If you're wishing for faster piano progress this
video is for you. Today I want to share with you 5 Bad Piano Habits that I see beginners
make all the time. Some of these may feel a bit common sense but I'm actually going
to go deeper into why these are actually big problems if you don't fix them for the long
term. I'm gonna count them down from number five to number one so make sure you stick to the end.
Before we get into what these five bad piano habits are, make sure you like and subscribe
to this channel to stay in touch with more of these free piano lessons and tutorials. Mistake
number five is: Always practicing hands together. What I just did is something I
see beginners make all the time, which is they always practice hands together. And
because they do that, they're not able to isolate where the problematic areas are. Whereas instead
if you were to work on them hands separately... ...before you then put it together. Much much better! Your brain will thank
you tremendously. Now I get why you love practicing hands together. It's because, well,
that's how the original music sounds. But if you actually want to improve your playing
of those parts, you need to help your brain by separating your hands. Master each hand really,
really well before you put them together. There is something I love to say to my piano students,
and that is that in piano one plus one equals five. What does that mean? What I mean is, in
piano playing the hand coordination that you need to execute a piece or a song really really well,
is actually many levels higher than just mastering two hands. You can't sort of just jump in and
play hands together perfectly straight away. A much better way to go about it is to practice
right hand really really well, left hand really really well, before you put them together. Bad
habit number four is: Always using the pedal. Now I get that practicing with the pedal just
feels a lot nicer and sounds a lot better. Because it got this kind of surround sound effect when you
use it. But, especially in the learning stages of your piece, I recommend you to actually not use
it very much at the start. People often say piano playing is a very difficult task because you've
got to coordinate two hands. When you always add the pedal into your music, you're not only
coordinating two but three limbs - hand, hand, and leg. The point that I'm sharing now is something
similar to the point that was shared before. And that's talking about this concept of isolation.
If you want to get better at a specific part, it's really important that you isolate that part
as opposed to trying to juggle 10 balls at once. Bad habit number three is: Not practicing daily.
Let me break this one down for you. It seems very sort of common knowledge but here's why
this is important. A key element to your piano progress is something called "sleep".
Without getting too much into the science of it, every time you practice piano and you then
go to sleep, your brain transfers your knowledge learned and your experiences into
long-term memory. So it's really important, whether you're learning the banjo, learning
how to cook, learning a new language, to do a little bit every day. Because you do
a little bit every day, you sleep every day, you become stronger a little bit more every day.
For example, if you're learning a piano scale... if you simply did just two minutes a day. Two
minutes of riding the scale up and down. So two minutes a day, times seven days, that gives you
14 minutes by the end of the week. Where you've done two minutes a day, you would have mastered
that scale so much better than if you just did the entire 14 minutes in one day. Huge achievements
are made up of small steps along the way. So give this one a try. Bad habit number two is:
Relying either too much on memorizing or reading sheet music. In my experience as a teacher, there
are two main kinds of students: there are students who love playing music through reading sheet
music, and there are students who love playing music through memorizing notes without the sheet
music. Which of these groups are you part of? Let me know in the comments below. Growing up learning
piano, I always was more of the second group. I would hate reading sheet music and sort of
read something once or twice and immediately try to commit it to memory. So I don't have to read
the sheet music again. The problem with that was I didn't work on my sight reading very much and
that actually capped my level after a while. I realized I couldn't progress much further in
piano because my reading was just not up to my standard of technique. So it's really important,
whether you are a huge reader or a huge memorizer, that you actually do the opposite and build the
opposite skill. And now moving on to our Number One piano bad habit. The number one bad habit I
see many beginners make is: Practicing too fast. This is what I see a lot of students do
they learn the notes. They start practicing slowly and then eventually they can play pretty
fast. And when they can play pretty fast, they never go back to the slow practice. So
after a while, they actually play these notes on autopilot mode and they're not actually conscious
and mindful about the notes that are happening anymore. So over time when they are asked to play
that passage, they can play something like this... It's unclean. It's not on time. It's
a little bit messy. I recommend you, at whatever stage in your piano learning,
to always go back to the slow practice. Why slow practice? To always be conscious of
what is happening with our fingers on the piano. I might even go slower than
that. this one... this one... After practicing slowly for about 10
to 20 minutes, I can guarantee you, you're gonna play that passage a lot better.
Because you simply know the exact movements that need to happen as opposed to sort of just
jumping in and playing everything on autopilot. And there you go, we've come to the end of the
Five Beginner Piano Bad Habits. Which of these can you relate to the most? Let me know in
the comments. Let me know what other piano questions you have. Ninety percent of the content
on this channel are inspired by your questions. Have a great day of practice and
I'll catch you in the next video.
