If You Can’t Play It Slow, You Can’t Play It Fast

This is the first in a series of videos designed to help you help your student get the most out of their music lessons!

At Otto Percussion Studio we specialize in Drum and Percussion lessons for all ages and abilities. Give us a call or text at 248 783 6520 or send an email to otto@ottopercussion.com to set up lessons. If you’re local to Lake Orion, Rochester, Troy or the surrounding areas of North Oakland County, MI you can come directly to the studio. If not, we can set up lessons over the great series of tubes known as the internet!

Video Transcript

Hi Facebook, Jeremy Otto from Otto Percussion Studio here. Welcome to the second video in my series designed to help parents help their children get more out of their music lessons. 
If you’ve ever waited for a student at my studio then you’ve overheard me saying ‘If you can’t play it slow, you can’t play it fast.’ Accuracy is so much more important than speed when you’re learning a new pattern and speed will come naturally once accuracy takes hold. It stands to reason then that the first step toward improving a difficult passage is to slow it down. 

Doing this can be surprisingly harder than it seems. Often when I ask a student to slow down they will start again at the exact same tempo, thinking that they have slowed down. The key is slowing down to a level that feels like it is absurdly too slow. It has to be so slow that the student has to pay attention to each individual note as opposed to grouping notes together. Music is a language and this is akin to coming up to hard word when reading and having to sound it out, break it apart into syllables to get it right. The difference is that rhythm is about how the length of each note relates to each other, and thus you have to slow down the entire thing, even the parts that you can already do, and that’s why it feels soooo slow. But it’s the guaranteed way to fix it.

So, if your student is struggling with a part, have them slow it down, and make sure they drop it so slow that they think its too slow. Once they get it, speeding it up will happen with ease 
Thanks for watching. If you have any questions about how slow your student should be working on a particular passage please send me a message or of course we can talk about it at lessons. If you haven’t already please ‘like’ the page and maybe share this video with others that might find it helpful. Thanks again, Lets hit it.