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We have all heard “Practice makes perfect”…
Especially, if you are a musician, this sentence is constantly in your mind. But it equally applies to anybody – from beginner piano students to professional musicians; and of course, to every other field of life and profession.
Here, let’s just mention a few things about piano practicing…
The big question is not necessarily whether you practiced only a half hour or 2 hours today, but HOW you practiced is what makes the difference.
Students commonly make the mistake of believing that only the amount of time spent in front of the piano matters.
Well, the amount of time put into practicing is certainly important – 5 minutes is not going to make up for 2 hours, even if you use the “best tricks”. To learn something, build a skill, gain technique, you need to repeat something over and over. I meant 20-30-50-100 times… And this is not just for building technique, but developing confidence and control that are so important when it comes to performing.
Make practicing part of your daily routine. It can help, if you have a set time in your schedule that is only dedicated for piano practice.
Even if you play your piece 2-handed, practicing hands separately sometimes is very beneficial. You can look into fine details more effectively that way. So going back to separate hands does not mean you are not improving!!!
Many times rhythm problems will occur, as e.g. the piece you are working on has some challenging rhythmic patterns. What are you going to do about it?
Easy! Count aloud! Many times loud counting is even more effective as using a metronome. So go for it!
Please note, the fact that you are “talking” (… counting aloud….) while playing might create some extra mistakes in your playing (as now you are paying attention to one additional thing), but within a few quick tries, it will be solved and the extra mistakes will be gone as you will get used to loud counting.
Slow, attentive practicing from the beginning is another good thing to keep in mind, however the best “trick” is here to come…
Don’t practice the entire piece, over and over, from beginning till the end. Work in “baby steps”. Pick on the tricky part right away – select that 1 or 2 or 3 measures that are giving you a hard time and just work on them, without going on. Even better, if you just work measure by measure. Practice 1 measure until you know it really well, then go on but only work on the next measure the same way than on the previous one. Repeat that (2nd) measure over and over until you really don’t make mistakes. Then, instead of moving on to the next measure again (the 3rd one), now go back to the first measure you started to work on and connect that to the 2nd measure. Play those now 2 measures many times in a row. When there is absolutely no problem with the 2 measures together, then you can start working on the 3rd. And so on, so forth.
Dividing your piece into small sections is one of the most effective way to learn something quickly and securely, and although it looks you are “not getting anywhere” with the many-many repeats of only 1 measure, this kind of approach to practicing will deliver a much better result in much less time than the “usual” (… I meant, “mistaken”…) way of practicing.
Look at it this way: if you play a piece once, from beginning till the end, everything – including the hard parts – will get only 1 practice turn, and the piece took. e.g 3 minutes to play it through. To get a repeat on it (… only the 2nd turn..), you’d need to play through the entire piece again, taking another 3 minutes. So within 6 minutes you only had 2 repeats on every part of the piece.
Do you think, within 2 repeats your knowledge of the piece and the hard technical parts will make a significant improvement? No, not at all!!!
But within 6 minutes, do you know how many times you can repeat those 3 measure that are hard and have been giving you a problem…. Well, the answer is that you might as well can get a good 50-100 turns squeezed in to that 6 minutes. And after that many turns, that part should never give you a problem again – or at least much-much less than before, but in that case, as a worst case scenario, you just need another “6-minute” practice session the next day.
So even if you have a few minutes practice time a day this is the way to do your work, and so even in that few minutes it is possible to achieve great results!