After the playing gets good, it goes bad

At somepoint during practicing a piece, I find I can play certain sections very well and fluently, then with more practice, they go down hill and errors in playing/timing creep in. Do you experience this problem too and what do you do about it, other than slow practice again.

Give it a rest for a week.

I heard something interesting once, a theory about emotions that I have yet to see disproven. It puts all the emotions on a sort of thermometer scale. If a guy who is at such-and-such place on this scale comes into contact with something distressing, he falls down the scale, and if something good happens, he climbs up it. In ascending order, some of these emotions are sorrow/pity, fear, anger, boredom, conservatism, happiness. So someone who is happy and feeling good gets into an animated conversation with someone who is feeling terrible about himself. The sad one might get nervous, the happy one might get bored. Just a theory.

So what I'm thinking is, you were happy playing the piece. Then something started pulling you down. Might've been physical fatigue, maybe a part that you didn't understand that well and which kept sticking out in your mind (that puts me off big-time). So just catch yourself in the act. Hey, I'm getting bored of this. Red flag! This is the same piece that I loved not even ten minutes ago, and it's boring me to tears. Something is wrong.

I call it 'practise anxiety.' I wouldn't worry about it.() The flip side of the coin is that if you practise a piece intensely and then give it a rest for a few days, (a week), it seems easier to play. But you can't learn a piece by not practising it. My advice is to practise through the difficulty, like a runner running off a stomach cramp. Once you know the piece COLD, then you'll know it.

I didn't realize conservatives were so close to achieving happiness.

Joe Kubera

And conservatories are a special sort of heaven? <G>

People get credit for being conservative when they're really just stupid.

' Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative has no brains...'

Also, be careful not to 'learn' mistakes. If you start to make the same mistake over and over, without correcting it, you will eventually, effectively have it 'memorized'. I've found mistakes like these creep into my playing that way.

Thank you all for the suggestions not counting the psycho analysis. happy playing to you

I refuse to get involved this time. I just wanted to state that.

( Martin, you should know better . Baiting an old man like that is unChristian. )