How To Practice Piano Efficiently and Correctly
Practicing the piano is an art form unto itself, and unless you do it correctly, you could waste countless hours without improving. Follow our exhaustive piano practice guide, and remember - consistent, slow, and careful practice is the only way forward.
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General Tips For Effective Piano Practice
Practice The Piano Every Day
As our Philadelphia piano teachers will tell you, consistency is more important than quantity. It’s the same when you learn any skill - a few minutes per day will lead to consistent improvement. Even 20 minutes per day is excellent - and it’s far more effective than practicing three hours only one day a week. It’s like “cramming” during college - you’ll forget everything you studied the next day if you cram.
Rather than focusing on how many minutes you’ve practiced, think about accomplishing at least one goal every day. Goal oriented practice will help you see your progress, feel more fulfilled, and take as much time as you need to meet that goal - whether it’s 10 minutes or 30.
Use a Metronome - Work With Different Tempos
When practicing anything, use the metronome. With a piece of music, you should start with a slow practice tempo (half temp at the most). Then, as you get better, turn it up ten notches, and so forth.
Also, practice with the metronome at double time. So in a 4/4 piece that you are practicing at 60 BPM, you’d want to set the metronome to 120 BPM so that it matches up with the eighth note subdivisions. This promotes evenness and rhythmic accuracy.
Practice Piano Slowly: It’s the Only Way To Learn
It may seem counterintuitive, but if you want to learn piano quickly, you have to practice slowly.
The National Institute of Health cites a study in which a group of students were given a more arduous, slow learning technique when studying math, compared to a control group that followed a traditional learning model. The students who took the slow route performed poorly on a test the next day; however, when they took the same test a week later, they outscored their peers significantly.
Another study tested word recall by college students: half of the words in a list were typed in a large font, and the second half in a smaller print. Surprisingly, the students recalled the words in small print more accurately - a testament to the fact that if we force ourselves to really grapple and “chew on” a given subject matter (in this case, piano), it will find itself into our long term memory.
You won’t play the piano fast in the first year. You are wrestling with fingerings, note reading, rhythm, two hands at the same time, technique, and more. But if you slow down and truly internalize the material, you won’t need to circle back and learn the same concept twice.
Hand Position, Posture & Technique Always Matter
Do not get lazy with your technique. It might seem like it doesn’t matter when you are first starting, but trust us, it does matter!
If you practice with incorrect technique, all of the following and more can occur over time:
You will develop wrist pain, or even carpal tunnel, because of the tension
You will not play beautifully - bad technique does not allow you to phrase passages and connect notes musically
You will not be able to gain speed - your scales, arpeggios, and difficult passages will be hamstrung by your poor technique
In short, practicing with correct technique helps you avoid tension - tension, over time, will damage your body, prohibit you from using arm weight (arm weight is important for good tone), stop wrist rotation and other techniques that lead to beautiful playing, and keep you from playing quickly.
Don’t Practice Wrong Notes!
Every time you practice a wrong note, a habit is born. But if you start practicing your new music or etude very slowly and carefully the first time, you won’t have to “unlearn” anything later. In short, if you lack discipline and play through music sloppily or ignore mistakes, it becomes that much harder to learn it correctly.
It feels like you aren’t making progress at first if you practice with discipline. But the end product - a polished, accurate piece of music - will reveal itself far sooner if you are disciplined.
Rachmaninoff, when asked how he achieved perfection in his playing, replied (paraphrase), “I don’t play wrong notes.” Be like Rachmaninoff - if you can’t play it perfectly, it’s too fast.
Tips For Learning your Repertoire
Start With The Challenging Parts
Don’t start playing your literature from the beginning every time. When you first start the piece, identify the hardest parts of the music, and dedicate at least five minutes per practice session. Then, you can circle back to the easier or more satisfying passages that need less time. A worst-case scenario is when you’ve been making great progress, and then - Bam! - you encounter a brutally hard part. Morale is lost, and progress becomes slow.
Practice In Sections
Firstly, identify all of the sections in your music that are alike. For instance, the first statement of the main theme. Does it come back around several times in the piece? Pencil a bracket around each iteration of the theme, and make a point to practice that section looking at the music in each place it appears. Your visual memory will play tricks on you otherwise.
Secondly, identify sections that are unique. Meaning, they only happen briefly - usually a tricky development section or coda. You should dedicate specific time every day rehearsing those several times, because they only occur once in the music and you won’t play them as often otherwise.
Once you’ve divided your piece into sections, a great idea is to practice those sections in different order every day - that way, you won’t neglect the last section, and your memory won’t be dependent on you playing them in order.
Further down the road, you should practice starting each section for memory. Have a friend call out “start section C,” and you should be able to instantly recall that passage. If you can do this, it will be an excellent hedge against memory slips in performances.
Consider Memorizing the Tricky Measures or Passages Early On
If you are playing a piece with a few technical traps, force yourself to memorize those early on. Then, every time you walk by the piano, you can sit down and play through it slowly without even opening your music - you’ll be shocked at how well you can play these sections come performance time.
Think About The Theory
Perhaps it’s not worth analyzing every measure of a development section, but you’ll memorize the music faster if you know what the chord progressions are, what key you are in, etc.
Basically, think like a composer - it’s the best way to memorize your music. You also won’t truly master a piece of music until you understand each element, and that includes the theory.
For instance, you should know that you start the piece in A major, transition into the relative F sharp minor, modulate through a development section based on five-of-fives, and arrive back in A major after the cadenza. It wouldn’t hurt to scribble your analysis into your score (with a pencil!).
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Specific Techniques To Master Difficult Passages
Drilling the Rough Sections
Colloquial wisdom states that you should be able to play a difficult passage perfectly 100 times before it’s ready for a performance. This is a deeply frustrating practice technique, but you can accomplish this by playing it in 10 groups of 10, for instance.
Slowly Increasing Tempo
Similar to drilling, tick the metronome up 2 marks after each repetition. Or better yet, play a passage five times perfectly, then add two ticks. This will help you plug up any technical holes you may have missed.
Different Rhythmic Grouping
If you have a fast scalar or arpeggiated passage, practice it with dotted rhythms (long-short and short-long). This will help you play it more evenly and accurately. You can also group the notes into triplets or quadruplets if the number of notes allow.
Blocking The Chords
If you are trying to learn or memorize a difficult passage written in a broken chord pattern, always block the chords. In other words, don’t play the notes as arpeggios, but group them into the filled-out chord as a triad, for instance. Chopin’s “Ocean Etude” is a perfect example - you will memorize the piece much faster if you have memorized the actual blocked chords.
Rapid-Fire Practice
After you’ve learned the notes carefully, it’s time to drill the speed. To accomplish this, play a tricky passage as fast as you can (accurately) repeatedly. You will need to rest in between repetitions or you could get tense.
You can benefit from this technique even before you can play something perfectly. Let’s say you have a brutally fast, measure-long sequence that starts and ends with your thumb. You can drill that passage as quickly as possible, making sure you begin and end on the right note - this helps you internalize the muscle memory needed to play the passage accurately from beginning to end.
Try Switching Into “Musicality” Mode
Sometimes we hit a wall when practicing technical passages. It can be helpful to change your mindset, turn the metronome down a few clicks, and practice while focusing on voicing, balance, phrases, articulation, tone, and other interpretive concepts. It gives your brain something more artistic to think about, and it still allows you to internalize the technique.
How To Practice Your Scales and Arpeggios on the Piano
Scales and arpeggios - they aren’t fun! But they help you develop finger independence, dexterity, and technique, and you will be able to learn difficult pieces of music much faster if you can already identify scalar or arpeggiated passages. Here are a few specific practice techniques.
A Variety Of Articulations
Practice your scales staccato, slurred, in two-note slurs, and portato (a sticky staccato). This helps you develop more finger independence, and when a piece of music calls for one of these techniques, you’ll execute it better.
With Dynamics
Why do we practice scales like robots? We shouldn’t. Practice them loud, soft, crescendoing up and decrescendoing down, and vice versa. You’ll be shocked at how it actually is to play scales legato with crescendos and decrescendos. You can also build in your own climax - in short, pretend it’s a piece of music.
A Variety of Rhythms
As mentioned above in the repertoire section, you should practice your scales with dotted rhythms (long-short, short-long), in triplets, in quadruplets, and with the metronome set to the beat and the subdivision. Some people even practice their scales with a whole octave set to a beat - this is a good way to drill speed and practice connecting large groups of notes smoothly (in a performance, you don’t want the audience to notice subdivisions, for instance).
Intervals
Play your scales in thirds and sixths as you become more advanced. Further down the road, you can even play your scale with thirds in both hands (four notes being played. simultaneously). At this point, you have earned the right to create your own methods of practicing scales.
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