Why I built Play Fast Notes

I'm not a programmer, but a digital tool I built this year has changed how I handle the thing that scares me most on stage.

Fast technical passages have been my weakness since I started the clarinet. Not a passing insecurity I outgrew on the way to a principal chair. It's the actual thing that has caused me the most anxiety on this instrument from the beginning, and if I'm honest, still now. Give me a slow, exposed, expressive line, and I enjoy myself and feel confident. Put sixteenth notes under my fingers at a tempo that's genuinely fast, and some part of me still braces.

For most of my playing life, I didn't have a real method for those passages. I had effort. I'd slow the passage down, grind it ten times in a row without a mistake before clicking the metronome up, and hope for the best. A lot of the time it worked. That was the strange part, because it still didn't make me feel ready. The anxiety heading into a performance or an audition never went away. I never felt like I could really trust my technique when I needed it. I was doing a lot of work, and mistaking the amount of it for the right kind.

The book that changed it

What changed my practicing was reading Molly Gebrian's Learn Faster, Perform Better. Gebrian is a violist with a background in neuroscience, and the book explains what's actually happening in your brain when you learn a difficult physical skill. A lot of it ran directly against how I'd been practicing.

Two ideas hit hardest. The first was about repetition itself. I'd always assumed the way to lock in a hard passage was to play it the same way over and over until it went automatic. Gebrian's research points the other direction. If you introduce small amounts of variability into the repetitions, changing the rhythm, the grouping, the articulation, you force your brain to stay engaged with the material at every moment instead of slipping into autopilot. The catch is that you have to do it in a way that keeps building toward consistency, not variety for its own sake. Playing a passage the exact same way fifty times feels like diligence. A lot of the time it's just your attention checking out.

The second idea was about breaks. This one I would have called a waste of time before I read it. "Breaks aren't wasted time," Gebrian writes, "they are the most important time for skill improvement." Researchers watching people learn a fast sequence found that most of the improvement showed up during the rest between repetitions, not during the repetitions themselves. The brain, it turns out, replays the passage during those short breaks, faster than you could ever play it, consolidating the thing you just drilled. Ten seconds of doing nothing was doing more than the tenth repetition would have.

I read all of this and thought, I've been fighting my own biology for twenty years.

Knowing the method isn't running it

Here's the problem I ran into next, and it's the reason there's an app at all.

Understanding the science didn't mean I could execute it in the practice room. The methods Gebrian lays out are precise and multi-step. You work systematically between half tempo and performance tempo, changing your starting and stopping points throughout the process. In some ways it destroys what she'd call the illusion of mastery, that feeling that you can absolutely do this, the one that vanishes overnight, or vanishes on stage exactly when you need it most. It's a real procedure, and running it correctly asks a surprising amount of your attention.

The problem was that the system itself was complex, and I found my attention more on the system and the procedure than on the notes themselves. It's the kind of thing that would lend itself well to an application that could guide you through the process, and that's how Play Fast Notes was born.

What a session actually looks like

You photograph the page or load in a PDF of your part, then draw a box around whatever passage is causing you anxiety. From there the app offers six guided practice strategies, and you pick the one that fits the problem in front of you.

The Tempo Ladder clicks the tempo up over time, either in sequence or in a randomized cluster. Interleaved Click-Up is Gebrian's method, a different tempo and a different set of notes on every repetition. Rhythmic Variation lets you play the passage in different rhythmic patterns, which shifts the emphasis onto different notes each time through. You can apply the rhythms straight to the passage, or have the app write the passage out in those rhythms as an exercise to play through. Micro-Chaining and Macro-Chaining build a passage forward and backward, or outward from the spot that's giving you the most trouble. And Interleaved Practicing is the one I reach for as a performance or an audition gets close: you play each passage in random order, giving yourself a single attempt at each, which tests the thing that actually matters on stage, whether you can play it right the first time.

Whichever one you choose, the app runs the procedure so you don't have to hold it in your head. It sets the tempos, tracks where you are, tells you what to play next, and records the session in a practice log so you can review your work later. You can even leave notes for your future self about what to focus on in the next session. You're left with the one job that was ever really yours, which is evaluating your playing as you go and making adjustments where they're needed.

The breaks were doing the real work

The piece I was most skeptical of is the one I now defend hardest: the Micro Break Timer.

Left to myself, I don't rest between repetitions. Resting feels like slacking, so I skip it and lose the exact window where the learning was going to happen. The timer takes that decision away from me. It paces the breaks: ten seconds of nothing, and those ten seconds are not a pause in the practice. Per the research, they're when the learning gets supercharged and the brain rewires itself. Sitting there doing nothing while my brain quietly rehearses the passage faster than my fingers ever could is apparently the most productive thing I could do in that moment. I would never have believed that a few years ago. The timer makes me do it anyway, and I can feel the difference.

Between the guided process and those enforced breaks, the app does something for me that I could not do on my own. It's like a coach watching over my shoulder, making sure I work with my brain instead of against it, reminding me to work smarter and not harder.

Where it goes

Play Fast Notes isn't publicly launched yet. I've been practicing on it every day, a small group of people are testing it, and I'm still shaping it before it's open to everyone. I'll say more here when it's ready.

I've written before, in Behind the Screen, about the systems I use to prepare. This is the first one I couldn't keep on paper. The method wanted to be a tool, so I made it one, and the passages that scared me for twenty years scare me a little less now. That feels worth handing to someone else.

If you want to work through your own technical passages, that's the kind of thing I do with students.