Practice tips for pros!
You’ll never hear the end of it: how long to practice, how many days to practice, and NOW how best to practice. I promise this is the most important.
How to practice efficiently and with the best use of your time is the BEST skill you can learn as a piano student, and parents can also benefit from knowing how best to encourage mindful and productive practice sessions. When I was in college I aimed to practice 3.5 hours a day, and that is a low average for the professionals. I no longer have that kind of time to set aside for practice and I imagine the majority of my students with their schools, jobs, extra curriculars, and sometimes kids of their own do either. So how do you make the most of your precious time so that you aren’t dreading your lesson or have to tell me long lamented sentence: “I didn’t really have time to practice this week”? Here are my best tips for effective practice:
-Practice slow: You already know this one. I say it a lot. I cannot stress it enough. Learn slowly, practice slowly, read slowly. I often incorporate 2-3 days each week designated only to very slow practice. This means I concentrate on maybe a page at a time, usually for about 7 minutes at a time, and practice hands separate and then hands together WAY under tempo. The result on days when I go back to tempo as marked are astounding. Try it and you won't regret it. You probably won’t spend a lot of time in lessons going over mistakes either.
-Play challenge spots first: It’s unappealing at first, but why not get it out of the way? Carefully marking with a pencil what measures give you trouble will help you target what measures need to be practiced after scales. By playing trouble spots first (SLOWLY), you get to use your freshest brainpower for the hard parts, and the rest of your practice can be spent with less potentially frustrating material.
-Play backwards: What do you think happens if you always play from the beginning to the end? Spoiler: the beginning gets better than the end. Playing from the last page to the first page can be more interesting, and evens out the attention spent on each page.
-Play Hands Separately, but with pizzaz!: Who says hands separate practice needs to be dull? Use all the dynamics, phrase markings, staccatos, accents, etc. to add entertainment to each hand’s performance. Adding all the musicality when practicing hands separate means double the entertainment when they come back together!
-Finger numbers are important (but they don’t tell you what note to play): Use the finger numbers provided in your music, it’s there for a reason. Often the composer wrote those finger numbers, sometimes a publisher added them later. Either way, they’re for the player’s benefit and ease. That said, finger numbers will not always assume what “hand position” you’re in, and therefore do not tell you to play whatever note that finger may already be on. Read both the note and the finger number before you play.
There are many more tips I have, but I’ll leave you again with this important one: Don’t practice until you can play it right, practice until you can’t play it wrong!
