Five Pro Tips For Better Piano Practice — How To Make Faster Progress On The Piano

[Music] every week loads of you get in touch with me because you want my advice about piano practice you want to know things like how long you should practice or how you should organize your practice routine quite a few of you are also interested in finding out how you can judge your own progress typically because you're concerned that you're not progressing quickly enough and you want to know if you can speed things up a little bit so what i'm going to do today is take you through my five essential tips for practicing the piano more effectively and more efficiently these are all things that professional musicians kind of take for granted but which might not be obvious to you if you're a relative beginner on the instrument or if you're an amateur player now all of this stuff is pretty timely for me at the moment because as some of you already know i'm in the middle of writing a brand new book about how to be a better all-round musician and clearly practicing effectively is a major major part of that now that book is slated for publication in autumn 2020 and when it comes out i'll add a find out more link to the description text that accompanies this video and if you happen to be watching on youtube i'll also add one of those little youtube cards that appear in the top right hand corner of the screen okay on with the show five tips for making your piano practice more efficient and more effective starting with tip number one stop fretting about how much you practice instead focus on how often you practice that's because practicing just a little bit every single day of the week is much more effective than practicing in big chunks just once or twice a week now professional musicians have known this for centuries but these days psychologists have a name for the phenomenon it's one aspect of what they call the spacing effect to put it simply when your brain is learning a complex new task it takes time to lay down and reinforce the new connections it needs in order to master that task and you can help it to do that more efficiently by keeping it topped up with these regular little reminders of what it's supposed to be doing if you just hit it with big blasts of information every now and then it finds that harder to process so what does that mean in practical terms well for most of us it means that 20 or 30 minutes a day of focused practice and we'll come on to what that means in a second 20 or 30 minutes a day of focused practice six or seven days a week is absolutely fine you'll often hear classical and jazz musicians at the top of their game saying that they practice for six or seven hours a day or however long and yes often they do but don't aim for that as an ideal those guys are the real professionals they have to be the top tenth of one percent in the world okay and practicing for that long carries risks first of all you risk injury lots of professional musicians have major problems with repetitive strain injury and secondly you set yourself up for failure if you say to yourself i'm going to practice two hours a day every day then when you fail to meet that goal as you inevitably will you feel like a failure and you get demoralized much better to aim for that achievable 20 or 30 minutes a day six or seven days a week and you should find that that is the absolute ideal for making steady progress especially if you're in your first few years of learning the instrument [Music] tip number two always remember that there's a difference between playing the piano and practicing the piano if you just sit down at your piano and play through stuff that you're already comfortable with then that's great you'll really enjoy yourself and being able to do that is one of the reasons that you learn the instrument in the first place but don't kid yourself that that is practice because it's not practice is by definition always challenging and that's because when you practice what you're trying to do is send a signal to your brain that it needs to upgrade itself to meet the demands of a difficult new task and if your practice feels easy it's just not going to get that message it's a little bit like going to the gym if you walk into your local gym and pick up a really light weight you might be able to lift that for 60 70 80 repetitions you might get tired eventually but fundamentally your body can meet the demand that you're placing on it and because of that it won't bother upgrading it won't see the point okay instead what you need to do is pick up a heavy weight that you can only lift for eight or nine or ten repetitions and do that lift that consistently then your body sees that there's a challenge that it is being consistently presented with because you're training day after day week after week and in response it will upgrade itself it will meet the challenge you will get stronger muscles your brain works the same way when you're learning a tough new skill like playing the piano okay you need to put yourself in a position of consistent challenge so if you're practicing and it feels easy that is not practice but here's the thing you mustn't challenge yourself too much you need to stay in a kind of sweet spot between challenging and achievable if you work on material that is too difficult that's almost worse than working on stuff that's too easy it would be like thinking you know i need to get stronger so i'll go and lift an elephant the task will be so far out of your range that you wouldn't make any progress at all so always stay in that challenging but achievable sweet spot tip number three don't worry too much about your rate of progress on the piano now based on a lot of the emails and messages i get quite a few of you do worry about your rate of progress and honestly usually it's needless now if you're making no progress at all over a period of months then that suggests that something does indeed need to change chances are that either you're working on material that's too difficult for you in which case make it more achievable or you're not practicing often enough in which case aim for the six or seven days a week that i was talking about earlier or perhaps you're working with a course or a teacher that doesn't really suit you and no one piano teacher or piano course works for everybody so don't feel bad if you have to make a change but as long as you're making some sort of progress don't worry too much about how fast it is it's not really worth worrying about progress because learning the piano like any complex skill tends to proceed in fits and starts yeah the way you develop and the rate at which you develop will be non-linear sometimes you'll have very quick periods of development then you'll have a plateau then another quick period of development then another plateau and it's really hard to predict when those different phases will come so when it comes to assessing your own progress it's pretty pointless trying to do it over the short term don't sit down and practice and say how does this sound compared to last week okay you can do that sometimes but don't make a habit of it it's much better to say how does this compare to last month okay or even better six months ago now how do you judge that because actually it's very hard to judge subjectively if you try to think back to how you were playing six months ago you might deceive yourself and in fact you'll tend to be hard on yourself which might lead you to get demoralized a really good way of making it objective is to every now and then video or record yourself playing the piano then you can save that recording and six months later or three months later or however long come back to it and use it as a comparison and that will show you your real rate of progress even better it will show you your rate of progress in sub skills so six months down the line you can look at a video of yourself playing six months previously and say okay i've got better at dynamic control good but yeah my legato and fingering isn't everything it should be so i can really focus on that area [Music] tip number four attack the problem now most amateur players when they're learning a new piano piece or learning how to improvise over a new chord progression or song or whatever we'll just go through the process of playing it over and over and over they might divide it into sections beginning middle and end but fundamentally their approach is just to play through this piece or through this song lots and lots of times and that's how they learn it okay now when you're just starting out with a new project that can work fine in fact it's a good way of getting to grips with a new piece yeah but what the professionals do when things get difficult is find the problem areas and isolate them what amateurs tend to do is just to keep playing through and they'll get to the point where they can play most of the piece but they'll just be one or two problem areas that they just kind of bump over every time they play through and they might spend the whole half hour practice session playing this piece over and over again and most of the time they'll be playing stuff that they can play yeah but they'll just have these little bumpy sections and that's inefficient the professionals take those problem areas out take them to bits slow them down play them lots and lots of times maybe spend 20 minutes just playing a single bar over and over again attacking the problem and then when the problem is solved they'll drop it back into the piece okay so don't be one of those amateurs who just plays through from beginning to end over and over and over again always identify and attack the problems [Music] finally tip number five always remember to listen and pay attention when you're practicing or playing the piano if you and i were violinists or singers we wouldn't have this problem and that's because we would have to focus all the time on producing the sound using our breath and our vocal chords if we were singers and our shoulder arm and hand if we were violinists and also on tuning the sound yeah but the piano does most of that work for us sure we have an influence over the dynamics the louds and softs yes we can influence things like phrasing and legato and staccato but once we have pressed a key the piano takes over and does most of the work of producing that sound and that means that when you're playing the piano it is fatally easy to zone out and just get into the mechanical process of pressing the right notes at the right times and that's a shame because once you're doing that you've lost focus on the really important things just pressing the right note to the right time is in some ways the least important part of playing the piano the most important part is putting in the expression the musicality the grace all of the stuff that makes your music worth listening to so the big problem here is that if you are conscientious and you practice every day you're more likely to run into this problem you sit down you do your practice you play your scales you play your pieces but before you know it your brain has wandered off elsewhere you're planning a holiday you're mentally writing a shopping list or something and your your hands are just mechanically pressing the right notes at the right time now that means you're not making effective music and it also possibly means if you're practicing rather than playing you're not really challenging yourself you're just playing through stuff that you can play quite comfortably so you need to get into the habit of consistently listening to the music that you make one way to do that is to avoid making your practice routine too routine yeah by all means practice at the same time every day and by all means start with a warm up because that's good for your hands and prevents injury but then within your practice session mix and match things up sometimes play a few scales then one of your pieces then a few more scales and a song you're improvising on or play your scales in a different order or play your one of your pieces with the last section first anything to make things a little bit unusual a little bit different so you don't purely get into the zone if you have an attack the problem mentality then that is much easier because every practice session will have at least part of it dedicated to identifying the problems in a particular piece or a particular song and trying to deal with them

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 19,418

Keywords: piano practice, piano practice frustration, piano practice for beginners, piano practice routines, piano practice tips, piano practice schedule, piano practice intermediate, piano, keyboard, piano lesson, bill hilton, practice piano, practice piano for beginners, practice piano everyday, practice piano effectively, practise piano

Id: Xk9ozR2rPOQ

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020