Violin Practice Fundamentals, part 2: How Slow Can You Go?

Everyone knows that slow practice is critical to learning difficult passages in a piece of music. The problem is that slow practice becomes tedious and boring very quickly, so we perfunctorily slow down for a spell then move on. But before long, we find that we're not improving at the rate we would like to, so we revisit the notion of "slowing down".

For the violinist, any passage of music usually involves a myriad techniques occurring at the same time, and there is no way to pay attention to everything at once.
For me, slowing a difficult spot down to crawling tempi allows ample time for mentation and execution.

I call the the first step of slow practice the "identification" step, where we give ourselves the time to input each tiny piece of data required to play a particular passage well.





Techniques:
String Crossings
Interval Relationships
Intonation
Bow Distribution
Articulation
etc.....