A friend's newsletter this week led me to the Fast Practice Technique as taught by trombonist Jason Sulliman. The basic idea is that you should be learning new pieces at the actual tempo you will need to perform them at rather than slowing them down while learning. So if you play Irish music, this means learning a reel or jig at session speed to begin with. You might not get all the notes this way, but you can get it to survival mode and by doing so you accustom your brain from the get-go to the actual speed that is required of you. Not the speed that will eventually be needed, but the speed that is needed now. This bypasses some of the note for note, step by step learning that goes on when you slow the piece down and learn it that way.
The problem with learning a piece at a slowed down tempo is your brain can't process the information the same way when played at the faster speed. I've experienced this myself at sessions. Something I was playing at home at a much slower tempo completely breaks down when trying to keep pace at a session. It's kind of like going to the batting cage and practicing hitting off of pitching machine throwing at 60 mph. You might develop a perfect swing but when you finally face a pitcher throwing 90 mph you're not going to be able to hit it.
After getting the gist of the tune by learning it at tempo, with the fast at-speed version being your place of reference, you can slow it down later on to fine-tune and refine any notes you were misunderstanding or glazing over. You do this after learning it at speed, not before. What I'm not sure of is how much you have to worry about bad habits and tension creeping into your playing of the piece. Does that stick around or is it ironed out as your interpretation of the tune grows and evolves?
Recently I have been toying with the phrases "happy enchilada" and "whet your appetite". A happy enchilada is a tune where you know the general structure, you feel like you have most of the notes, and you can play it at-speed along with others as long as someone else is leading. You hear happy enchilada where the actual notes say half an inch of water. Close enough to survive in a session.
Then in the practice room you whet your appetite for the happy enchilada by going over the tune from a theory point of view, studying the actual notes of the piece compared to what you were playing, correcting notes you had wrong, and so on. Note that it's not "wet your appetite". It's "whet your appetite". Whet means to sharpen. So when you whet your appetite for a happy enchilada you're simply sharpening your understanding of a tune that you can already kind of play at speed. Here's to many more happy enchiladas!
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