Practice Tips

Efficient Piano Practice

10 Expert Tips

Everybody is under intense time pressure these days, and musicians are no exception. In reply to the many requests about efficient piano practice, here are some expert tips that can help you make the most of your practice time.

1. Get organized. Practicing the piano efficiently is really about how to organize oneself to get the best results from the effort expended. It's essential to be very clear about our daily practice objectives. Many students find that writing a daily practice plan helps them to focus on their most important practice tasks and gives them a feeling of accomplishment as they complete each one. Teachers can write plans for beginning students so that they know exactly what to focus on at home.

2. Focus on one task at a time. Discipline yourself to complete each practice goal before moving on to the next. In the long run, you'll save enormous time by completing the day's work on your Mozart sonata before studying Debussy, rather than bouncing back and forth between them at whim. While you might not get that new Chopin etude note-perfect and up to tempo today, you can indeed 'finish' a given passage with musical polish at a slow tempo. Indeed, Sviatoslav Richter's way of building his enormous repertoire was to finish each line of music before moving on to the next.

3. Only practice with full concentration! In his autobiography, Daniel Barenboim cites this as a fundamental rule for practicing. If your practicing does not demand enormous reserves of concentration, then you're not practicing properly. Five minutes of concentrated practice is far more valuable than five hours of moving your fingers while your mind wanders. The mind must be active at all times, since it is first and foremost the mind that must play the piano.

4. Always warm up first! Properly warmed-up hands will allow you to accomplish the physical tasks demanded by difficult repertoire with greater ease and with fewer errors. I find that scales and arpeggios make for the best warm-up.

5. Practice slowly. It is a known psycho-physiological fact that the brain cannot absorb musical information in detail when playing fast. It is therefore essential to work slowly and carefully at all times. Never try to force speed, as such attempts are harmful both to the memory and to acquiring velocity.

6. Don't allow yourself the 'luxury' of mistakes. Mistakes cost far too much time to repair and only create uncertainty, whereas your practice ought to build security. Remember, your performance is a direct result of how you practice, and efficient piano practice means playing correctly. If you start making mistakes, it means either that you're going too fast to learn the music or that your brain is tired. If that's the case, it's best to take a break and do something—anything—else.

7. Practice only short passages. The brain absorbs musical information much more readily when it is not overwhelmed by quantity. Each day, practice just one passage, and practice it extremely carefully and thoroughly. This makes for far more efficient piano practice in the long run.

8. Schedule your practice sessions. As useful as this tip may be, it must be subsidiary to the rule of only practicing when the mind can best concentrate. For many people, this is first thing in the morning. Not only is the mind fresh, but you'll have a feeling of accomplishment having started your day by completing a major task, not to mention an emotionally rewarding one.

9. Keep a practice journal. A practice journal is a log of your practice sessions, including what you practice and for how long. It can be a notebook or even a spreadsheet. At the end of each practice session, write down exactly which pieces you studied and the number of minutes spent on each one. I've discovered that timing myself forces the mind to focus, and the clock doesn't lie. At the end of the week, month and year you can discover how much time you spent on each piece, which can help you when planning your repertoire and performances in the future.

10. Study away from the piano. Some of the most efficient piano practice can be accomplished without a piano. Analyze the piece, listen mentally, hear each voice in your inner ear, sing each line, discover thematic relations and harmonic subtleties. It is always amazing to me how many music students simply learn notes without ever really knowing the piece or its compositional strategy. Instead, be sure to make mental study and analysis an integral part of your piano practice.
While these efficient piano practice tips themselves take some practice, I'm certain that you'll experience gains in productivity from the first day you start using them. Happy practicing!

 http://www.key-notes.com/efficient-piano-practice.html
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PIANO PRACTICE PRINCIPLES: (by Dr. Brent Hugh
Assistant Professor of Piano
Missouri Western State College Department of Music)

1. Listen! Everything else in practicing depends on you listening to yourself.

2. Do it right from the very first. Always aim for perfection in notes, sound, and musical expression. YOU CAN DO IT! If you work to get it right from the very first, it's easy. Once you've practiced it a hundred times the wrong way, though, it's very difficult to play it perfect. Remember: doing it one time right is better than doing it a thousand times wrong.
Psychologists say: A stimulus enters long-term memory (that is, it is "learned") after it has been attentively observed 7 times. But if an "incorrect" stimulus is first learned, it then takes an average of 35 (!) repetitions to learn the "corrected" stimulus. Learning it right the first time is five times easier than re-learning after learning it incorrectly.

3. Try to understand the music. Apply the things you have learned in your theory classes and everything you know about music to the pieces you play. Look for the key, scales, chords, patterns, repeated sections, the form, phrases, accompaniment patterns, rhythmic patterns--everything you can find. If you understand the music, you will learn it faster, remember it better, and play it more musically. Keep a pencil by the piano and write these things in the music as you find them.
Psychologists who study learning say: Analyzing the meaning of something helps you remember it longer.

4. Write things down. It helps you remember things better if you write them down. When you see it a day, two days, and a week later, it refreshes your memory and helps make it a part of your permanent memory. If you write things down, this process will happen automatically. If you don't write them down, you probably won't think of them again, and you will forget them.
Things you should write down:

• Things your teacher says. We pay hundreds of dollars for piano lessons, yet the minute we walk out the piano teacher's door, we forget 90% of what the piano teacher has said. It's just like throwing away 90% of the money we pay for piano lessons. The piano teacher tries to write things down for you but just can't write down everything. You should go home, play through your pieces, and right there in the music or in a notebook write down everything you can remember about your lesson. This doesn’t have to be complete sentences—just notes and phrases that you understand and which will jog your memory. If you do this, you will be amazed at how much more you remember and how much less the piano teacher has to repeat the same thing.
• Things you figure out about the music. If you figure out a piece is in the key of D major, write down: "D major." If you find an F major chord, write it down. If you figure out the piece is in ABA form, write it down. Figuring these things out once and then forgetting them does no good.
• Interpretation. Circle all the dynamics and tempo markings. Write in how you want to play the piece. For instance, draw crescendos and decrescendos to show how you're going to play a particular phrase.

Psychologists who study long-term memory say: The key to making a particular stimulus a permanent part of your long-term memory is to review it repeatedly over a long period of time. Memories that are not reviewed in this way become gradually weaker with time. Writing things down allows you to review them over a period of time and so make them part of your long-term, permanent memory.

5. Be your own teacher. Don't wait for your teacher to tell you every thing to do; figure it out for yourself. Often you can figure out the problem and solve it just as well as the teacher can, so why wait?
In the end, you teach yourself how to play the piano, with some help from others.

6. Look at practicing as problem solving. Don't look at practicing as putting in a certain amount of time at the piano, or as repeating your pieces a certain number of times. Look at practicing as finding and solving problems in your pieces.
There are three steps in this process:






IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM. Know what that piece should sound like, and recognise the difference between the way it should sound and the way it does sound.
FIGURE OUT WHAT CAUSES THE PROBLEM. Is the problem caused by weak technique? Bad fingering? An awkward stretch or jump in the music? An unclear mental picture of the music in your mind? Whatever it is, you have to figure out the cause of the problem before you can fix it.
FIX THE PROBLEM. This might mean using some of the practice methods outlined below, changing the fingering, analyzing the music so you understand it better, or (as a last resort!) just practicing the spot over and over until it is comfortable to play. Problems you can’t solve yourself, ask your teacher or fellow students. 7. Remember three important questions. How do you know when a passage is good? How do you know that it is, technically and musically, the best it can be?
Asking yourself the following three questions is a good start. If answer "yes" to all three questions, you can have confidence you are on the right track. If there is a problem with one or more of the three elements, you need to do some problem solving.






1. Does it SOUND right? Does it have the right notes, the right rhythms, the right dynamics and phrasing, the right tempo, the right articulation, the right voicing?
2. Does it FEEL right? Are you as relaxed as possible to play this passage, or do you feel excess tension in your hands, arms, shoulders, neck, or anywhere else? In general, do your movements feel smooth and flowing or sharp and jerky? Do you even have an awareness of how your hands, arm, and body feel, or have you blocked these feelings out altogether?
3. Does it LOOK right? Can you see any evidence of excess tension? Does the choreography of your movements—hands, fingers, arms, head, and entire body—seem to match the requirements of the passage? Looking at what you are doing is often a great help in creating a greater awareness of your muscular sensations and feelings. The muscular sensations are often very subtle; your eyes can help you tune into what you are feeling. Observing yourself in a mirror or via videotape is often very helpful.
Students often pay attention to sound only. On the piano, it is very possible to get a perfectly correct and even a beautiful and musical sound, while at the same time misusing your body in quite a terrible way. You may be able to play like this for a year or even ten years—but eventually it will catch up with you. In the meanwhile, you probably have various aches and pains and your sound and technique—even if good—are not as good as they could be.

 http://brenthugh.com/piano/piano-practice.html
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from Katia Palivoda

. while working you can make accurate marks with pencil  to remind yourself about correct fingering, better fingering, type of chord (to understand and memorize the fragment better), accidentals if you keep forgetting about them etc.

2. to make a plan is wonderful idea. When you open the scores, please decide first what you want to achieve today. Your plan needs to be built gradually in the matter of difficulty. Sample: for a new piece you can say yourself: I want to be able to play R.H. today with no single mistake. The next day review R.H. If you feel it's good, move t the next task: knowledge of L.H. If not, work on R.H. again, till you like it! For the other days it can be : being able to play first 2 lines both hands with no mistakes.

3. do it right in slow tempo first! After it's good in slow tempo, move it to a LITTLE faster level. DON"T PLAY IT UNTIL YOU CAN DO IT RIGHT. PLAY IT UNTIL YOU CAN'T DO IT WRONG.

4. I agree there is no sense to practice when you tired. But I recommend not to skip a single day. When you tired, put easy task for yourself. Sample: playing slowly each hand one-2 times. Playing 2 times  both hands very slowly on deep sound. at least you review the piece, Remember, if we miss even one or 2 days, we are loosing what we accomplished before.

5. Sometimes our daily practice is more inspiring, sometimes it's less. It's a ROUTINE. sorry,  we cannot expect it to be FUN and easy. It's a serious WORK. And the ability to focus and work well, will help you farther in life!   But it's up  to our  mind, not to have it boring but INTERESTING. Let's learn how to work effectively at home, and we will be able to enjoy   understand beauty of music and express it!

6. Very important moment. Please be READY for the lesson. Our lesson (except beginners where they are introduced to notes ) should be dedicated to technical, artistic, musical goals,  You all prepare your homework for school. The same approach  to our music lesson is highly appreciated and really needed.

7.
Sometimes it seems ! like we experience loosing of   interest. It is   common thing, which come to most of the students and musicians (artists, dancers and many many others) from time to time. It's temporary, and  not the last one :)   Loosing of interest leads to less practicing. Less practicing leads us to less accomplishments. Less accomplishments --> we enjoy music much less when we cannot play it.  What happens here first? Hard to say, since it's tightly connected aspects. But I think the following resolution would be right :
to feel and carry the responsibility to do well whatever we do and
to grow and improve our  love  to music in general, by listening good music, being curios about it.

Let's do not rush  to give up when something more difficult is on your way. Human's mind has amazing abilities. Remember we can resolve any difficulty if we put our mind into it + time and energy. When we resolve a little challenging task, we grow immediately and  become stronger.

8. Where to find INSPIRATION:  CONCERT. YOUTUBE. MUSIC WORKSHOP (master class), CD player in car.  Please put at least 3-4 concerts  of classical music to attend in a year. Listen piano concertos by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff   in car while driving to school.  WHERE; San Diego Symphony Hall (family festivals for smaller children, regular concerts for older), Escondido Center of Arts, Museum of Making Music sometimes offer interesting musical programs.