🧠 You're practicing wrong (and so was I)

Hey music makers!

Last week, I told you I cracked a tooth from stress-clenching about music. (I'm finally getting it fixed tomorrow.) I'd been chasing placements, deals, industry milestones, and my body was breaking down from the pressure.

I realized I'd lost my way. Music used to be my escape, my curiosity, my joy. Somewhere along the line, it became a source of shame.

So I made a decision: I'm releasing my expectations, recovering my 19-year-old creative spirit, and returning to curiosity.

And part of that transformation is relearning how to practice.

Because the way you practice shapes your relationship with music. Rush through it and chase speed? You reinforce the pressure.

But when you slow down, break things into chunks, and practice with intention. You remember why you fell in love with this.

Early in my bass journey, I learned this lesson through a James Jamerson bassline.

If you know Jamerson, you know he's a legend, one of the most influential bass players in Motown history. His lines are full of 16th note syncopations, ghost notes, jazz vocabulary, and constant movement across the fretboard.

For a beginner? It was a heavy lift.

I could play bits and pieces, but I couldn't string together a decent performance. My fingers couldn't keep up. The syncopations didn't feel natural. I was rushing through it, hoping willpower would make it click.

It didn't.

So I got creative: I printed the sheet music, cut it into 2-bar strips, and practiced tiny sections in random order. I slowed it down to the point where it didn't sound like music. I brought in a metronome at 50 BPM and crawled through each phrase with complete focus.

And it worked.

It sounds obvious, but most of us skip right past it: the fastest way to master something hard is to practice it slowly and break it into chunks.

This week, I want to show you how to apply that same method to songs, using a technique that legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman teaches his students and that world-class musicians have used for decades.

Why it works: HAIM uses what music educator Jimmy Kachulis calls "power progressions" which are flexible patterns that create strong harmonic direction and emotional pull across genres.

Both phrases reorder the classic I-vi-ii-V power progression for variety.

Phrase 1 swaps V for IV: ii-IV-vi-I creates a gentler approach to the tonic.

Phrase 2 restores the V and shifts vi to the second position. The melodic bass movement comes from first inversions on three chords (including a brief I⁶-vii⁶-I walkdown).

On the second cycle, they omit the final I, ending on V to push into the prechorus.

Learn these in Roman numerals and you can transpose them to any key.

💡 Pro Tip: Knowing the chords isn't the same as playing them smoothly.

You might get through it at full tempo, but if your fingers stumble and transitions feel choppy, you're not refining it.

That's where slow practice + chunking comes in.

Legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman teaches this to all his students:

"If you practice something slowly, you forget it slowly. If you practice something fast, you forget it fast."

Why? Because when you practice slowly, you're building precision. You're reinforcing the correct movement, the correct fingering, the correct transitions over and over, without error.

When you practice fast (before you're ready), you're ingraining mistakes. Your brain locks in the fumbles, the hesitations, the sloppy transitions. And now you have to unlearn those mistakes before you can progress.

As Daniel Coyle writes in The Little Book of Talent: "Slow practice works like a magnifying glass: it lets you sense your errors more clearly, and thus fix them."

Ben Hogan, considered to have one of the most technically sound golf swings in history, routinely practiced so slowly that when he finally contacted the ball, it moved about an inch.

The Spartak Tennis Club teaches students to swing in such slow motion they resemble ballet dancers.

And at the Septien School of Contemporary Music, performers learn new songs by singing one slow note at a time.

But slow practice alone isn't enough.

You also need to break the progression into chunks: small, manageable pieces you master individually before combining.

This is exactly what Perlman teaches: work on short passages, refine each segment, then connect them. Modern learning science calls this "chunking." He learned it from his mentor Dorothy DeLay, who studied under Ivan Galamian, creating a direct lineage of teaching philosophy.

Galamian, the legendary pedagogue who trained Perlman and many other professionals at Curtis and Juilliard, built his entire method around this principle.

His core belief: every physical motion must be guided by mental intention. Practice isn't mindless repetition. It's deliberate refinement.

Here's what he taught:

Every skill is built from chunks. Like letters forming words, then sentences, small pieces combine to create something complex and beautiful.

At Meadowmount, the school Galamian founded in 1944, students practiced excerpts in random order, mastering each segment before reassembling the whole. As one instructor put it: "Students aren't playing on autopilot, they're thinking.

And that's the key: chunking + slow practice + mental focus = mastery.

When I cut that Jamerson bassline into strips and practiced each section slowly, I wasn't just learning notes. I was developing a 16th note syncopated feel that didn't exist in my musical vocabulary yet. I was training my fingers to move across the fretboard with intention. I was building the kind of precision that only comes from slowing down.

The fastest way to master something is to slow down.

It sounds counterintuitive. But when you practice with intention by breaking things into chunks, refining each piece, and staying in the sweet spot, you build skills that stick.

That's how James Jamerson's bass line finally clicked for me. That's how Perlman's students become legends. And that's how you'll turn progressions from something you "kind of know" into something you truly own.

Start slow. Stay focused. Let the mastery come.