How to Practice

Being a teacher, you also learn because you need to explain. As I teach more, I see a need for students to understand how to practice. Here is one stab at it.

Some things to understand before we start:

1. Practicing correctly is hard work. You know that because if you are doing it correctly, you need a break from it after a while.
2. Practicing is repetitive. Don’t expect anyone to enjoy hearing it. No matter how nice a piece is, when you hear little bits of it played over and over it gets tiring.
3. Progress is slow. The worst part is, when you practice poorly, progress is slower. It’s slow enough when you practice correctly.
4. You should have a goal. When you sit down to the piano, you should have purpose and intent. Understand what your goal is.

The Beginning – Goal = Play the piece slowly with the metronome without stopping.

When you first look at a piece, your goal should be to get familiar with the motions your hands need to go through to play the notes. For this, fingering is of course the main priority. Slowly read through the piece hands alone paying close attention to what fingers you are using. Follow the fingering in the music. If you don’t like it, change it but write it in. As you go through the piece, if you make a mistake with your fingering and have to correct your choice of finger, write it in. Write BIG. Make it obvious. The object is to make it easy to choose the correct finger. Once you go through it and get familiar with the notes, turn the metronome on to 60. Go through it again now with the metronome. Mark the music with brackets where you have trouble staying with the clicks. The goal is to get through the piece without stopping, hands alone. You still need to pay close attention to your fingering but now also pay close attention to your rhythm. If you use the wrong finger, write it in BIG. Are the clicks coming where they should when you play? If a rhythm gives you trouble or has you confused, bracket that spot so you can focus some time on it. Try clapping the rhythm with your hand and count out loud. You also need to pay attention to the length of notes and if they are staccato or legato. Once you have bracketed the places that you have trouble staying with the metronome, just work on those bracketed spots. The next day you sit down at the piece, start with those. Don’t start at the beginning all the time. Working backwards through the bracketed sections is a good idea too. Once you can play the bracketed sections, try the whole piece again and see how well they are doing. You will notice that once you fix a spot, it’s still a problem later. Re-fixing the tough spots is very common and should be expected. Following this procedure should make it possible to play through the piece slowly without stopping using the metronome.

The Middle – Goal = Play the piece up to speed with the metronome.

You are still getting comfortable with the motions your hands need to make at this point. You can play it slowly with the metronome without stopping at 60. Move the metronome up in increments of 20. Try playing with the metronome at 80 next. Bracket the spots that you have trouble. Sometimes they change when the tempo increases. When you have a spot that you can’t play fast enough, you need to focus on that spot now. To increase the speed, it’s both physical and mental but repetition is the only way I know. Two times slow and one time faster is one approach. Keep pushing the tempo of that spot higher and higher by working it up slowly to the point you can’t play it, then backing off again in tempo and trying to work it up again. You should find that by doing this you can push that upper limit higher but expect that it will be slow progress. If a spot just can’t get any faster, sometimes it may be a fingering problem. Sometimes when the spot is played so often it is memorized. That’s a good thing. It makes it possible to think of the whole passage at once and that helps you play it faster too. If you reach a plateau and it won’t go faster, give it a break. Coming back to it later helps. If you can’t get it up to speed in a week, perhaps the teacher can help. It may be necessary to re-assess the level of difficulty of the piece.

The End – Goal = Play expressively without the metronome

At this point you can play through the piece up to speed with the metronome. Time to turn that off. As you play, think about how you want the music to sound. Pay attention to the markings in the music. Are you playing appropriately to the markings? Here is where the teacher is often helpful in identifying the ways to make it more musical. This is where the skill in listening is developed. Often we hear what we play but we aren’t listening to it. Listening requires a different level of attention. You need to be able to shift the focus of your attention away from what you are doing with your hands to what you are hearing. I like to tell students to treat the piece as if they wrote it. Of course, the goal is to try to recreate what the composer intended, but if you act as if you wrote the piece, it sometimes helps shift your attention away from the keyboard.

There is enough to write a book on this subject and many ideas from many people. Just doing a search on Google for “how to practice the piano” (use the quotes when searching) turns up about 29,500 results. Unavoidably there are naturally many things missing from this two page description. I recommend looking at some of the other sites that come up from this search.