Keeping Rhythm when Messing Up

[hearty patio]

Many pieces I play I often mess up a couple of times, which is normal for my skill level, but I often completely forget what I’m doing and have to stop or even go back to the beginning of a part even from a small mistake. What’s the best way for me to learn how to keep a good tempo after messing up?

[lofty veldt]

start from random spots in the music and learn to jump back in and recover

ie "checkpoints"

[peak tide]

yeah i was gonna say "find some checkpoints"

could be the start of the phrase or of a section

If you want to practice different spots at once, I have a method

Find 3 or 4 hard places (just a few bars or seconds at best) and play them in random order, without too much of a stop

Tempo doesnt matter but you want to have the same one for all

And so you do repetitions in random orders

[hearty patio]

Alr. I was before brute forcing it and trying to get to the end of a piece with a metronome, but I could tell that wasn’t the best method at all XD

[peak tide]

This helps practicing tough spots, but it also gives a foresight on how you would do if you played the piece from beginning to end

And it's scientifically proven to be a great long-term learning method

And in the beginning, it's completely normal to fail a lot

But after a few days, maybe a week, of doing this regularly, you're gonna start knowing your stuff much better than if you were just repeating one single spot

[peak tide]

Unless you have a recital or smt very soon, I don't recommend playing the whole thing while bruteforcing through mistakes

If you do that, you're practicing mistakes

[hearty patio]

Yea I figured it wasn’t gonna get me far

[lofty veldt]

rule of 3 I wished I learned years ago:

when fixing mistakes: play correctly 3 times, and at 3 tempos, for 3 days

[peak tide]

not sure that works well

try my method next time tho

when i was taught this method, i was given an example

if your brain listens to a funny joke, it's gonna laugh the first time, right?

and the second time, and the third maybe

but by the fourth time, it slowly gets bored of it

So my method instead varies the repetition and helps the brain to "not get bored"