The one practice technique I'd keep if I had to throw out all the others

I'm going to share a practice technique that, if you build it into a habit, will improve your synchronization, your tone, and eventually your speed. Out of every practice technique I've covered, if I had to keep only one, this would be it. There's also a second technique I pair it with that makes the whole thing even more effective.

The technique is called transition time.

I first read about it in Troy Stetina's Speed Mechanics book, and I didn't really get it. I understood the words on the page but I couldn't feel what he was pointing at. Two years later, in 1995, I went to GIT in Hollywood and a classical guitar teacher named David Oakes taught the same concept in a class called Playing Techniques. When he demonstrated it, it finally clicked.

I'm telling you all that because I think it's worth taking your time with this one. If you don't get it right, it won't help you. And it's easy to not get it right.

What transition time actually is

Transition time refers to the speed at which you move from one note to the next. That's it. The whole technique is built on one idea: when you practice slowly, you keep your movements between notes as fast as if you were playing at top speed.

So if you're playing quarter notes at 60 bpm, one note per second, you still want the movement from note to note to feel like 16th notes at 200. The note holds for a full second. The transition between notes is instant.

This is what most slow practice is missing. People play slowly and the movements between notes are also slow, which means they're rehearsing slow movements. Then they wonder why their playing doesn't speed up. They blame slow practice itself. But it isn't slow practice that's broken, it's the way they're doing it.

If I play a phrase slowly without transition time, you can hear gaps between every note. The hand drifts from one position to the next at the same speed as the music. If I play the same phrase at the same tempo with transition time, the gaps disappear. Each note holds for its full value, and then the hand snaps to the next position as fast as it can.

The right hand gets light. The whole thing feels crisp. That's the feeling you're after.

Keep the tempo low

This is the part students get wrong most often.

Transition time only works if you're at a tempo where you have full control. If you push the tempo up, you stop being able to make the transitions genuinely fast, because the note durations get short enough that "fast transition" and "fast playing" become the same thing. The whole point is to separate them.

David Oakes had us start at 50 bpm. Honestly that's almost too slow, you end up just waiting for the next click. Somewhere around 60 to 70 bpm is a good starting point, one note per click. Your job is to land each note exactly on the click, hold it, and then move as quickly as possible right before the next click.

Don't raise the tempo. That's not the goal. The goal is to make the transitions sharper at the tempo you're already at. If you focus on that, your top speed takes care of itself over time.

How to know you're doing it right

Listen for gaps.

If you're doing this correctly, the gap between notes should be tiny. Almost inaudible. The line should sound legato, even though you're picking every note. Something like (clean, connected) rather than (gaps everywhere).

If you hear space between the notes, your transitions are too slow. Hold each note longer. Move faster between them.

I've seen several high-level players talk about this same idea in different words. Hilary Hahn has written about practicing slowly while keeping the fast transition. I've seen cellists talk about it in the context of scales. It's the same concept everywhere. It's just rarely explained clearly enough that students actually do it.

Make it a habit

The reason this technique is so valuable is that it's not really an exercise. It's a way of practicing slowly. Once you internalize it, it becomes the default mode whenever you play something below tempo. You stop having to think about it.

That's what I'd encourage you to aim for. Not "I do my transition time exercise for ten minutes a day," but "all my slow practice is now transition time practice."

Finger choreography

The second technique pairs with transition time and amplifies it. I call it finger choreography. Fancy name for a simple idea: while you're playing one note, you're already preparing the next finger.

Take a three-notes-per-string scale. As I play the first note with my index, my second finger is hovering close to its note. As I play the second note, my pinky moves into position. On three-notes-per-string scales, your fingers are usually lined up with the frets you're going to play anyway, so this doesn't take much.

Where it really matters is at string crossings.

When I cross strings, the next note is usually back to the index finger. So as I'm playing the pinky on the current string, I want my index finger lifting and moving to land lightly on the next string. Not fretting it. Just resting on top of it, ready to go.

The key is that I'm preparing it at the same time as I'm playing the previous note. Not after. If I play the pinky, then prepare the index, then play, I've added a step. The whole point is that the preparation happens during the previous note, hidden inside it.

When you watch a player who has this dialed in, you'll see the index finger pop up to the next string the instant the pinky lands. They look like they're playing about half as much as they actually are.

Where it gets tricky

Coming back across the strings is harder. Now you've got the problem that preparing the index finger on a higher string can mute the note you're currently playing. You have to find an angle where the finger is in position without damping the ringing string. Sometimes you can, sometimes the geometry doesn't allow it. Work on it where you can.

Same idea applies to arpeggios. Take a major arpeggio with the shape 12, 9, 10, 9. If your index finger is just hanging out floating in space while you play the higher notes, you've got a long trip to make when it's time to play the 9. Long trips at high speed go badly. But if your index finger drops onto the 9 the moment you play the 10, you don't have a trip to make. You're already there.

When you try to play that arpeggio fast, the difference is huge. You're not moving the finger quickly, you've already moved it.

The pinky bonus

There's a side effect of practicing this way that I didn't expect when I first learned it. It fixes flying pinkies.

I've never seen a student who could prepare fingers properly and also have a tense, flailing pinky. The two are incompatible. To prepare the next finger, your hand has to be relaxed. The moment it relaxes, the pinky stops sticking out. It just settles back where it should be.

So if you've been fighting your pinky for years, this might be a more useful fix than any of the standard "keep your pinky close to the fretboard" advice. The pinky isn't the problem. The tension is. Get the tension out and the pinky behaves on its own.

Putting it together

Transition time on its own is powerful. Finger choreography on its own is powerful. Together they're something else.

Slow tempo. Hold each note for its full value. Move between notes as fast as you possibly can. While you're holding each note, prepare the next finger so it's already where it needs to be. Stay relaxed.

When you do this, your slow practice stops being a different activity from your fast playing. It becomes the same activity, just stretched out, with all the same movements happening at the same speed. The only thing that changes when you speed up is the spacing between the notes. The notes themselves, and the transitions between them, are already there.

Give it a try. Pick something you've been working on, drop the tempo to where you have full control, and run it with transition time and finger choreography for a week. Let me know how it goes.