No Progress in speed playing

[aviator_pl]

Hello I’m playing CBA and i cannot play fast especially with potrato/staccato articulation (like for baroque music), when I am trying to play fast, first few notes are ok but later my fingers don’t want to play or they don’t hold the articulation… do you have any advice, any excercises? Thank you for the help

 

[debra]

Exercise slowly, with the right articulation, and gradually work your way up. It's especially important to control that your fingers keep making really small moves up and down. If you lift a finger higher than needed it needs to travel a larger distance and that will slow you down.

 

[murathan]

You can study scales and Hanon staccato.

 

[OuijaBoard]

"Speed Kills!" Let this be your motto. Practice slowly at a speed you can phrase and articulate in your sleep. Then move it one notch up on the metronome. Carefully isolate the spots where you run into problems. Next, you must incisively identify the etiology of the problem--it may be fingering, it may be something else. Then practice the problematic sections slowly until you can play them to speed with the sections that work fine. Always return to play the entire piece back at the slower speed you already can phrase and articulate in your sleep. Rinse, repeat.

One thought: With CBA, for single-note melody-line passages, which often occur in Baroque and Classical-era music, I always operate from the three outer rows. I use them as the home/default position, and use them almost exclusively for single-note melody-lines. I branch to the fourth or fifth row only for ornaments, double-stops, and chords.

This is by no means the sole "correct" approach. It is one approach that works for many, but other players use different home positions across the five rows depending on the key or other factors. I'm just throwing that out there, because my own speed and facility improved when I made the outer three rows my home/default for single-note melody line runs. YMMV, of course.

 

[JerryPH]

Hello I’m playing CBA and i cannot play fast especially with potrato/staccato articulation (like for baroque music), when I am trying to play fast, first few notes are ok but later my fingers don’t want to play or they don’t hold the articulation… do you have any advice, any excercises? Thank you for the help

OK, so what are you doing to increase the speed?
If you are having challenges playing something fast, I can pretty much guarantee to you that you will have challenges playing all similar items with the same level of difficulty.

You say that your first few notes are OK but then it falls off fast. So flexibility is not the issue, endurance is. Have you ever tried going to the gym? Were you able to dead lift 200 pounds on your first try? 98% of the HEALTHY population could never do it, but of those 98%, a very high percentage COULD... IF THEY PRACTICED.

Want to see nice improvements in 30 days??
Do exercises that are of similar "style", meaning are they arpeggios or scales or whatever... at the end of your practice sessions, for at least 20 minutes after EVERY practice, at least once a day 5 days a week (or whatever the number of days you play per week), do what I outline below. Use a metronome so you can see your progress. No metronome? Google online free metronome on your computer and use that.

The method
Do each exercise 3 times slowly use the metronome, this is a small warm-up
Increase the mentronome speed by 5 beats per minute and repeat 3 the exercise at this speed
Keep increasing the speed by 5 BPM until you hit your wall.
Once you hit your wall, reduce the speed by 5 beats per minute and repeat 10 times in a row without stopping and without errors. If you make an error, start over and do 10 times in a row without errors.

If you can get through this, you will experience fatigue and feel your fingers very tired, possibly some cramping in the forearm.

This was one of the things that I did pretty much every day at the end of all my practices when I was a kid, but I would take it to the point of failure and my forearms were burning and my fingers felt like 20 pounds each.

Want to develop endurance? Push yourself to the point of discomfort in every practice. I guarantee you will see significant measurable improvements on day 30 compared to what you started at on day 1.

How did Arnold Schwarzennegar put it? No pain... no gain.

BIG NOTE: Age and physical capabilities define your limits. A 15 year old will be able to play a lot faster and longer than an 80 year old, but all players doing this can and will benefit from this style of dicipline.

 

[aviator_pl]

Thank you for replies! I’m playing in slow tempo with loose hand, trying to hit buttons to the end with selective articulations like portato.

 

[JeffJetton]

Not a classical player by any stretch, but I do agree that the key to playing fast is, fundamentally, practicing slowly.

Here's a trick that I've probably posted here before. I think I got it from Itzhak Perlman's "Masterclass" course: For passages that are a series of equal notes, like a run of 8th or 16th notes, practice them with exaggerated alternating long and short notes. After doing long-short for a few repetitions, switch to short-long.

I think it works because you're playing both slowly and quickly at the same time. The exaggerated long notes give your brain time to catch up and think about the next move (and then actually *pay attention* to that move when you do it). But the very short notes give you training in moving your small muscles quickly, but with control, and not going off-the-rails like an extended run of quick notes might.

 

[Ffingers]

You can study scales and Hanon staccato.

On a CBA? (Chromatic Button Accordion)
One of the great advantages of the CBA keyboard is the freedom from rigid scale patterns.

 

[JerryPH]

On a CBA? (Chromatic Button Accordion)
One of the great advantages of the CBA keyboard is the freedom from rigid scale patterns.

Most definitely! Anything thing that helps you practice patterns that you will use in the songs you play cannot hurt.