Whether you are just starting out or have been playing for some time, I hope that the following tips will be useful to you in making your progress more efficient and more enjoyable!
- Short, frequent practice sessions are far more effective for learning than occasional marathon sessions. You will make much more progress practising 20 minutes twice a day than doing 4 hours over the weekend! Performing an activity regularly is the best way for our brains and bodies to learn how to do it more effectively. This means that “practice” does not have to entail hours of self torture! Keeping practice sessions short has many advantages. It allows us to stay focused and relaxed for the entire practice session, making learning more efficient and enjoyable, and it prevents practice from feeling like hard work, which it isn’t – playing music is enjoyable, that’s why you started learning an instrument!
- Set small, specific achievable goals. “I want to get better at the piano” is something every pianist in the world has in their minds, but to achieve that, we need to master small things, one at a time. An example of a small goal like this might be “I’m going to master the C major scale in both hands” or “I’m going to master the first 8 bars of this piece”. If you know exactly what you’re working towards, and keeping the tasks small and manageable, even 10 minutes of practice can be effective in working towards this. Mastery of an instrument comes from mastery of very small things, one step at a time.
- Create a clutter-free, distraction-free practice environment. If we get to practice for 20 minutes, we want to spend all 20 of those completely absorbed in the task at hand. In the 21st Century we’re surrounded by small distractions such as mobile phones, computers and televisions that all drain our ability to focus on something properly. If we really were able to focus with all our attention on something for 20 minutes, we would achieve far more than an hour of mindless repetition.
- Work on very small sections of music at a time. New players often play a piece the whole way through every time they practice it. If we break a piece down into smaller sections, we get to repeat those sections a lot more times, and really notice any weaknesses or flaws in that section. This is another reason why short practice sessions can be effective – if we only need to practice 4 bars of music, we can make improvements on those 4 bars in just 5 or 10 minutes, and it prevents us feeling overwhelmed by longer pieces.
- Aim for accuracy over speed. If we perform something carefully and slowly, eventually we will become able to do it faster – it’s a natural progression. People often try to practice new material too fast, which leads to ingraining bad habits and learning new mistakes! Speed will come from accuracy.
- Increasing speed – One of the most common challenges for a musicians is getting the tempo of a piece up. The method I use involves finding a “base tempo” or “practice tempo” that is a speed where it feels really easy and there is no anxiety or tension. A good way to find this practice tempo is to try playing something faster by increments, and find that tempo where you start making mistakes. Then drop this tempo by 10-20% to get your base tempo. Let’s say I find that 100bpm is my practice tempo. In one practice session I will start off at 100bpm, then try 105bpm and 110bpm, maybe even 120bpm to see how it feels to play it at that speed. After a few days I might find that 105bpm has become the new “base tempo”. A metronome is an essential piece of kit for any musician – you can easily download a free metronome app on your phone or tablet. Which brings us on to..
- Relax. Playing the keys on a piano requires very little effort, yet people often tense up their entire bodies when they are practising. This is actually a natural bodily response when we find something difficult, so to counteract this tension, make your practice easy! Play things slowly, play small manageable sections. Thoughts like “I need to practice all of this stuff by tomorrow!” or “I need to get this much faster right now!” will lead to tension, which makes us play worse and feel stressed out, which in the long run will lead to a negative association with your practice sessions. If we want our playing to feel easy and effortless, we should practice in this manner too!
- Aim for complete mastery of the material you learn. This means being able to play it effortlessly every single time. It is far more beneficial for your as a player to master 8 bars of music than play 32 bars badly. Let’s take the C major scale for example. If we really spent the time to master this properly, we would also be learning the fingering pattern for G major, E major, A major, D major, and a lot of other scales, so when we go to learn these new scales, we have already mastered the fingering pattern for them! Mastery can take time, but it’s our own impatience and frustration that prevents mastery. Thoughts like “I’ve been playing this for 2 weeks and I still make mistakes, argh!” cause us to rush through material, move on to something else, and we ingrain the habit of practising to a level well below mastery. Instead, think “This piece is getting a little closer to mastery every time I practice it”. There is not a musician in the world that can play everything – the world class musicians you see or listen to have mastered WHAT THEY ARE PLAYING right now. Each bar of music that we master makes us a better player, but playing 500 bars scrappily won’t do anything good for us (or whoever is listening!).
- Record yourself. Listening back to our playing when we’re not at our instrument often reveals a lot of things we didn’t hear while we were playing it – the cause of this is usually that our attention is split between listening and paying attention to the physical side of playing – watching our hands for example. Recording and then listening back allows us to devote 100% of our attention to listening. We are able to hear parts we liked (which can be very encouraging), and parts we didn’t like so much. Listen and analyse, and decide what you would like to be different about it. This gives you more specific things to work on to improve it, rather than “this just needs more practice”.
Recommended books on piano practice:
The Musician’s Way, Gerald Klickstein – A comprehensive guide to efficient practice technique and attitude, as well as performance tips and looking after your body and mind as a musician.
Effortless Mastery, Kenny Werner – Jazz Pianist Kenny Werner offers some very interesting insights into achieving effortless mastery of an instrument through the elimination of the stress and anxiety that works against us in achieving this.
Piano Lessons in Sevenoaks
For piano lessons in the Sevenoaks area, please visit the lesson info page