The past few weeks I’ve been learning a new piano piece: The 3rd movement to Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata. It’s a fairly long piece at 7 minutes and is 10 pages of sheet music; 2 of which are played twice. That’s about 30 seconds of music per page played.
Now normally when you learn a piece of music, you start at the beginning. You learn the notes of the first few measures and get those down. Then you move to the next few measures, learn those, then continue.
Then somewhere about 2-3 pages in you’re at the point where it takes a while to play the stuff you’ve learned. Then you hit the stuff you haven’t learned yet and it’s like crashing your car into a brick wall. It’s also discouraging.