Everyone has problems rushing. In life and in music. Rushing is what makes a passage not sound smooth as glass. It is what makes the fingers and tongue get out of sync with each other in a double tonguing passage. There are times where you don’t even know that you are rushing until you play with the piano and then realize that you have been rushing all the time but didn’t know it!
Rushing is something to be conquered in order for a solo to sound spectacular with runs that glisten with ease. You can conquer this beast but it takes effort and sometime blood sweat and tears.
Your metronome is your best friend. When it comes to rushing. It is going to hold that beat for you and make sure that you are steady. There are very few of us that have such an internal beat that you can keep that beat steady no matter what your fingers are doing. Generally, we change the beat to fit the fingers. Turning the metronome on ensures that your beat isn’t going to waver. Find a beat that allows you to play the run or passage perfectly without rushing. If you can play it perfectly without rushing that’s where you start.
We definitely have fingers that the muscles are really responsive and other ones where the muscles are not as responsive. When we work on a passage, what we’re really doing is teaching all those muscles to work equally. We need to make them all be even and be at our command rather than them doing their own thing, which is what’s happening when they’re rushing.
After that tempo is learned I will advance the metronome to stretch my fingers but not crash and burn. You can use the same rhythm changes at this tempo. I also like to switch up the articulation. Tonguing (or double tonguing) is my favorite thing to do with fast passages. I feel that putting a tongue on each note helps register that note in my brain. But, I will use every articulation I know for the passage.
When I use this method of muscle training, what happens is that my eyes see different things than they saw the first dozen times I practiced it. Our eyes don’t see and our brain doesn’t register all those notes in a passage. When you articulate differently, you make your fingers and your eyes see something they didn’t know before and therefore you learn it better and you learn it stronger.
Sometimes a rushed passage is just a matter of missing a note that was tucked inside.
The next step is to change the rhythm. It can be crazy to change the rhythm but it is quite effective. If you take a group of 16th notes and make them into triplets that can throw your whole idea of the passage into something brand new. Triplets can become duplets. Irregular groupings can turn into regular groupings of 2/3/4’s. Try it!
Another fun thing to try is to play the passage forward and backward. Begin with whatever articulation or rhythm you are using and once you get to the end of the run turn around and play it backwards. I’m not sure what makes this work but it does. Once again it might be because your brain registers notes that it didn’t see before. If you haven’t done it before, it can get a bit tricky the first time especially because you don’t see the accidentals ahead of time.
When you are changing articulation and rhythm don’t get caught up with the fact that they don’t always work beautifully because of repeated notes or rests. Adapt the passage to what you are doing it will still work. When I’ve was doing, Chant de Linos by Jolivet, I remember working on some of these really difficult passages with these runs that didn’t fit in my fingers. They don’t fit into our usual conception of scales and arpeggios. They were made up of skips and intervals that I wasn’t used to playing. Using this method to practice definitely made me see notes that I hadn’t comprehended initially. It saved my hide when it came to learning this piece.
After you’ve been doing it with that tempo, make your metronome go a little bit faster and repeat everything you’ve done so far. It’s a slow way of getting your passage learned, but it’s the strongest way I know to get even, clear passages without rushing. As I always say, slow gets you faster, faster. That’s my motto! It works and it works every. single. time. There’s not a single time where this method doesn’t work.
Check out your passages, see where you’re rushing. Take out your metronome, use different articulations and different rhythms, but always make sure you’re at a tempo that you can achieve this and then move it a little bit faster.
Have fun working on your passages where you’re rushing and get them to not rush.
DoctorFlute
Watch my video of this: FluteTips 96 Are You Rushing Here’s How to Fix it
