In my previous post, I looked at the advantages of slow practice. Here, I examine how to build on that foundation, and how practising fast is just as vital to building virtuosity.
The Speed Trap: Why Your Slow Practice Isn’t Making You Faster
Every dedicated piano student has encountered it: the ‘speed wall’. It is that frustrating plateau where a passage, learned meticulously and played perfectly at a slow or moderate tempo, simply falls apart when pushed toward performance speed. The notes become uneven, tension creeps into the hands and arms, and accuracy plummets. The common response is to employ the horrifically-named ‘boil the frog’ method: a gradual, incremental increase of the metronome speed, hoping that the technique that worked slowly will eventually hold up at a faster pace. More often than not, this leads to a dead end, leaving the student feeling that they simply lack the talent or fingers for virtuosity.
This experience stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the biomechanics of speed. The pervasive myth is that fast playing is merely ‘slow playing sped up’. The scientific reality is that high-velocity motion is often a completely different motor programme. An analogy from locomotion is instructive: a horse’s gallop is not a sped-up walk; it is a different gait, a completely distinct pattern of limb coordination designed for speed. Similarly, the physical movements required to play a scale on the piano rapidly—the subtle rotations of the forearm, the alignment of the arm and hand, the grouping of notes into single impulses—are biomechanically different from the deliberate, finger-by-finger movements one might use at a slow tempo.
At a slow speed, almost any physical approach can work. One can use inefficient fingerings or introduce unnecessary tension, and still manage to play the correct notes. However, as the time between notes shrinks to milliseconds, these inefficiencies become catastrophic. There is no longer time for the brain to consciously direct each finger; the movements must be automated, streamlined, and supremely efficient. The ‘speed wall’ is not a failure of the student’s physical capacity, but a failure of their method. It is the predictable breakdown that occurs when one tries to force a ‘walking’ motor programme to ‘gallop’. Slow practice is indispensable for learning the ‘map’—the correct notes, rhythms, and musical details. But we need a different set of tools to build the high-performance ‘vehicle’ needed to navigate that map at high speed.
In the table below, I provide a comparative overview, synthesising the distinct roles and characteristics of slow and fast practice. By framing them not as opposites, but as two essential and complementary phases of a complete learning cycle, we can begin to understand how neither on its own is sufficient for us to achieve truly reliable, sustainable virtuosity.
| Slow Practice | Fast Practice | |
| Primary Goal | Encoding & Accuracy: Learning the correct notes, rhythms, fingerings, and musical details with zero error. Building the ‘map’. | Optimisation & Automation: Training high-speed reflexes, building stamina, and achieving subconscious control for performance. Building the ‘vehicle’. |
| Neurological Process | Myelination of Correct Pathways: Deliberately forming and strengthening high-fidelity neural circuits for precise execution. Low cognitive load. | Schema Formation & Retrieval: Testing and refining motor programmes under pressure. Forging adaptability through variability. High cognitive load. |
| Physical Focus | Hyper-Awareness & Tension Release: Conscious control of every movement. Identifying and eliminating unnecessary muscular effort. | Efficiency of Motion & Reflex: Developing a different ‘motor gait’. Training coordinated, ballistic movements and rapid tension-release cycles. |
| Key Tools & Methods | Ultra-slow practice, hands-separate work, metronome set to subdivisions, mindful listening, deliberate practice. | Speed bursts, chaining, rhythmic variations, alternating tempos, mental rehearsal, variability of practice. |
| Primary Danger | Mindlessness & Loss of Context: Practising mechanically without musical intention or losing the sense of the larger phrase. | Ingraining Errors & Injury: Myelinating mistakes through sloppy repetition; creating chronic tension leading to RSI. |
| Psychological State | Mindful & Analytical: Deep concentration, evaluation, and problem-solving. A meditative and deliberate state. | Trust & Flow: Letting go of conscious control, relying on automated skills. A state of complete absorption and confidence. |
The High-Speed Toolkit: Advanced Strategies for Building Controlled Velocity
To break through the speed wall, pianists must shift from a linear, incremental approach to a set of dynamic strategies designed specifically to teach the nervous system the language of velocity. These techniques often feel counter-intuitive because they disrupt comfortable repetition, introducing targeted challenges that force the brain and body to discover more efficient motor solutions. They are forms of ‘desirable difficulty’ that lead to deeper, more flexible, and ultimately faster skill acquisition.
Speed Bursts and Chaining
Instead of trying to play a long passage fast, this technique focuses on playing very small ‘chunks’—as few as two to five notes—at or even above the final target tempo. This micro-practice allows the nervous system to solve the biomechanical problem of speed for a tiny segment without being overwhelmed by cognitive load or physical fatigue. The goal is to execute this small burst perfectly, with relaxation and control. Once a burst is mastered, the next step is ‘chaining’. The pianist links the first mastered burst to a new, tiny burst, practising the transition until it is seamless. The chain is gradually lengthened, one link at a time, building stamina and fluency at full speed. This method builds the reflexes for fast playing from the inside out, ensuring that every component of a passage is secure at tempo before the whole is assembled.
Rhythmic Variation
Practising a passage of even notes (e.g., sixteenth notes) with different rhythmic patterns is a time-honoured technique, particularly for challenging repertoire. Its effectiveness goes beyond mere ‘finger strengthening’. By imposing a new rhythm, the pianist forces their brain to regroup the notes in novel ways, breaking up motor-pattern monotony and building neural flexibility. A more advanced and effective application involves using a long, paused anchor note followed by a quick, light burst of ‘grace-notes’ leading to the next anchor note. This method explicitly trains the crucial cycle of tension and release: a moment of focused energy for the burst, followed by an immediate and conscious release on the paused note. This teaches the hand to avoid the cumulative tension that is the primary enemy of speed.
Alternating Tempos
This ‘crazy wildcard’ approach involves jumping directly between a slow, controlled tempo and a super-fast, ‘disaster’ tempo where the passage is likely to fall apart. The logic behind this seemingly chaotic method is rooted in how the subconscious brain learns. The messy, high-speed attempts provide the nervous system with raw data about the demands of velocity. The subsequent return to a slow tempo gives the brain the processing time to analyze that data and subconsciously discover more efficient movement strategies without the pianist’s conscious intervention. The real learning often happens during the rest and sleep between practice sessions, as the brain consolidates these new motor programmes. This method accelerates the body’s intuitive discovery of the correct ‘gait’ for speed.
Variability of Practice (VOP)
The effectiveness of techniques like rhythmic variation and alternating tempos is supported by a core principle of motor learning science: Variability of Practice (VOP). Research has shown that practising a skill with slight variations (e.g., different tempos, dynamics, or similar but not identical passages) leads to the formation of a more robust and adaptable motor schema. A schema is an abstract, generalised rule for a class of movements, rather than a single, rigid motor programme. A pianist who has only ever practised a scale at one fixed tempo has a weak schema. A pianist who has practised it with varied rhythms, accents, and tempos has a much stronger, more flexible schema that they can readily adapt to the demands of a performance. This approach builds a technique that is not brittle, but resilient and transferable. (See, for instance, this article on VOP.)
Mental Practice
One of the most powerful yet underutilized tools for developing speed is mental practice. Legends like Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz were known to rely heavily on it. Neuroimaging studies have confirmed their intuition: vividly imagining the act of playing activates the same neural regions as physical practice. This allows a pianist to rehearse a piece at full tempo in their mind, solving fingering problems, coordinating movements, and reinforcing memory, all without physical fatigue or the risk of ingraining tension. It is a highly focused, deliberate activity that involves hearing the music, feeling the keys, and seeing the score internally. For mastering speed, it allows for countless repetitions of a difficult passage, solidifying the neural blueprint for high-velocity execution before the hands even touch the keyboard.
The Dangers of the Fast Lane: How to Avoid Ingraining Errors and Injuries
While specific fast-practice techniques are essential for building velocity, applying them improperly or prematurely can be profoundly detrimental, leading to ingrained errors, poor musical habits, and even career-threatening injuries. The pursuit of speed without a foundation of control is a dangerous endeavour.
Practising Mistakes: High-Speed Error Reinforcement
The principle of myelination, which makes slow, accurate practice so effective, becomes a liability during sloppy fast practice. When a pianist attempts a passage at a speed beyond their control, mistakes become frequent. Each incorrect repetition sends a signal to the brain to myelinate the pathway for that error. The student is not just making mistakes; they are actively building a fast, efficient, and durable neurological superstructure for them. This leads to the frustrating experience of a passage that is ‘consistently inconsistent’, where errors seem random but are in fact the product of competing, well-rehearsed neural pathways. The adage ‘Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent’ is a stark warning. The goal should be, as many teachers say, ‘Don’t play it until you get it right; play it until you can’t get it wrong’.
Ingraining Hesitation and Unevenness
Forcing speed before a passage is secure leads to common performance flaws. These flaws are actually just practised habits. The slight hesitation before a difficult run, or the unconscious slowing down for a tricky leap, becomes part of the learned motor programme. The brain learns to anticipate the difficulty and builds in a ‘safety’ pause. In performance, these interruptions shatter the musical line and rhythmic drive, signalling to the listener a fundamental lack of command. These habits, once ingrained, are notoriously difficult to eradicate because they are linked to the very structure of how the piece was learned.
The Spectre of Injury
The most serious danger of improper fast practice is physical injury. When a pianist tries to play faster than their current technique allows, the body’s response is to recruit more muscles and increase tension in an attempt to force control. This is the opposite of relaxation and efficiency, which are required for speed. This cycle of tension can lead to debilitating inflammatory conditions like tendonitis, tenosynovitis, and other repetitive strain injuries (RSI) that can cause chronic pain and sideline a musician for months or even permanently.
Pain is not a sign of progress; it is the body’s unambiguous signal that the movements being used are biomechanically unsound and unsustainable. The ‘no pain, no gain’ philosophy of athletics is dangerously misplaced in music. We must treat an inability to play a passage cleanly and without tension at speed as a diagnostic sign. It reveals a fundamental flaw in the underlying physical technique—poor wrist alignment, a lack of forearm rotation, excessive finger stretching, or static tension. The solution is not to push through the pain, but to return to a slow, analytical practice tempo to re-tool the physical movements and eliminate the root cause of the strain. Ignoring this warning is like revving a car’s engine to fix a flat tire; it only risks catastrophic failure.
The Psychology of Speed: From Panic to Flow
Playing fast is as much a mental challenge as it is a physical one. The techniques used to build velocity are not just training the hands; they are conditioning the mind for the unique psychological state required for high-speed performance.
Cognitive Chunking for Speed
At high velocity, the conscious brain is physiologically incapable of processing every single note in real time. To cope, it must think in larger patterns, or ‘chunks’. A virtuoso does not think ‘C-E-G-C-E-G’; they think ‘C major arpeggio’ as a single, holistic gesture. The practice techniques of grouping notes with rhythmic variations and building passages with chaining are not just physical exercises; they are cognitive training programmes that teach the brain to see and process the music in these larger, more efficient chunks. This reduces the perceived complexity of a passage and frees up mental bandwidth.
The Flow State
The optimal psychological state for any high-performance activity is what psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi termed ‘flow’—a state of complete absorption where the challenge of the task is perfectly matched to the skill of the performer. In this state, action and awareness merge, the sense of time becomes distorted, and the performance feels effortless. If a pianist attempts a piece at a tempo that far exceeds their technical security, the challenge outweighs their skill, and the result is not flow, but anxiety and frustration. The systematic speed-building methods I’ve discussed are designed to raise the pianist’s skill level methodically so that the performance tempo falls within this ‘flow channel’.
The feeling of ‘panic’ that often accompanies playing fast is the conscious brain’s reaction to realising it can no longer keep up with the fingers. It tries to intervene and micromanage a process that must be automatic, and this very intervention disrupts the subconscious motor programme, causing more errors and escalating the panic. The entire purpose of the advanced practice toolkit is to build a subconscious motor programme so reliable that the conscious mind learns to trust it and let go. This trust is forged in the practice room. By mastering small bursts at speed, the subconscious system proves its competence to the conscious mind. Over time, the conscious brain learns it can cede control of the mechanics and shift its focus to higher-level artistic direction. This is the essence of a confident, flowing performance.
The Grand Synthesis—Uniting Slowness and Speed
The debate between practising slow and practicing fast presents a false dichotomy. The two are not opposing methodologies but deeply synergistic and equally indispensable phases of a complete and intelligent learning cycle. To neglect either one is to leave the process of mastery incomplete.
Slow practice is the phase of encoding and construction. It is the meticulous, architectural work where the accurate neural map is drawn, a tension-free and efficient physical technique is forged, and deep musicality is embedded into every gesture with hyper-aware concentration. It is the foundation upon which everything else is built.
Fast practice is the phase of retrieval and optimisation. It is where the nervous system is trained to navigate that map using a different, high-efficiency motor gait. It is where reflexes are sharpened, stamina is built, and the entire system is stress-tested until it can perform automatically and subconsciously.
An effective analogy is the process of building and racing a high-performance car. Slow practice is the meticulous design, engineering, and assembly that takes place in the workshop. Every component is perfectly crafted and fitted, every system checked and double-checked for flawless operation. Fast practice is the track testing. The car is pushed to its limits in short, controlled bursts to see how it handles under pressure. Its weaknesses are identified, and it is then taken back to the workshop—back to slow, analytical practice—for precise adjustments and refinements. One cannot build a winning car on the racetrack, but one cannot win a race by staying in the workshop. Both environments are essential to the final victory.
By understanding the distinct but complementary roles of these two practice modes, students and teachers can move beyond frustrating plateaus and inefficient habits. By embracing an holistic approach that honours both the microscopic precision of slow work and the unique biomechanical and psychological demands of speed, we can unlock a more efficient path to mastery, transforming our practice from a source of struggle into a journey of discovery, control, and profound artistic expression.
