Am I Wrong To Say "Never Slow It Down"?

Opinion seemed to be varied

It seems everyone has their opinion, and a lot of them differ from my approach of never slowing down music when learning/transcribing it.

One commenter referenced Lennie Tristano, a piano player active in the 40’s 50’s and 60’s, as singing things at 50% before singing them at full speed. I think that is confusing the training of the ear to hear things with the ability of the voice or the instrument-specific motor skills to play them.

Also, in 1950, or at any point during Lennie Tristano’s career, there was no such thing as the “amazing slow downer” app. The closest you got was playing a vinyl record at the slower speed on your turntable.

Either way, almost every argument to the contrary of my method seems to be based on “well, you’re still getting something out of it”. Like I had said you would get nothing from the process of learning music having slowed it down.

Much like walking 1 mile once a week as opposed to simply sitting on the couch and doing nothing will be a move in the right direction, transcribing having slowed something down is better than nothing. You’re simply selling yourself short on what you could be learning, and how good your ear could be getting.

Someone else commented that they “would never trust myself to get something completely correct without using the available tools to double check my work”.

Is that not making my point for me on a lot of levels? If you don’t have the confidence in your own work to the point where you don’t trust what your ear is hearing, you need to ask yourself some pretty serious questions about where you’re at in the journey, and work way harder at the fundamentals before building towards whatever it is you think you can’t be trusted to get right.

It’s amazing to me that anyone became great at music before the arrival of the iOS app store and google play.

Thoughts?

More soon,

Janek

P.S. due to massive demand we’ve added international shipping to the limited run of Author-signed copies of my physical books. Each of the available books has an international shipping link on the page now. Be aware that it’s not cheap. I wish I could get the price down, but the USPS is impossible here in the States, never mind Fedex and UPS. The flat rate we’ve come up with is actually slightly under the total cost to us before packaging, and for those brave enough it’s now available.