The above title probably makes little sense upon first glance, but it’s the most succinct way to summarize the following. As you know, practicing is Repeating Sections Correctly. Let’s call them, R, S, and C for brevity’s sake. Think of them as not as independent variables to be set without regard for each other, but rather as dependent variables that are limited and defined by one another.
Inverse correlation principles:
- Tempo is inverse to section size
- Tempo is inverse to correctness
- Repetitions are inverse to section size
- Repetitions are inverse to tempo
- Correctness is inverse to tempo.
- Correctness is inverse to section size.
- Correctness is inverse to repetitions.
For the above principles, inverse means that as one variable increases, the opposite variable must decrease to maintain quality.
The number of repetitions you practice for any given section are dependent on 2 other factors: the size of the section, and the tempo of the section. As the size of the section increases, the number of repetitions decreases. The inverse is also true. As the size of a section decreases, the number of repetitions can increase.
Concurrent to the section size and repetition quantity relationship is also relationship to tempo vs section size. As the size of a section increases, we must slow down in order to keep things correct. Similarly, with smaller sections, we can afford to increase the tempo while still playing correctly. Finally, as you increase a section size massively and increase the tempo to a very high speed, correctness will almost always suffer some losses. If you’re playing a piece at full tempo that’s several minutes long, it’s almost inevitable that an extra note will be pressed or the timing of a note will be off by a bit. Thus, when playing an entire piece of music while approaching a performance or final tempo, it is impossible to demand the same level of absolute perfection that we expect when working on a very small, very slow section.