Practicing backwards!

Have you ever noticed how, when you’re learning a piece of music, all goes well for, say, the first page, and perhaps part of the second, but soon after that things deteriorate.  The later bits of a piece of music don’t seem to improve quite like the earlier bits, and frustratingly, the piece seems to peter out towards the end.  Or perhaps you do find yourself eventually getting to the end….but only after a grim battle.  It’s enough to put you off learning any pieces more than a couple of pages long!

But then..think about it. What do you normally do when you hit upon a tricky bit of the piece you’re learning?  Do you go back to the beginning, or at least to a point in the piece where you feel confident enough to start on, and then take a “run up” ….only to find yourself attempting to wade through the mire of the trickier, later bit and getting stuck in the mud all over again? So what then – yet another “run up” and ….guess what?

Here’s a technique that can help to even up your performance over the course of a piece. It’s a tip received gratefully from my piano teacher during my MA years, and it’s so effective that I now pass it on to any pupils suffering from the above-described troubles!

It may sound strange, but try practicing backwards!  Here’s how:

1. Slowly play the piece through, working out which fingers should be where at the start of every bar (if it’s not already printed on the page).  This is a bit fiddly, but you’ll be glad you did it, when it comes to stage 2. This stage is probably enough for the first practice session.
2. Start your next practice session with the very last bar – even if it’s just a single chord.  Make sure you follow the fingering you carefully worked out in your last session. Don’t worry about any other bar, just play this one until you can end confidently.  Then move onto the bar before, learn that, and then play both bars in the correct order.
3. Next, move to the third bar from the end.  Play it confidently, see if you can run it into the penultimate bar (which should be more familiar), and then into the last bar (which should be easy by now).
4. Keep proceeding backwards bar by bar, playing from the new bar right to the end. Each time, don’t be tempted to move back another bar, until you are confidently playing from whatever bar you are on, right to the end.
5. PLAY SLOWLY. WHILE YOU ARE IN THE LEARNING STAGE, LET YOUR BRAIN GO AHEAD OF YOUR HANDS, NOT THE OTHER WAY ROUND!

This technique has a number of advantages:

1. Instead of going from the known into the unknown, with all the frustrating feeling of entanglement and stuckness that can occur, you will be going from the “getting to know” into the “gradually more known”, and landing finally at the “well known”.   Instead of moving from confident playing to ever more hesitant playing, you move from hesitant but improving playing into confident playing. 
2. Being able to get to the end with increasingly confident playing has a very positive effect on self confidence and trusting your own ability to complete something.
3. At a later stage, when you know the piece fully, you will automatically be playing it from the beginning anyway, so your performance of the “front end” of the piece will naturally catch up with the “back end” , creating a more even performance all through.
4. If you get lost or make an error in the piece, you will find it easier to pick up the threads from any bar that you choose. That’s because you’ve been starting from every single bar anyway, as you've been learning.

This is an unusual way to practice, and doesn’t suit everyone. However, if you do find yourself avoiding longer or more challenging pieces because you seem to lose steam part way, try experimenting with this technique, and see whether you find it helpful.