Count how you practise.
You sit down, you start at the beginning,
you play until something goes wrong,
you wince, you go back
to the beginning.
Which means the first eight bars
have been played perhaps four hundred times
and the awkward bar before the last chorus
has been played twice,
both times badly,
both times on the way to stopping.
Your song has a polished front
and an untouched middle,
and you have been rehearsing
that exact shape for a month.
There is a reason it happens
and it is not laziness.
Starting at the beginning feels like the song.
It sounds good immediately,
your hands know it,
and for thirty seconds
you are a person who can play.
Working on the hard bar
sounds like nothing at all,
feels like failing on purpose,
and produces no moment
that anybody would want to record.
So the pleasant half of the work
crowds out the necessary half
without either of you noticing.
Here is the repair
and it fits in one session.
Find where you always stop.
That is the piece.
Take four bars, not the song,
and play them at a speed
where you make no mistakes,
which will be slower
than you think is dignified.
Play them until they are dull.
Then add the bar before,
because the trouble is almost never
in the difficult bar.
It is in the approach to it,
where your hand is already
in the wrong place
and the notes were decided
two bars earlier.
Then practise arriving.
Start from the second verse
with no run up at all.
Start from the bridge.
Start from wherever the song
would be if somebody
stopped you at random.
A song you can only play
from the first note
is not learned.
It is a sequence you can trigger,
and it will fail on the night
at exactly the place
you have always been forgiving with.
Go and be unforgiving
with four bars
for twenty minutes.
Nobody will hear the difference
in the opening.
Everybody will hear it
in the bar you used to stop at.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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