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Nothing is not an error. The physical connections between two fingers are no more different after a pause than those that occur within differing tempos. There is no reason why this should cause a problem than there is reason to believe that a pianist would only be capable of executing music at one specific tempo, or that they would be incapable of adapting to take time over a passage in order to follow a singer. The issue is merely to redress the balance of how accurate linking movements relate to each other. This must be done at once, to prevent serious problems, but there is no inherent inaccuracy, if the player is fully aware of what is going on. Conversely, when you play a wrong note, you retain an INACCURATE physical memory in the brain- in the sense that you used entirely the wrong finger or felt a completely incorrect distance in the hand. Playing incorrectly is an error of the most literal kind that bears no relation to stopping once to feel the connection between two notes.

Many great pianists use practise methods that involve habitually pausing to listen to the sound production and balance. It causes no problems because there is no incorrect movement. It merely means that the next part of the chain has yet to be added. You simply need to ensure that it DOES get added at the first opportunity where you can be certain will be connected accurately. Once you know what to add you get the experience of connecting the two correct fingers (a movement that is still the same as that required, regardless of whether you have taken time), you go back and get it right what actually equates to FIRST TIME. Play a wrong note and you have added an incorrect link to the chain. When you go back, you have literally zero experience of how to add the correct link and you also have the fact that your hands are going to want to do the same again. Very dangerous. This is where the bad programming sets in.

Pausing is never to be recommended. However, if it's a toss-up between guessing the next note and being sure of it, a pause wins every time. The only issue is whether the student goes back to correct it. They should do so at once, otherwise pausing can end up a habitual flaw. Assuming they do correct it, they have far less work on their hands than the student who panics and plays a random note but feels he has to keep going. There is science to back this up. The brain retains the knowledge of the wrong note, whether you like it or not. Its knowledge of a hesitation is no different to the differences that occur between playing the same notes at different tempos, physically speaking. In fact, if the thought-processes are sound, what you learn from stopping to focus a particular isolated connection is exactly what will permit you to execute a flawless rhythm next time round, without sloppy guesswork. The whole purpose is actually to build up to a whole as soon as possible. It's just that you favour isolating those moments that are least likely to prevent a continuous whole, over settling for an inaccurate whole. Would you prefer your train to take you to the correct destination half and hour late, or to arrive on time at a random station on the other side of the country? If you don't get it right, the benefits regarding time are simply not benefits.

A wrongly struck note leaves a memory that is different to that required in every possible respect. Admittedly, isolated wrong notes can be fixed too, albeit with greater effort. However, if you have the mindset that it's better to screw up than to stop, wrong notes are not exactly going to be rare. Once you've messed up a few times, you've got more work on your hands than if you took the time to be sure of every note first. The mindset simply isn't conducive to accuracy.


If you refuse to trust hesitations however, I'd suggest a compromise. It's far better to stop at once if you feel unprepared for what follow and to plan it out before attempting it again. The greatest enemy is simply to guess because you don't know what you're attempting to do. As long as you have a means of preventing random guesswork, you stop yourself wasting time trying to remove bad habits. No method should ever encourage guesswork (outside of sight-reading practise), or it's just asking for irrepairable inconsistency.

PS. I never allow students to release the previous note if hesitating though. If they do so, it really is deeply counterproductive. You need to feel the means of connection between fingers, to have awareness of what will be required when you lead back in to ensure that the rhythm will be there next time.

If it is true that to hesitate rather than err is a cardinal sin then I guess I am condemned to roast in heck.

I got the quote "hesitate rather than err" from the lovely book "Improve your Piano Playing" by John Meffen. He has a whole chapter entitled "Methods of preventing and correcting mistakes" which has some bearing on the issues discussed in this thread, although a certain party wishes to forbid such a discussion:

Nevertheless, being an engineer, I believe in practical approaches to things as opposed to philosophizing and bloviating about things I know nothing about. That is why I have taken John Meffen's advice to heart and have succeeded in minimizing the frequency of errors in my playing.

The "hesitate rather than err" advice is meant to be applied during the stages where one is learning the notes and committing things to memory. It is at this stage where one must be on guard against hitting wrong notes. At this stage one is playing so slowly that matters of timing and rhythm are almost irrelevant. "Your brain must always be directing your fingers accurately to the next note or chord" he states.

This idea of hesitation is related to the notion of inhibition in the Alexander technique, meaning the ability to prevent an unwanted habitual response from taking place by deliberately creating a pause.


He concludes: "Inhibiting an action in order to prevent making an error is an essential first step, but it is not an end in itself. It does, however, provide space (thinking time) to allow the next moves to be worked out."

Anyway, I highly recommend that book.

Meffin is referring to something quite different. The idea that if you try, try again you'll get it right. That doesn't work in piano. As far as forbidding goes, maybe inhibit is a better word?

And again, your misconstruing of this thread as about how not to make mistakes reveals your anxiety over the issue - that will only lead to more mistakes. Instead philosophize and bloviate.

Post of the day. The link with Alexander Technique was spot on too. It also supports my earlier observation: "You can never unlearn anything", therefore you are well advised to practice the correct movements on the correct notes versus spending your time doing things wrong and then correcting tha later, burning at least three ambiguous neural connections along the way.

Trying to endlessly understand how things work or why they are is a dead-end path compared to just entering the moment of now and picking relatively simple and practical approaches, actually applying them consistently, obeserving the results and booking success. The rest might be termed pianistical verbal master**tion.

You calling me a wanker?

Thank you for that free bit of psychoanalysis. You have been able to identify my anxiety issues from a distance. Are there any meds you would prescribe...or I should just join you in philosophizing and bloviating?

What the heck, join in, chill.

OK, I'll join in. Here's my take on how mistakes happen, from a quantum electrodynamics perspective. Mistakes originate from vacuum fluctuations.

In other words s..t happens.

I think maybe quantum biology could have some relevance here.

Now, I know a couple of you disagree with me that stumbling and stuttering is a fault.

Or at least you think it is a very minor one compared to a finger occasionally bumping the wrong key.

But, if you can bring yourself to, consider it as a possibility. Temporarily think of it as error.

Accept for the sake of argument that we A) want to prevent hesitation and rhythmic stumbling, and B) would really like to avoid teaching it in the first place rather than having to cure it later. (I'm not sure if those are two ideas or one. It seems to be a given with some approaches that beginners must play stumbling and haltingly, and we'll cure that as they advance. But I'm sure we'd all agree if there were a way to avoid having to unlearn it later that would be preferable.)

So, then how would you change teaching to address that as a priority instead of something else?

As student: Is it in the teaching or the learning - studio or home? We cannot really learn, in the sense of turning something into a physical habit, during a lesson. We can get an idea and hopefully the right one. But the part you guys are concerned about would happen between lessons, wouldn't it?

I think you're missing the point of that "hesitate rather than err" quote. It is not advocating stumbling and stuttering while performing a piece. All it is saying is that while in the process of learning the notes be sure to mindfully hit the right notes. Allow yourself the thinking space to figure out what the next note or chord is. After many correct repeats the notes are secure and well in hand. One can then play the piece without stumbling or stuttering because the notes have been learnt correctly and securely.

I think concentrating on making a beautiful sound first and foremost, followed by no stress what so ever over mistakes. I had a teacher once who I could tell was seething every time I made a mistake. All the time I was playing she stressed me out - consciously willing me not to make an error.

I tend to agree with TimR that practicing with mucho hesitations or pauses could be just as damaging as practicing and correcting wrong notes. It is how people learn to play with out a sense of pulse and is perhaps more difficult to un-teach than a few wrong notes.

The better choice would seem to be to choose a simple enough task (one voice, one hand, short section) or slow enough tempo to be able to do it right without wrong notes and without pauses.

Come to think of it 20 odd years ago I picked up a habit from a friend whose playing I then admired. Whenever he made a mistake sight reading he'd go 'D'oh', like Homer Simpson. Myself I was quite stoic and just brushed off errors. It's taken me a while to get back to the condition.

Agreed. Ironically, willful hesitation between two notes is often the quickest way of connecting those notes- when done with understanding and thought. Say if you have four semiquavers descending by step followed by a wide interval of a 7th say. Stop willfully on the last semiquaver and you can teach yourself how to perform the most difficult movement with certainty, first time around. Now that your hand has experienced what it needs to do to make the most difficult connection, you can go back and get it in a steady tempo (still slow though)- knowing that you have prior knowledge of how to cover the most likely stumbling block to the rhythm. If you think that the worst thing you can do is to lose the rhythm you will almost inevitably take a wild stab and have to go back to square one- without the faintest idea as to how you are going to cover the difficult movement. This is absolute useless, if you're hoping to get anywhere.

To think that it's better to arrive on a wrong note than to hesitate makes about as much sense as saying that it's better for an aeroplane to arrive on time, even if that means crashing straight into the terminal, than for it to arrive safely but a little behind schedule.

KBK- you feel that nobody should worry about wrong notes at all? Perhaps this is why there are so many flubs in your film of the Chopin A flat study? Perhaps this is why you're not playing any pieces of advanced difficulty to a high standard? Have you never thought seriously about that? You should always worry about wrong notes when practising. However, you worry about them in context of thinking about what you are trying to achieve that did not happen. You simply have to avoid dwelling on a negative, and think about what you ARE trying to achieve. Thinking of a beautiful sound is futile, if you learned a piece so poorly that you cannot play it without mishitting half of the melodic notes (and sounding audibly strained on those that you reach). I wasted years of my time thinking so exclusively about the sounds I intended to achieve, that I never learned how to achieve them. Since I started practising slowly with accuracy and precision in mind, I can actually produce something like the sounds I intend to, when I return to playing through.

If you learn how to move properly in practise, you can permit yourself slips in performance and they will probably do little harm. If you tell yourself that it's okay to screw up frequently when practising, results will be ten times worse still (and will be very unlikely to sound beautiful). We learn to play accurately, in order to not to have to worry about mistakes in performance. Tolerate regular mistakes in practise, and you will put yourself in a position where the added nerves of performance result in something that is beyond the point of being tolerable. It causes far more stress when you make a proper balls up of a performance through lazy preparation, than when you refuse to settle for basic errors during practise.

I think you misunderstand though. It's not what you want- certainly not. I do think think of it as an 'error' of a kind, and indeed it's important to do so. You have to go back and deal with it at once. It's just not an error in the same sense that a randomly struck note is. Indeed, there is no error in judgement as long as you know that you are pausing for a purpose- and that you go back rectify the rhythm at once. This has nothing to do with simply reading the notes one at a time and failing to count. That is worthless, beyond any doubt. However, if it's between guessing and pausing (under the strict condition that the pause would be rectified immediately afterwards) there's no doubt that guessing is less productive.

In order to ensure the student can grasp the rhythm as marked, it's good to do tapping exercises. They get the full mental sense of the rhythmic feel from doing it. If a student knows what the rhythm should have been they can fix it very easily- provided that they have discovered a means to connect the correct notes (which is exactly what the pause enables, with near 100% certainty). The only problem is when the student simply doesn't consider or understand the rhythm, or when they are too concerned with continuing to go back and remove any hesitations.

I see your point, and it does sometimes work that way.

I would make two observations though.

One is that a note that has been learnt at the wrong time has not NOT! been learnt correctly. It is just as wrong as B instead of Bb. Maybe even more wrong - could be a MAJ 7 chord instead of a DOM 7 and still fit. Hee, hee.

The other is that for a very large number of people it simply does not seem to work. By the time they have the notes learnt with the stumbles, they've learned the stumbles too well to every completely unlearn. These are the points where they make mistakes later. Every been to a piano recital? Ever NOT heard those stumbles? Note errors are rare compared to rhythmic stumbles, at least in the recitals I've been at.

A willful hesitation is not a hesitation. It is merely rewriting the rhythm and then playing it correctly, in good time. It is a method I highly approve of. Make that last semiquaver a quarter note, half note, triple dotted whole note, I don't care. But don't put a fermata over it.

Don't you see my point though? A musical line is basically a series of connections between pairs of fingers. Whatever timing you adopt these connections are felt the same way physically. All we're talking about is a different set of proportions between links in the chain of connections. This is not hard to fix- provided that you know how important it is to fix it. In a sense there is no error but merely incomplete links, which have yet to be fully interconnected.

Provided that you are capable of feeling every physical connection, anyone with a good sense of the rhythm (that can be aquired through tapping exercises, with no ill-consequences) should be able to reinstate the rhythm to these connections. When you prefer to go wrong, you have learned NOTHING about how to perform the connection that governs everything. If you're looking at it from a jazz point of view, it's fine to change things. However, nobody learns to play accurate Chopin etudes, by guessing which note to flap around at in the correct rhythm. The benefits of 'correct' rhythm are not benefits in any sense if not accompanied by the correct notes. The benefits when pausing are very real, because it allows you to practise the connection that will be required when you go back to reinstate the rhythm. There is no way that going wrong can ever be better than pausing, when you're learning difficult pieces.

I'm not saying that pauses are a good thing. In an ideal world where nobody ever went wrong, the best thing would be to play in a continuous tempo with perfect accuracy. In a world where almost everyone does go wrong, allowing yourself time to think is better. Any mindset that promotes random guesswork over thought is fundamentally flawed in its foundations.