How to Learn a Piano Piece FROM SCRATCH [My 6-Point System!]

hey everybody welcome back to my channel I'm Dr Kate Boyd and I'm a professor of piano at Butler University in Indianapolis Indiana and I'm here to help you take your playing to the next level this video is about how to learn a new piece from the ground up I actually had the idea to make this video because I showed my system to several of my new students last semester and honestly they have been completely changed pianists as a result they're learning music much more efficiently much more effectively and their self-confidence that the piano has gone through the roof because they realize that actually they're making significant progress every single day at the piano and so I'm really excited to show this system to you today in this video I'm going to go through my system and I'm going to show you how I applied to learning a brand new piece myself to illustrate this I picked a piece that's brand new to me it's a beautiful Barker role by the Romantic French composer named Mel Boni if you want to follow along I've put a link to the sheet music in the description and I'm going to provide the version that I annotate over the course of this video so you can follow along now I love acronyms because they make things easier to remember and so because learning a brand new piece can be somewhat stressful the acronym I use here is stress which is really actually the opposite of what the system does it's designed to alleviate stress from the early stages of learning a new piece so my system the anti-stress system has six points to it each point correlates to a different letter in the word stress the first letter is s and it stands for sections it's important to divide the piece into sections as your very first step and what I mean by sections is this piece is eight pages long so I'm going to estimate that I'll probably divide it into between three and ten sections the way that I'm going to divide it into sections is I'm going to listen to it and then I'm going to hear where the music seems to start a brand new section and that will often correlate to when the texture changes or when the pattern change in the music and then what I'll do is I'll make a vertical line in the score as I listen to it and then when I'm done I'll see at the end how many sections that created I'll be right back all right so I've divided this piece into eight sections in order to figure out how long to make the sections you have to find the length that feels appropriate for you it should feel like a manageable amount of material if you're looking at one section of the piece and you just feel totally overwhelmed that's just a sign that you need to break it down into more sections you can have as many sections as you want in a piece or movement I personally find it a little overwhelming if I'm starting a new piece and there are like 50 sections to learn so to me eight feels like a very manageable number one really useful thing about listening to a piece first is that it helps you get a sense of the overall structure of the piece as I like to say listening to a piece before you learn it is like looking at the picture of the puzzle on the box before you do the puzzle it's not cheating to listen to it before you learn it you do not need to worry that you're going to be in the position of imitating the interpretation the artist did on the recording because you don't even know the piece yet if you are concerned about getting locked into a single interpretation of the piece before you've learned it then I recommend listening to about three different recordings of your piece back to back that will prevent you from getting too attached to any one performance and imitating what somebody else did so long story short it's totally safe and a very good investment of your time to listen to the piece at least once while following along in the score before you start learning it oh and also I've numbered my measures and that's always the first thing you should be doing too in cases when a score doesn't already have measure numbers written into it the second letter in the system is T which stands for take it from the end the reason that I always start a piece from the end is because psychologically it is so helpful as you play it nearing the end it gets more and more familiar instead of less and less familiar it also builds in this extra level of security that's just Irreplaceable another reason it's important to start at the end is because usually the harder stuff is toward the end of the piece and so you want to tackle that earlier in the process of learning so you have more time to get comfortable with it you don't want to do something like Play and Learn the first page get really really good at it and then turn the page and have the next thing be really hard and then get intimidated instead start from the end because then it's easier to keep exploring backwards closer and closer to the beginning of the piece now I have my eight sections so I'm putting number one at the end and going backwards marking each section that I previously decided back to number eight at the beginning the third letter in my system is R which stands for repeat until comfortable so you're going to work from the last section and you're going to choose a chunk from the end that makes musical sense like a musical gesture of some kind and you're going to repeat it correctly multiple times what this is is drilling this is crucial to the learning process now a quick word about the number of reps to do when you drill the number I recommend doing is between five and eight what you're looking for is feeling that something in your hands is kind of changing as a result of the Reps so when you drill and you do these repetitions you will feel like oh yeah now it's starting to sink in now I'm ready to move on to another fragment this is how I'm going to start drilling my new piece my first section starts at 88 and goes to the end however I'm not just going to start at 88 and play through to the end because there are many many fragments I need to learn before that that's like way too much information for my brain so I'm going to start in measure 108 and just look at the last four measures so the first thing I'm going to do is just play it hands together thank you all right so I looked at it and as you noticed I didn't try to force myself to play it in Tempo what I did was I played it and gave myself time to find each and every note now I'm noticing that the way that this is set up would benefit from playing it in blocks quartz so I'm going to play two notes at a time in the right hand and then new hand position here all right so that's how that is set up it's just all blocked so I'm going to drill it blocked I'm not even going to play it as written I'm going to do this this is my second repetition [Music] okay I missed that C flat so I'll get a little bit of a running start I'm just going over that a couple times so that's my done it three times and I'm just keeping track in the margins because I forget if I don't write it down I'm gonna go for six times that's how many I typically need to feel comfortable I missed that C flat again let me just do right before it and then okay that's my fourth time you can notice that I'm naturally increasing the tempo just a little bit it's not really a conscious thing as much as it is my fingers are ready to find the notes a little bit faster now I'm going to play it as written all right so that's my first fragment now I'm going to go backwards and I'm going to look at the texture and it looks to me that the texture changes in 105 where it says call Mato I'm going to look at that now what I notice here is that the right hand is going to take two notes of the melody each time so I'm marking that into my music [Music] thank you and then there okay that's my first real rep I'm also not deciding completely yet about my fingering I'm playing it a few times to see what feels intuitive thank you it's my second rep now this is the third repetition to go to G G now I'm gonna go all the way to the end to review the other little snipping right so you can see it it takes a long time to drill really well it also pays off in big dividends it's important to be methodical and to work back in little chunks that are something that make musical sense to you and that you can then retain as you do repetitions I'm not going to obviously Bore You by doing reps all the way back to my number one which is the first section but the idea is that you break up the section into small units like that and then you build them together and then you eventually get back to one and then you practice playing that to the end several times the next letter is e which stands for excellence matters the fact is the quality of your repetitions is super important it's crucial that each and every repetition is high quality and correct you know the phrase garbage in garbage out this applies to your practice too if you only remember one thing from this video remember this Excellence matters all reps are not created equal let's say you're playing basketball and you've decided you want to improve your accuracy on free throws having articulated that goal to yourself you certainly wouldn't just half-heartedly Chuck the ball in the general direction of the basket if you really wanted to see results you'd focus on your form and try to improve it each time so it's important not to just do a bunch of reps you need to make effort to do it correctly each time learn from the previous repetition and improve it for the next repetition here's what it sounds if I do a low quality rep of what I did earlier thank you so what I'm doing is I'm missing notes I'm playing inaccurate rhythms I'm not using the pedal to keep it smooth I'm not paying any attention to my voicing you get the idea right I'm going to do a high quality rep to show you the difference in terms of looking for excellence I'm paying attention to what voice I bring out I'm paying attention to rhythm oh and correct notes I took it at a Tempo I could actually play the fifth letter is s which stands for hands separate you are never too advanced to consider hand separate practice as a tool that can help you as you learn your music remember the goal here for each of your fragments and Reps is to find the optimal level of challenge we also want to minimize wasted time in the practice room because I would much rather be outside the practice room doing something interesting than spending too much of it inside the practice room doing something tedious and so I suggest that you start by trying to drill your sections hands together and if you notice that it's really really hard to play hands together break it down and do your reps hands separately if you can pretty comfortably play it hands together don't waste your time playing at hand separately a whole bunch of times but then if you play it hand separately learn it so that it's quite fast and quite comfortable go all the way up to Performance Tempo hands separately then then slow it back down and do it hands together here's how I would practice one of these little fragments hand separately I'm going to start and measure 99. first of all I'm going to start with the left hand foreign and I would write in fingering five three two one Etc and I would get it so that I could play the left hand pretty fast and so what I'm doing is I'm getting it so that each hand is totally comfortable on its own then I would slow it down Etc I would then play it hands together slowly and then do six reps of that the sixth letter is s which stands for slow practice the thing to keep in mind here is that if you are cognitively overloaded you will not be able to retain what you're trying to learn you need to feed your brain manageable chunks of information consistently with Excellence so that it can retain this information in the sensory memory take note of it in the short term memory without being overwhelmed and eventually move it to the long-term memory after a sufficient number of consistent correct repetitions the way I use slow practice in learning a new piece is to take it at a Tempo where I won't make mistakes and if I make a mistake I go back and correct it immediately you need to use your common sense and not waste a lot of practice time doing blanket slow practice in sections that don't need it if you have a complicated figure preceded by something you can play quite easily for example don't father repeating the easy thing tons and tons of times at a slow tempo because you can already play it this is much much more effective than blindly following a rule to play something a certain number of times with the metronome at a very slow tempo a good way to determine whether you're practicing something at the right Tempo is to notice the level of ease you feel while playing if it's a huge effort to play all the notes then you probably need to slow down if you can easily play it correctly musically and with good Rhythm and Tempo and doing repetitions feels completely unchallenging to you and might even be boring that's a sign it's probably a good idea to go ahead and move on to a new section while practicing it's important to find that Goldilocks level of challenge something that's neither too hard nor too easy so here's how I would apply slow practice to a fragment that I'm drilling I'm going to look at measure 99 and I'm just going to show you a little piece of it although the fragment goes all the way until 103 but I'll play it slowly and the idea is to have a good Rhythm and that I'm not missing notes I'm taking a Tempo where I'm not going to miss notes Etc right I'll do that that section but let's say that I couldn't do it at that Tempo accurately and instead the only way I could play it was like this [Music] okay that's a sign that I need to do hand separate practice that is not a good use of practice time if you think of how long it would take for me to do those three measures Not only would it take a long time but my brain is too overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information and so it I just won't retain it and that's where you really get into trouble that's where you start to feel like you're practicing and practicing and not making meaningful progress so if that describes sometimes when you practice then go back and learn the left hand now if it's just impossible to play the left hand alone or the right hand alone without great great effort then probably you need to work on something that's not quite as challenging for you that's at an easier level and then work up to the piece that you're trying to learn you're going to have more fun and ease and pleasure from playing the piano if you're playing pieces that are at the appropriate level for you and you will continue to improve and evolve and eventually get to the point where you are ready to play the piece that was so challenging for you if you're interested in how to learn a new piece of the piano you'll also be interested in understanding the foundations of why this system works so well and how the brain processes a new piece when you start it I made a whole video about that right here go ahead and click on that now to continue I'll see you there and happy practicing

Channel: The Piano Prof | Kate Boyd

Views: 11,350

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Id: VGkJoB_V1bE

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023