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How To Practice Playing without Thinking

Have you ever watched a really good ragtime pianist fly through a difficult-looking piece of music and wondered how their hands know what to do? It's like their hands are pre-programmed machines, and their brains aren't having to do any work at all; the hands just know where to go. How do they do that?

Practice Doing Something Else

Jonny May suggests forcing yourself to do other things while practicing. This is one way of literally training your hands to play the right notes, independent of your conscious mind. He suggests having a conversation with someone while you play, saying that he got a lot of this kind of practice while at Disney Land, since people were always interrupting him to ask directions.

He also suggests talking to yourself, which I'm quite good at doing it (albeit not while playing the piano).

 Another suggestion is to read a book while you play. I tried this a few times and could do it (sort of), and then I realized he meant to read a book aloud. I tried that and absolutely could not do it.

So I'm trying the talking-to-myself route.

Reciting: Easier than Conversation

It's too hard for me to come up with interesting subjects, so I've decided to recite things. At first I tried poems and Bible verses, but that was too hard. So I've settled on multiplication tables.

To be honest, those are too hard, too ... but they're doable. And I can see improvement as I progress from the 1s to the 6s (below) to the 9s, and so on.

If I go through a passage of "Bare Necessities" twelve times (multiplying by 1s, 2s, 3s, etc., up to 12), then, when I finally play it without talking or thinking about math ... my hands know what to do!

And when I speed up? My hands know what to do!

I won't say it's a magic pill because I do reach a speed where my hands can't keep up with the metronome, but I'll get there. Overall, though, it has really helped for me to start doing this!

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