How should I practise?
How should I practise?
Intro
You are probably reading this because you want to get better at playing the piano. Wanting to get better will give you the motivation, which is essential, but one of the most important things you need to progress is to know how to practise well.
One of the least effective ways to practise the piano is to start at the beginning of the piece and slowly grind your way through to a point when you start to lose concentration and interest. I see so many piano students take this approach to practising, and playing the piano can quickly become a chore and puts a lot of people off. So an important thing to think about when you practise is that you should try and make each session positive. That way you are more likely to want to come back again and again to practise, which is when you are most likely to make quick progress.
Below you will find some tips and techniques you can use when you practise which can help every practice session to be positive and productive. Don’t worry about trying to cram your practice full of these techniques, just using one or two might make a massive difference to how fast you learn new music. These practice tips are general practise tips and are not specific to any type of music or problem which might arise in some of your pieces. I will try and cover detailed practice techniques soon.
Everybody practises in a different way using different methods, and different practice techniques suit different people. There isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach to practising. But remember that the more you practise and experiment with the techniques, the better you get at it.
Techniques
1. Set a target
Try and set a target for how much new music you want to learn. Although it’s good to make sure you do your X minutes a day, don’t worry too much about time, it is better to concentrate on good quality practice and reaching your target.
2. Practise back to front
It sounds a bit counter intuitive but many people will swear by this method and it works for a few reasons. If you start at the beginning of the piece you are always moving from familiar music towards unfamiliar music until you reach the point where you can’t go any further, which can be frustrating and a negative experience. Instead of starting from the beginning try starting from say the last line of music and work your way back line by line. This way you will always be moving from something familiar towards something even more familiar. As well as helping you feel more positive about the piece it can also help you feel more relaxed as the music becomes more and more familiar, with less chance of mistakes or tension creeping in.
3. Sight reading
Try sight reading through a few bars or a phrase of new music before you start to learn it in detail. Once you have sight read it, try it one more time and see if you can improve on your first go by learning from your mistakes first time round. It doesn’t matter if you play lots of wrong notes when sight reading, instead you should keep going and follow the shape of the music with a steady pulse and getting as close to the rhythm as you can. This really helps you to get an idea of how the music goes and it helps you to learn to read music quicker.
Sight reading is a topic which I will cover in more detail soon. Being able to sight read well is a great skill to have. Every aspiring pianist dreams of being able to open a music book and just play it straight away, and people who are good at sight reading can do just that.
If you would like to practise sight reading there are good books such as the Joining The Dots
4. Practise hands separately
This can help you to work out fingerings more easily and it is easier to play with one hand fluently so try and concentrate on getting the rhythm right.
5. Practise small sections and repeat, repeat, repeat until it is fluent
Trying to learn a large section of music can be hard work, very unrewarding and slow going. A more efficient way is practising small sections, for example two three or four bars at a time depending on how difficult the music is. Aim to get it as fluent as you can by repeating it over and over, but don’t worry about playing too fast, a slow and steady but fluent play through is much better than a fast stuttering play through. Playing fluently is the sign that you have memorised the music. If the music is very difficult you can even work on just one bar at a time. Once you have mastered that bar, move on to the next bar and do the same, then try and stitch the two bars together and so on, until you can play a whole phrase fluently. It really is one of the most efficient ways to memorise music.
6. Vary the tempo
When you repeat a phrase say four or five times, it’s quite easy to lose concentration. To help stop this, try varying the tempo of each repetition for example,
slow - slow - medium - medium - fast
A good way to keep track of your changing tempo is to use a metronome..
6. Identify problems and fix them straight away
If there is a section which keeps going wrong, or you can’t play as fluently as the rest of the piece, make sure you concentrate on that area and try and fix it as soon as you can. If you leave it, it will always be there and you won’t feel as satisfied with your piece until you have solved it.
7. Play it perfect first time (top tip!)
Aim to play each bar perfectly as you practise, no matter if that means playing very slowly to start with. Practising with lots of mistakes will mean the music is more difficult to memorise.
8. Mix it up
Make sure that you mix up your practice sessions with easy fun pieces as well as the hard pieces. Try and do the hard work at the start of the practice session so you can do some guilt free fun playing afterwards. But don’t forget to do a recap of any new music learned at the end of your session to help it stick in your memory.
9. Practise the same day after a piano lesson
Your teacher (if you have one) is a gold mine of information, make sure after your lesson you remember as much of that information and put it into practice while it is still fresh in your mind
Also, if your lesson is once a week try doing the bulk of your practice in the few days after your lesson and save any days off from practice for later on in the week. This can help you feel more positive about your progress and you are less likely to have the dreaded “Oh dear my lesson is tomorrow and I haven’t done enough” feeling that I suspect we all have had at some point.