Chang precisely recommends the same thing: don't just practice by going through pieces from beginning to end repeatedly. Being a scientist, he quantifies that with efficiency arguments, which are along these lines: if a five minute piece contains two-bar difficult passage, then you can only practice that passage twelve times in the span of one hour. If the passage is only ten seconds long, you can practice it twelve times in just two minutes, which is 30 times more efficient.
One tools is to use a metronome to find the stress passages in a piece. Without a metronome, we hide the stressful passages by slowing down subconsciously.
Set the metronome at a baseline rate at which you can play everything. Then gradually crank up the speed. Then the stress points show up: passages where you fumble.
Chang makes astonishingly clever observations about speed. Basically, speed has two extremes that are easy: very slow, or super fast. It's just as hard to slow down from high speed playing as it is to speed up slow playing. The initial argument he makes is that there is no faster way to play three notes than to just hit a three note chord with three fingers, which is easy, and "infinitely fast". Moreover, it is basically easy to slow down from that "infinite speed" a little bit; if we hit the chord so that the fingers are staggered slightly, we will play a fast arpeggio. A really fast run of notes is like that: hitting groups of notes in this manner, and changing the hand position in between those groups.
One tools is to use a metronome to find the stress passages in a piece. Without a metronome, we hide the stressful passages by slowing down subconsciously.
It's striking how one's self-perception can be faulty this way. I've had this sort of thing pointed out to me by a bandmate, years ago, using a tape recorder and a metronome. It's like I was in a Sci-fi time-distortion, not because the tempo change was that large, but because it was so invisible to me without the recording and metronome!
Effects of metronome are quite insane. Even physically, as a faux drummer, playing with a stable time reference allows for so much more regularity you can be physically efficient, meaning more relaxed, less exhausting music playing (basically energy optimization). Then there's the mind massaging from perception of time .. Having a metronome is almost like a trance device.
Tempo is also one of the best expressive devices for performance. The mind massaging works in reverse! Lots of great choruses bump the bpm significantly, and the prevalence of recording and performing to click tracks has made it rare to have the kind of fluidity that you can get without them. You want to be able to manipulate your internal metronome expressively. I'm not a drummer, but definitely something to work on for every musician.
the prevalence of recording and performing to click tracks has made it rare to have the kind of fluidity that you can get without them.
Performing to a click is not nearly as lifeless as a hard-quantized MIDI production without live instruments. Sure, it may not have drastic tempo changes like a drummer who isn’t listening to a click, but it still has human variation. Making MIDI programming sound convincing and realistic is not an easy task
" Sure, it may not have drastic tempo changes like a drummer who isn’t listening to a click, but it still has human variation. Making MIDI programming sound convincing and realistic is not an easy task"
Not knowing anything about music at all I've wondered about this a few times. Isn't it just a matter of adding some stochasticity from an appropriate distribution? What is it that makes human imperfection different from machine generated imperfection?
At the best of my crappy math abilities, the way we feel about movements (let's say music is a movement) is full of layers of continuity. Simple randomness won't fit the bill IMO.
When I play I think about diffeq and nurbs .. but that's a highly subjective analogy.
Think about what makes a groove or feel. You can play quarter notes that feels heavy metal or funk, just by altering the impact and accent. Also I believe that our ears perceive a lot more than discrete events. A single hit has a duration and is more like a tiny bell curve than a zero width line on a chart. Same for singing, if you hit the right note at the right time nobody will like it, it's all in the way you get there in between, even if you're off a little, the subtleties are there to make it pleasing to our ears.
That is beyond my level of math understanding, haha.
In addition to differences in the performance data (MiDI) versus an audio recording of someone playing a real instrument, I find that MIDI instruments do not sound as realistic as a recording of someone playing acoustic drums or a real piano. Perhaps that is because VSTi plugins usually sample perfect hits and close-miced drums; while a recording of someone playing live drums might have many more imperfections and room noise... I don’t know. It’s certainly possible to program realistic parts with MIDI, but they always sound much more polished to me than real recordings.
>It's no secret that every drum machine has its own vibe - whether analog or digital, they rush, drag, swing, shuffle, and funk like no other. Some are extremely accurate, and others are completely off the grid. An MPC60 will sequence your sounds like a band is playing them, and the LM1 (responsible for the first sequencer shuffle of all time) will give you that incredible early 80s Prince feel. Whatever the machine, they all have a unique groove.
There are ways similar to what you've described and certainly doesnt even have to be that clever. Just adding a small random offset using uniform white noise helps.
People go to immense ends to get their programmed drums to sound good though - and the techniques that are coupled with this go beyond a statistical approach.
tldr: there's been some research into it – turns out that if you have a few parts (instruments), the randomness you add to each of them needs to be correlated:
> "The first [example] has had completely random timing errors inserted [...] with no link between the errors in different parts. The result sounds unmistakably unmusical and inhuman."
someone built a "humanizing" plugin for Ableton Live based on that research.
here's some quotes i liked:
> "[...] the timing of each individual note is dependent on every single note that both players had already played – a minor timing hiccup near the start of a piece will continue to affect every single note after it, up to the last notes. And when you play a duet every note your partner plays affects your playing, and every note you play affects your partner [...]"
> "[...] if everything is recorded together in the same take then quite large variations in timing are no problem – they don't sound like errors, just the natural movement of the music. But if the parts are multi-tracked, or sequenced parts are mixed with human parts, then the timing errors are glaringly obvious, they sound wrong because they are unnatural, and our capability to identify the uncanny marks them out as unpleasant and undesirable [...]"
About the correlation between musicians. I don't know if you ever played drums in a band. But there's such a weird coupling between everybody when the rhythm is solid. A few ms off from the drums and everybody in the room will have a hiccup.
Not related to the content of your comment itself, but congratulations on owning the unique Hacker News comment whose numerical ID corresponds to the YYYYMMDD date of its posting:
A classic example is Roxanne by The Police. ~132bpm verse, ~138bpm chorus by my rough measurement. You can really feel the rhythm section wind down after the first chorus, which wouldn’t have worked if the guitar hadn’t waited two bars to come in and resolve the shifting tempo with precision jabs right as the band hits the original pace. Great moment.
I recently switched to using a metronom when I play live with my band and it changed everything.
When you play live, you are always rushing a little bit, the louder you play, the faster you play.
Now when we play according to our own tempo from our recordings, I really have to concentrate not to start rushing again - but it is so worth it, everything sounds much better in a precise way.
My guitar professor in college would have me pick up from random points in a piece of music at speed.
Another reply on this thread suggested that practicing slow is categorically bad. This isn't true. There is value in not locking in bad habits by being deliberate at low speed.
I had never heard this about playing fast, though. Subjective as it may be, I always abhorred the "shredding" set, because it felt like a cheap trick rather than skillful playing.
Chang claims that slow practice is valuable, just not so slow that you change the "gait" of your motions.
Walking isn't the same motion as running; we wouldn't practice running by walking. But not all running practice is a sprint.
He says that it's a mistake to learn pieces too slowly and try to speed up from there precisely because of this "gait" issue.As you speed up, you have to unlearn the wrong motions that do not work at full speed and replace them with different ones.
I find it helpful to play the big phrase choreography—the shape of a phrase, making it a physical gesture with big muscles, actual exact notes be damned. Then add in notes, making it gradually more precise. But for anyone to say that slow practice is a mistake ever is just nuts! Slow practice is how we find hand and arm shapes and angles, how we listen to the sound- esp. for a non button instrument like cello. A musician who really stretches themselves toward greatness tries all the gaits at all the speeds and all the choice emphasis and every wacky thing they can think of to find something of truth in the music. Sometimes we improvise something harder and easier. A great musician is their practice- they are as fascinating as their practice methods- and the practice should be fascinating. The thing is to find one’s own method, not to do anyone else’s method. If one reaches for artistry in music, their practice must be innovative, stylistic, nimble and responsive to everything: training for flexibility. Training for facility is more like what is mentioned here- not bad, but if you want computing, computers are better suited!
As you speed up, you have to unlearn the wrong motions that do not work at full speed and replace them with different ones.
I don't know about piano, but at least in my experience with electric guitar the key to playing fast was to decouple the "gait" from speed by reducing wrist movements and using the elbow more.
economy of motion works wonders, but even then sometimes there are positions which have the same economy but may be dramatically easier at speed, and you need to play closer to tempo to learn that.
Sometimes it's even better to trade away lots of small adjustments to avoid one big one, because you can't hit the big one at tempo.
Hah, that is an excellent book. I remember it pissed off one of my friends who claimed that slow practice is the best way to learn. Glad I didn't listen to him, I use these techniques when learning all kinds of stuff.
Glen Gould also practiced by playing slowly and very slowly and so on. He practiced by singing and not playing, and yes by playing at speed and as has been mentioned as something bad... he practiced pieces sll the way through for hours on end
I would guess that e.g. in writing, for example, you'd have to find a way to iterate quicker (attempt writing short articles as practice rather than longform), and set bounds on yourself that induce strain (limiting yourself to not edit anything at the first pass until you finish, having a draft worked on for a very long amount of time?) and reviewing every pass you make to see where you could have improved.
Easy. What sort of writings do you put off the most? Do you fail to write replies to text messages but find yourself easily jumping into long threads on message boards? Or do you put off formal documentation in favor of a series of short notes? What are you not doing? That is what you should focus on, by deliberately going out of your way to put yourself into situations that require you to do it more.
Guitar virtuoso Shawn Lane offers another approach, where you attempt to learn very difficult passages by jumping right into it at the correct speed.
The idea here is that, by slowly speeding up, you end up using low-speed mechanics on high-speed passages and it doesn't always work. It's not for the faint of heart, but if you find yourself struggling it's certainly worth trying.
> If the passage is only ten seconds long, you can practice it twelve times in just two minutes, which is 30 times more efficient.
Your example timing makes me suspicious that this is a theory you haven't actually tried to put into practice yet.
Ten seconds is an eternity for a drill of a difficult passage. For an amateur, that's almost guaranteed to be too much music for them to isolate the difficulty. That means instead of a success rate of 100% on the drill they'll get something considerably less. For an amateur, "difficulty" usually means they were already playing it wrong before they began drilling it. So any mistakes in the drill help reinforce the initial muscle memory for that passage. That makes it extremely likely that they'll repeat the same mistake when you add an audience and nerves.
Drilling passages that are too long does at least decrease the chance of the player losing their place-- they have practiced starting at various spots that aren't simply the beginning. But they are only "30 times more efficient" at playing the piece with an unnecessarily high error rate.
Looking at it again, I'm taking more notice of the piano tuning chapter which I totally forgot about. I've done some piano tuning not long ago; I will re-read that in the light of my experiences.
https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/en/lat...
Chang precisely recommends the same thing: don't just practice by going through pieces from beginning to end repeatedly. Being a scientist, he quantifies that with efficiency arguments, which are along these lines: if a five minute piece contains two-bar difficult passage, then you can only practice that passage twelve times in the span of one hour. If the passage is only ten seconds long, you can practice it twelve times in just two minutes, which is 30 times more efficient.
One tools is to use a metronome to find the stress passages in a piece. Without a metronome, we hide the stressful passages by slowing down subconsciously.
Set the metronome at a baseline rate at which you can play everything. Then gradually crank up the speed. Then the stress points show up: passages where you fumble.
Chang makes astonishingly clever observations about speed. Basically, speed has two extremes that are easy: very slow, or super fast. It's just as hard to slow down from high speed playing as it is to speed up slow playing. The initial argument he makes is that there is no faster way to play three notes than to just hit a three note chord with three fingers, which is easy, and "infinitely fast". Moreover, it is basically easy to slow down from that "infinite speed" a little bit; if we hit the chord so that the fingers are staggered slightly, we will play a fast arpeggio. A really fast run of notes is like that: hitting groups of notes in this manner, and changing the hand position in between those groups.