Practice With Me #2: Fast/Notey Passages

Welcome to my “Practice With Me” Series!

This series is a virtual side-by-side practice session where I invite you into my practice room, explain the specific issue I am targeting, and how I’m breaking it down. My practice changes all the time - depending on time/rep/circumstances/other priorities - so no single one of these posts will be my definitive practice technique for that issue. Moreover, it’s an ongoing development and only details what I did on one particular day. I also don’t intend this series to read like an advice column; practice is so specific and personal, and anyway, who am I to give advice! But I hope you will engage in the comments so that we can all share ideas and work through these issues together - practice is a lonely activity, so let’s form a community out of it!

The Issue

Today’s practice issue concerns notes—lots and lots of them. Over the past couple of weeks, I have had so much new rep to learn, and much of it contained some really gnarly passages; high speed, flying up and down the fingerboard, chromatic in all the unexpected ways… Just very tricky notes to learn. Tackling all of this involved a very specific kind of work, so I’m going to share a bit of what I did here. Some of my methods were my tried and tested, fail-safe practice techniques, but I had a few new revelations during the process too, so I am excited to share those and see what you think.