How to Learn a Piece

of Music in 3 Steps
A rough guide to macro and micro approaches
 How to Learn a Piece
of Music in 3 Steps
1. Treat sight-reading as a fast-track to
learning. If you are learning a piece from
the music, it will be a lot easier to do if
your sight-reading is good enough to make
sense of it by a third reading. If your sight-
reading is not good enough to do this, then
I suggest another approach below.
The good sight-reader fast track: First-
time readingread through the piece
slowly but rhythmically, and never mind
the mistakes.
Second-time readingread it through
again, and try to keep going in slow time
without hesitations, and never mind the
mistakes. Try to make sense of the music
in your playing with phrasing and dynam-
ics. At the end, revise and play even more
slowly the difficult bars, the bars with mis-
takes, or the bars where you couldnt keep
time. Now move on to
Third time readingmake a special
effort to incorporate the improvements
which you have just been practicing, and
be more demanding of yourself regarding
keeping time, avoiding errors and making
it musical.
The poor sight-reader memorizing fast
track: Learn the piece phrase by phrase,
and dont move on to the next phrase until
you have learned and half-memorized the
first one. To memorize effectively, remem-
ber the fingering patterns and frets, repeat
the rhythmic shapes until certain, and try
to figure out the harmonies. Once you have
half-memorized the piece, try to under-
stand the structure and shape through the
harmonies, rhythms and melody. This will
help fully memorize the piece.
How the Learn a Piece of Music in 3 Steps
BY CARLOS BONELL
2. Alternate close-up detail with long-
distance overview. This applies to every
learner, whether a poor or good reader.
Close-up detail: The close-up moments
require you to extract just a phrase or a bar
or even just one difficult jump and repeat it
very slowly until you can play it smoothly,
after which you can try it faster. Then you
should play the passage in question from a
bar before and see whether it still works.
Then again, from another bar before that,
and so on. After a few minutes of concen-
trated close-up detail work, the brain tires
so you now move on to
Long distance overview: Play through
the whole piece ignoring mistakes and not
stopping. The priority is to create a smooth
musical performance in spite of errors.
Play through the piece several times and
remember where the errors occurred. Now
go back to close-up detail work and repeat
the process.
In any practice session, whether it is
30 minutes or three hours, alternate close-
up practice of difficult passages with the
long-distance approach of playing all the
way through the piece. The time you spend
on close-up detail may be a few minutes
or 10 minutes. Time yourself and you will
see how long two minutes of concentrated
very slow close-up detailed work really is.
Only continue for as long as you can con-
centrate. Then proceed to long-distance
overview work, which is more relaxed.
Close-up detail work is like breathing
in, while long-distance overview work is
like breathing out. Close-up detail work is
like looking through a microscope, while
long-distance overview is like looking
through a telescope.
3. Allow time for you to improve the
piece, and the 5-time test. Playing music
so that you sound completely at ease takes
time. You may have to live with the piece
for some months, and with really demand-
ing pieces, maybe for years. Pablo Casals,
the first cellist in the 20th century to revive
and play the solo suites for cello by Bach,
waited eight years before playing them in
public. But dont worry, you need not take
so long with the piece you are learning!
And here is an interesting thing: You
may not practice the piece for weeks, and
yet it may sound better when you pick it
up again. All the while, the music has been
bubbling away in your subconscious.
To prove to yourself that you have mas-
tered the piece, subject it to my 5-time
test. For this, take any difficult passage
and play it through five times in a row with-
out a mistake. If you succeed, congratula-
tions, you are on top of it! If you cant play
it correctly five times in a row, its like the
game snakes and ladders: Go back to num-
ber one and repeat very slowly.
Good luck! CG
COLIN COOPER PHOTO
From the June 2012 issue of Classical Guitar