correct yourself because the metronome really doesn’t give you any help at all.

So I’m going to work very hard on this, and once I feel confident enough to move on to the real exercise, I’ll come back and write about it.