Practice like a pro

By Ausra Motuzaite-Pinkeviciene (get free updates of new posts here)​​​​​

How to clean up your organ piece so that inner voices would sound clearly?

The other day one of my students played for me Adagio by Albrechtsberger.

When she played the inner voices didn't sound well.

I suggested to practice maybe a couple of lines at a time and playing only solo parts at first.

This worked. This Adagio has 3 manual parts and this fragment started sounding much better. We even didn't repeat each step multiple times. Just one time was enough to make a difference.

Then she played two part combinations for me in this fragment. Not surprisingly, the places where the messiness in articulation was present originally, now this fragment was almost without any mistakes.

After that she was ready to take on all 3 parts together.

I asked her how would she feel to be able to play it like that the entire piece?

"Of course, this would be amazing", she said. "It would move me to the next level".

But what would it take to be so meticulously precise with her practice and repeat each step with a laser-focused intent?

She said, "It's a choice - to start practicing like a pro".