Tips for Practicing Piano
Alas, we come face to face with music’s Leviathan: practice. It is every student’s Achilles’ heel and let’s all be honest, nobody likes to practice. The few who declare “I love to practice” surely are not well in the head; these must be the same people who pay their taxes on April 15th, right?!
Well, I love to practice and I pay my taxes on time. Don’t get me wrong, I spent most of my musical life fighting to get out of practicing, but I’ve finally figured out how to trick my brain into not seeing it as a chore. It started by taking a step back and addressing a few questions:
What is practice?
How do you know if you are practicing efficiently?
Is it good enough to just play a few notes here and there or does practice need to be long and focused every time?
Let’s start at the end. Is it good enough to just play a few notes here and there?
And the answer is… drumroll please… YES!
It is definitely good enough and do you know why? Because the bare minimum is better than nothing. And research actually shows that short bursts of practice can often be far more effective than long stints that become exhausting. Even tapping your fingers on the fallboard or a desk activates muscle memory, works on dexterity, and reinforces the neural pathways previously made. The minimum requirement for practice is being present while moving your fingers, hands and body. AND don’t forget that having FUN, which we have a better chance of experiencing if we know our practice will be short and actually fits into our life, increases our chance of doing it again the next day. And doing it again the next day promotes forming a habit. And this is ultimately what we want when it comes to practice: To come back to it day after day because we enjoy it, not because we have to.
Next, how do you know if you are practicing efficiently?
Well now we’re asking some harder questions. The truth is only time will tell you if you are practicing efficiently. If you can see progress over time, then you are practicing well. Interestingly enough, the more you focus on measuring said progress, the more efficient your practice tends to become.
Allow me to unpack this: when we change our focus of practice from “playing songs well” to “finding routines to easily measure progress”, not only does practice become easier, but the progress you make also becomes much clearer, thus motivating you to keep working hard!
For example: Let’s assume we are practicing Mozart’s Sonata in C. Instead of practicing the piece intensely for several days, seeing little progress, becoming discouraged, and quickly forgetting about it, let us break the piece down into different skill sets that allow us to easily measure progress.
This beloved Sonata, like most piano pieces, can be broken down to fragments of scales, arpeggios and block chords. So along with practicing the piece every so often, let’s also practice the scales and chord patterns that allow us to clearly measure progress. Grab a metronome and start with a scale or chord progression that exists within the harmonic structure of the piece. And always, always pay attention to your body: Do your arms feel less or more tense after 2 minutes of scales? Are you able to stay relaxed while changing from a G chord to a C chord? Use the metronome to measure progress with note and rhythmic accuracy. At what tempo does it become challenging to play eighth note scales? Is that number increasing? Keep a diary to help keep track of your progress over a few weeks. You’ll quickly see that the bpm that seemed impossible a few weeks ago is now easily manageable!
Practice becomes a chore when you are running a race that has no finish line. You’re just endlessly running. No wonder so many people stop! The secret is to set yourself a finish line every time you decide to sit on your piano bench, and it has to be a finish line in sight. Every practice session should have one main focus, one main race to finish. Perhaps it’s playing scales 2 bpm faster than you did yesterday, or learning to change chords from G to C in their first inversions this time. And if you aren’t sure what that focus should be or how to break your piece down into these measurable steps, this is when a teacher is of utmost importance and value!
So finally we approach the question where it all began, what is practice?
Simply put, practice is sitting at your instrument and trying to be better than you were yesterday. Oh and trying to have a little bit of fun while you’re doing it.
The most important key: don’t stop. Keep trying. Each and every day your instrument will reveal something new to you.
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These practice tips shared with you by Sebastian Singh and Ciara McAllister