Mental practice for the win! Specific attentive mental focus on the exact motions. I’m not good at it yet, and it doesn’t instantly solve every problem and make me able to play my Chopin really fast and perfectly, but it helps. It is easy to delude yourself that you are better at it than you are, but it is incredible to analyze your own brain patterns for deficiencies. Easy to hear when you play a wrong note. Harder to recognize when you think a wrong note, or gloss over a specific finger on a specific note and how that feels.
SOS does kind of mean something. Focus stamina. That has been something that the running has really taught me. If my plan says 5 miles, I run until my watch beeps at mile 5. If my plan says slow practice on the Brahms for 25 minutes and then 25 minutes of mental practice, I set up my alarms on my phone and go to it until the alarms beep. I check my watch when I run, and I do always have it beep at me about my pace, and I did check the time once during my 25 minute mental practice session once (there were 3 minutes left). I wonder if I should work towards never checking.
It’s also interesting to think about what types of practice are harder or easier to focus on. I’m very good at focused analysis. A number of times this week when I had just specified “slow practice” I really drifted away from a slow practice of the exact motions (my intent) to a theoretical analysis of the piece. Now, that is extremely helpful to me. I have very strong physio-mental images of harmony because of my jazz background, so if I know that measure 52 is a B minor chord and that’s the vi going to a V65 of IV in measure 53, my hands find it really well.
I want to focus in the coming week on doing my work at the earliest feasible time every day.