Hi, Everyone:
The title of this post is a tad misleading, as this post is actually intended to be about playing clean and working to build speed as opposed to simply "practicing."
As you can imagine, I've been playing my new Collings MT2 a whole lot since getting it almost two weeks ago, and I'm noticing my playing coming around to a more stable, more dexterous state. My hands are feeling a bit stronger and I'm playing a lot cleaner than I was prior to getting my MT2, when I wasn't playing as often.
Just yesterday, I practiced the melody to Roanoke for a half hour, playing it about 30 times. I practiced with a metronome to steady the flow of notes and spent most of the 30 minutes playing it over and over at 90bpm, which is a comfortable pace for me right now. I bumped it up to 115bpm, then scaled down by 5bpm until I got back to 90, at which point I played it a few times at 90 again.
It was a lot of time spent on Roanoke in one session, but I am tired of flubbing my way through it and have never doe more than play it a few times a day so I could steadily get better at it. Today, I dove right back in and realized how good it felt to play it again at 90bpm. So, I simply increased to 91 bpm and played it there for a dozen or so times before upping it to 116 and then down by fives until 91. It seems I was able to increase the bpm ever so slightly and not lose any cleanliness. Theoretically, I feel like I can up it a bpm every day until my floor to 100 and my ceiling to 125, which would be a baseline to maintain.
I know it seems like some hair-splitting, but the goal isn't so much to play extraordinarily fast. It's to play clean and be able to push the pace if needed. So, I don't tend to try for big increases at a time when I'm in a rigorous practice regiment. My question is... how do you practice? How do you work on playing clean notes and building speed? I'm fine with drills and that kind of thing. They can get wearisome, but they support the other things we can do that are more inherently creative. I just want to experiment with how I practice so I can keep growing as a player.
Thanks!
P.S. I'm loving the Chris Baird fundraiser. :-)
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