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Is it too early to nominate this for post of the year?

I would gladly nominate this as practice post of the year! These are the really essential things.

I hope my explanation I gave in this post was clear. If not, I don't mind clarifying if one has specific questions.

Everything has its place: slow, fast, loud, soft and anything in between. There are times when slow practice just doesn't work, and it would be better to learn each hand individually (maybe in phrase groups) and play it at tempo before putting it together with the other hand, e.g. when playing 11 notes in RH against 15 notes in LH. Once you've learnt the notes, you need to speed up to the tempo you'll be playing it at. If you start to flounder, slow down to the pace you were comfortable at at start from there.

Don't forget, training is specific as all athletes will tell you. If you want to run a fast marathon, you need to train to run fast.....

Not also playing slowly helps a lot but pressing the key slower and more relaxed helps with the quality of the sound as well.

I guess if you believe quieter is synonymous with higher quality sound, then yes.

you can still do relaxed slow movements and play loud firmly and sonorous

When I "press a key slower", the volume of my piano decreases. Perhaps you have one of those voodoo pianos.

I would actually bother discussing if you didn't have such mocking tone

Schnabel maintained and advised: "One should never make any music, not even sound one musical note, without a musical intention preceding it."

I don't know of any better prescription for cultivating facility. Being able to clearly deliberate the musical intention of a playing-movement prior to executing it seems to me crucial for controlling it exactly as required, and equally crucial for forming a reliable, vivid memory of the music's detailed content. For me the basic purpose of slow practising is to utilize the expanded time-span to ensure that every playing-movement is in fact effortlessly achieving its intended musical outcome, and if it isn't, for ascertaining whether my musical intention preceding it is sufficiently clear in my mind - 9 times out of 10 I discover it's not, or even non-existent. In that event, the purpose of slow-practising shifts to improving the clarity of my intentions and the rapidity and reliability with which I can bring them to mind. That said, the purpose of slow-practising is to acquire the ability to think fast. But in work of this nature, the mind won't be bullied into doing so. It's essential to work at a pace that permits recognizing that each intention is clearly defined, and initially that pace may need to be (especially in the case of very demanding passages and atonal compositions in general) a quarter or even smaller fraction of the music's required tempo - whatever it takes. Perseverance over a number of sessions is often necessary to achieve rapid, clearly defined recall of musical intentions, but it does come!

I also practice the opposite way - playing slow pieces faster in order to develop the longer phrases first before looking at the small details.

I think that slow practice has its benefits. Just as you sometimes need to spend money in order to earn money, you often need to practice slowly in order to learn how to play rapidly. When you attempt to play too fast too soon, the muscles have a tendency to sieze up and become tight- which obviously is counterproductive, as you need looseness and flexibility to achieve speed. I think that the problem is that sometimes your body is not comfortable approaching a new passage at breakneck speed. Instead, you need to learn the correct motions at a slow tempo and then gradually build up speed, allowing your body to be more comfortable with the tempo.

However, I think that two caveats need to be added to slow practice. One is to ensure that you practice the correct motions at the slow tempo. Sometimes, people practice motions at slow tempi that have nothing to do with what will have to be done at the fast tempo. They might not even realize that, as when playing very slowly, you often can hit all of the notes even when your physical motions are totally wrong. Of course, everything falls apart when you try to increase the tempo. For example, when practicing octaves, it is important that the wrist bounce that allows for a drop and a rebound is present even during slow practice. You may have to minimize the wrist bounce at a fast tempo, but that motion should be practiced even when playing slowly.

The other caveat is to maintain a sense of motion and musical direction, no matter how slowly you are playing. Sometimes, people play in a heavy and labored fashion when play slowly. That should be avoided, as it only causes tensions and makes it that much harder to increase the tempo. Instead, passagework should be practiced with a sense of forward motion, even during slow practice.

Most definitely! Slow practice must be making MUSIC slowly.

Agreed...My teacher sometimes has me play slowly but also has me count subdivisions of the beat. So the rhythmic accuracy is maintained, as opposed to playing a note and taking a long semi-random time to play the next. Slow but musical.

IMO this is an invalid analogy.

Many people, especially those who have never tried to learn something technically complex like a sport or playing an instrument to a high degree of skill, do not have good body awareness. Playing the piano requires us to isolate muscles and create very specific patterns of movement.
The brain and the body operate at differing speeds--the brain processes thoughts much faster than the body can execute motion.
Slow practice allows the body to experience--and learn--proper motion/form.
It's frustrating, though, because the mind wants to go so much faster! I have no scientific proof of this, but the anecdotal proof is that I can memorize all the notes/dynamics etc. of a piece long before I can play them up to tempo!
For me personally, slow practice is a must. Since I can't visually check my position on the keyboard, I have to teach myself exactly what it feels like to play passages correctly--the faster the passage, or the more leaps and other keyboard movements involved, the more this is true.
I am better (i.e., more accurate) playing slower-tempo things, but, as a lover of Prokofiev, Bach, and many others, I have a huge list of faster pieces I want to play.
The biggest challenge is having the patience and perseverance to do the kind of practice that works--and keep doing it--until you achieve the results you want.

Why do you think so? In both cases, you initially do the opposite of what you intend the final outcome to be. In the first instance, you lose money (i.e. spend money) as part of a strategy to eventually gain money. In the second instance, you play slowly as part of a learning process that will eventually result in your being able to play rapidly. Just as people studying business sometimes have difficulty grasping the concept that you must sometimes spend money in order to increase profits, music students sometimes don't comprehend that slow practice can be conducive to fast playing.

1. practice attentively and slowly with no mistakes

2. get a good nights sleep

3. repeat steps 1 and 2 for a few more days or weeks depending on difficulty of piece

4. speed up the music learned and stored from from attentive, accurate, slow practice to indicated tempo.

walah!


Personally, getting stressed from practicing and making mistakes usually means I'm trying to practice too fast. Very counter-intuitive as we all strive for that virtuosic tempo right off the bat. We hear it in our heads from listening to recordings etc, but our body does not react to it. The bridge between the music and the mechanical movement is linked and solidified quicker and more efficiently through slow practice. Getting enough quality sleep is also important.

By slow, clear and attentive practicing, our brain makes concise connections between motor, visual and auditory synapses that gets embedded as memory after daily practice and the REM sleep.

The amount of time required to learn a piece to tempo will slowly diminish as one's experience and expertise of the instrument grows, but there's really no getting around slow practicing because of the reinforcing that takes place as the brain makes connections and forms memories.

Polishing a Chopin Etude at the moment. Prof says to have it polished and memorized by next Tuesday. I thought I had it memorized today but realized I'm just sloppily blurring through some sections at tempo by ghosting notes because I'm "unsure" of what the exact passage is. Being able to play through a polished piece at half tempo and no mistakes is the best insurance for me that I have each note memorized, that is, after I can get through the piece at tempo with at least 90% accuracy. The final stages requires myself to return to a slow pace and then sleep on it and it really takes a lot of effort to slow myself down, especially when I "think" i can play a piece with 100% accuracy at full tempo but in reality, I cannot. I think the the real discipline in piano practice is knowing when to slow down again and willingly do so, which is what the OP has made note of.

It makes more sense to me now.

hi
may be you should try another fingering