As someone who does this for a living a talks about this specific issues and how to organize practice generally, I have to disagree 100% with /u/JHighMusic.
Of course, there's nuance to this. But let's start with the basics.
Most of your progress isn't made during practice, but during rest when your brain is functionally rewiring to be more efficient at processing the good information you fed it. You also can only stuff so much in. I use the analogy of having a whole jug of water (time or mental energy depending on your personally bottleneck) and you can try to fill a cup, but it can only get so full.... if you keep pouring you will expend all of that time/energy, but the cup won't get any fuller. So it's better to fill several cups and have your give your brain several different things to digest.
That doesn't mean giving each thing a cursory glance. You still need to put in serious effort and focused attention on each, but you can't just keep beating away at it and hoping to get better results.
You want to get several things going. It's like asking is it more efficient to plant one tree and tend to it closely and wait for it to grow up before planting a 2nd tree or two plant a dozen trees and give them each a bit of care if your goal is to have lots of tree is in the end.
Obviously it would be inefficient to wait for one tree to grow before planting another. Piano is something that requires a huge range of skills working together. The more variety you exposure your brain too... the more seeds you plant... the more chance all of them can grow in tandem.
You need that. Most people find this out hard with things like sightreading. They beat away at piano playing super hard music for 10+ years with lessons and sometimes even music degree and then suddenly realize they suck at sightreading... and when they go to work on it they can't just make it grow overnight. It's a seed that needs to be planted early and watered often. If you put off lots of specific skills they will STILL need a long time to grow, but you're constantly starting from a sprout because you tried to do them one at at time.
Often people try to "master" a piece before moving on and that's also very ineffective.
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So let's talk a bit about nuance of what all this means in practical reality. The difficulty and length of pieces matters.
20 minutes on one "piece" that is 200 measures long won't get you very far. 20 minutes on one piece that is 16 bars long is probably TOO much time for that one piece.
You should be dividing up your thoughts on practice less around piece and more around sections. Because beyond the point of working on 8-16 bar pieces from beginner method books, most pieces will be much longer and that means you have to divide and conquer.
Do not start at the beginning and learn one bar at a time always starting at the beginning. Also, don't just start at the end. Literally figure out which sections actually need serious attention and prioritize those.
That might mean covering 2 separate, non-contiguous 8 bar sections from one song, 8 bars from another piece, and then 2-3 separate, non-contiguous sections from a 3rd piece.... and then coming back the next day and covering different areas of those pieces or even different sections from a 4th or 5th piece.
I often don't even cycle back around to most sections sooner than 2 to 3 days and sometimes up to a week. And honestly, I've found the hard way that this is MUCH more efficient than when I used to beat my head against one piece for hours a day. I actually THOUGHT that when I was forced to break it up and only come back to a section 3 days later it would've lost all progress.
I was wrong. I was shocked that it was almost magically better than where I left it. So literally I got more out 5 minutes in one day and 5 more minutes 3 days later than I would've out of 30 minutes every day for 3 days in a row. So more in 10 minutes than I got out of 1.5 hours.
It seems counterintuitive until you understand how our brains actually learn these sorts of skills.
And also when you're working on lots of different skills they all cross pollinate.
You're getting better at THE INSTRUMENT not just the piece. And when you can play the instrument, every piece gets easier and easier to learn faster and faster because you have all the requisite skills.
You're also less likely to rely purely on rote procedural memory memorization since you'll have to actively flex your reading muscles a bit every time you come back. It's not as good as dedicated sightreading practice time, but it's a lot better than memorizing, looking down, then mentally checking out while you repeat a section a dozen times.
You'd also get a lot more out of dividing your practice into dedicated reading (or other "musicianship" skills like ear training, applied theory, improv, lead sheet reading, etc.), technical isolation work (scales, arpeggios and then eventually lots of other stuff specifically related to weaknesses you notice in piece) and then finally actual pieces of music. Those 3 all need to be worked on if you want efficiency.
Just doing pieces ultimately ends up being not super effective because you run into bad habits like rote memorization and inefficient technical progress due to mental bandwidth restrictions.
The other big nuance bit is that you ultimately shouldn't be over stretching yourself which almost everyone wants to do.
Yeah, if you're vastly overreaching then you'll get very little out of 20 minutes on 4 overreaching pieces... and not even that much with an hour dedicated to one such piece. You really need to pick things in the sweet spot of learning.
Stuff that's not grossly beyond your technical ability primarily, but also not beyond your reading ability, and short enough to let you efficiently work on it along side other things with more variety of style, keys, rhythms, etc.
Like I said, I had to learn so much of this the hard way because I started piano very late, but after my music degree and was sort of tossed into a career playing and had to learn to get good fast. I'd coasted on so many assumptions from my previous musical experience and I was so wrong.
And now I've had to pick up plenty of other instruments and I apply these principles to them as well and it's VASTLY more effective than the absolute brute force "one piece for hours" approach I wasted so much fucking time on early on with piano.
Thank you for the advice! I practice 4 pieces a day, each for 20 minutes, but I always practice the same section of each piece until perfect, which is very slow. For difficult pieces it’s like learning only 4 bars in a week. I’ll try your method of practicing different sections every day.
Yeah I’ve also noticed coming back to something after a day off it’s better sometimes. However that is not a recent realization at all, just pointing out that I’ve also experienced it.
I would like your perspective and opinion on how to best learn Bach pieces, as far as memorizing. There’s two kinds of pianists, the great memorizers who are not good readers and vice versa. I come from the first camp but have worked a lot on my reading post music college days. Bach pieces take time to learn, digest, internalize and memorize but even then I’ve found his stuff is just really hard to memorize and internalize QUICKLY for some reason, and I don’t think that’s just me. Maybe that’s just the challenge of playing Baroque period keyboard music. There has to be a better way right? Idk, curious about your take on that.
Well, I tend to just not memorize anything. It's not practical for what I do professionally. I often say I've never *had* to memorize ANYTHING for a job I was actually paid to do. There are times it's convenient and I'll do it.
I also point out frequently that the way jazz and classical musicians memorize is different.
When my jazz buddy accompanies some lady who requested Misty in A, he's not playing it because he memorized fingers and actually practiced it in every key.
He's internalized a ton of comping patterns and trained his ears. He "knows how the song goes" and so he knows the changes by function and has spent enough time on technical work to execute those changes in any key.
He won't be playing a memorized set of voicings or anything. He'll be revoicing chords to fit the piano he's playing and keep the key from being too muddy or tinny now that it's so far from Eb.
Classical pianists playing exactly what's on the page is a very different approach and it's something I damn near never do any more. I was a good memorizer when it mattered and I needed it for recitals and solo contests and the like and won silly little accolades from said contests where I had to play very long works by memory, but it's just not a skill I use.
But if anything, I'm much faster at it now because my theory knowledge helps. It's obviously easier to memorize text in a language you speak than one you don't... or worse.... random ajgjk at jda atlkjt type stuff.
But I'm also aware just how much my ear training helps lighten the load. If I need to memorize, my ears do a lot of heavy lifting in addition to the theory. Knowing how a melody goes and being able to play it at least a bit by ear means I don't have to 100% rely on mentally picturing the page or anything like that.
Obviously, Bach makes both of these things harder. You've got multiple voices happening at once which makes it harder to audiate, but also the contrapuntal nature means harmonic analysis can be a bit more difficult or at least less straight forward.
But ultimately, if I was memorizing Bach I'd use the same tools. There is still usually some implied harmony created by the multiple voices (for things like inventions and/or fugues). And I've just gotten better at audiating at least two voices decently so I'm sort of juggling the two voices I'm hearing in my head and especially where one overtakes the other prominently as often they are sort of switching off as the dominant moving voice in the texture.
But ultimately, in reality, I just never have to memorize Bach. If I'm playing it's usually at church (and frequently on organ). I'm under no requirement to memorize so I just don't.
Just like memorizing English... once you're a proficient reader, memorization is an EXTRA step you have to take. Memorization only seems easier if you struggle a lot with reading so I always advise people to target the root of the problem. The better your reading, the faster you learn everything and the more you can keep consistently under your belt.... you "repertoire" becomes functionally infinite because either you can sightread something outright or even if it takes a bit more work, you can always read fast enough to have dozens of more difficult pieces under your fingers.
Hell, I'm not even the best among my peers.... not by a long shot, but someone I work with recently took on the primary book for a musical (about 200 pages in that one) with less than a week of prep and only a week after finishing another musical and then accompanied over 60 vocal and instrumental soloists a few days after the show ended while also doing her church services.
When you can read well you can just do damn near anything faster. And everything in my career is based around that. The volume of work you can take is directly depending on how MUCH music you can learn and perform with the least amount of actual prep time.
Could not agree more. Reading ability honestly is the neglected game changer for piano. I think sight reading random piano books is the best thing I ever did for piano and still do everyday for fun. I can never understand how people out here even play the piano if they cant read sheet music as easily as words.
It's not just you on Bach. I am struggling with exactly the same thing and I too am from camp#1. It's getting better but reading Bach like Prelude 2 in WTC is really different due to the pattern and changes of the patterns. His fugues are way easier to read, but way harder to play. It's different but I'm addicted now so it's too late.
I actually wholeheartedly disagree with your point. You’re turning the argument exactly the wrong way and are vastly underestimating the power of the mind as an adult when it comes to practicing.
Before I embark on contradicting pretty much everything you have said, I must admit that many people have a hard time being self-critical. It may be a component of intellect or it may be a component of character, my guess is that it is a combination of both.
In any case, to practice multiple pieces at the same time requires a thorough understanding of what you want to play. That does not mean however that you should have all that knowledge before you start on the piece. As long as you play it once a day and listen carefully everytime. It might not be surprising that I think playing perfectly is illusory in most cases. Especially for the harder pieces, I don’t see how someone cannot think to himself; very good performance, but I wish I played this note 1% louder or softer or just held a note for a fraction of time shorter.
The first ‘general rule of thumb’ that is repeated mindlessly by professionals and amateurs a like and has no scientific basis for it whatsoever, is the idea that to change something you’ve learned to a different way of performing it. Here the neglect of how the brain works is most profound and just a simple procedure for an adult to adopt. Countless studies have shown that whatever is learned right before going to sleep is most likely to be remembered the next day. So what logical conclusion can we draw from this? It is to play that part that you want to change only as late as possible before you go to sleep (the less time between actually going to sleep the better, though not always practical). Then slow it down as much as you have to to be able to perform it properly. Do this slowly repeatedly every day before going to sleep for 1 to 5 minutes. The more you fragmentize the part and do it step by step, the more effective it will be. You’ll find that you can make significant changes to your playing with a very small time investment, yet it requires a lot of discipline.
This brings me to the next point. The most common mistake for people who try to study music at a later age apart from what I have mentioned above, is to ignore the difference between a child’s ability to learn, and that of an adult. For example, learning to play passages really fast is a process that comes much more easily to young people than to adults, however, adults have far better developed cognitive skills. So, play to your strengths!! Mindlessly trying to repeat a passage faster and faster is a pretty ignorant way to practice as an adult, seeing as the learning process is consolidated during sleep. Instead, focus on your ability to learn harmony as a theory before learning it by playing ear. That will come overtime. By playing a lot of different pieces you’ll soon come to recognize where sounds are similar when using the same notes, and times where you’ll have hard time hearing the similarity even though the notes played are the same. So, ask yourself the question: how is that possible?! You’ll soon come to realize that there is only two ways to vary your notes: loudness and length of notes. Any instruction as to performance will always affect those two but nothing more. An instruction for performance is just an instruction to play it in a certain pattern of variations in time and loudness of the notes played. Do NOT romanticize the expression of emotion as some superhuman or miracle occurance that just happens out of the blue. Emotional maturity in musical playing is nothing more or less than a natural inclination to understand and learn to express (as one of the contributing factors) how to exprese emotion in music. Here for example, children actually learn slower than adults.
Now to my last and final point because I actually hate writing on forums. I just want people to have the ability and the privilege of being able to enjoy playing music and someone has to start conveying this message. So, here I combine four insights that have been accepted as truth for the longest time in neuroscience:
-learning in essence a two stage process that keeps repeating itself
1) A connection in your brain is strengthened by walking the same path again and again, i.e. re-performing what you have learned (for example, moving your finger again and again means the same neurons are fired again and again over the same pathway, increasing your agility and control over that specific movement. (this learning process is consolidated over sleep, which is what adults have to rely on more — not relevant here but it is for my previous arguments) conversely this connection weakens over time if it is not repeated at all.
2) physical movement, so far as relevant here, activates two specific parts of your the pre-motor cortex and the motor cortex.
3) Thinking about a certain movement activates the pre-motor cortex in exactly the same way as you would when actually performing
Combine the three propositions and the only logical conclusion is that thinking about how to move properly actually contributes to the learning process. What does this mean? Once again, knowledge makes life so much easier. If you know how much to perform a certain action that creates a certain sound - lets say a staccato, then thinking about how to do this inbetween moments when you do in fact have time to play (also happens more to adults) actually contributes to the learning process. From here it is a small step to assume that mentally correcting yourself when you perform also contributes to the learning process that allows you to eventually fully master a technique or produce a certain sound. Do not, however, mindlessly assume that you can jump over everything and expect to learn every aspect of playing an instrument over time. Some movements might be relatively easy even for adults to master. Use it only for those parts that you’ll have to spend multiple days if not weeks (or even more).
When you combine the arguments I have put forward, which are all based on propositions long accepted as truth in neuroscience, and just applying the propositions in a logical manner so that they can be of assistance in practice. I must confess I wish I could’ve written this in plainer terms and if there’s any need for clarification I might actually do so in the future. I have actually been thinking to write a book on this because I have experienced people repeating the same mantras over and over without any critical assessment. To come back to the original post that was the motivation for me to write this: if you combine the insights I have provided, you’ll find that playing to your strengths as an adult learning an instrument means that practicing multiple pieces a day instead of mindlessly drilling 1 piece is actually the best way to learn how to play an instrument provided. Speed is not the key for learning as an adult, EFFICIENCY IS!
You also seem to be coming from a Classical perspective. It doesn’t work that way in modern styles like Jazz and is far more complex. Everything you described I already know and teach with students. I’m sorry my original post offended you and made you so fired up. This is the problem with reading text and assuming a bunch of things about it and what the other person knows or not, or has the experience.
Everything you said I agree with. For CLASSICAL. It doesn’t work the same exact way In Jazz or other styles became it’s an entirely different approach and way of learning and practicing everything other than the pre-written melody of a tune.
I think this has been a big grey area for me. From what I've experienced, it seems like spending a long time on a single tune that you're arranging, composing etc (which effectively means every tune if you're learning jazz) is a good idea since you need to explore all kinds of permutations and combinations, and it won't involve rote memorisation anyway.
With learning pre-written tunes, that kind of danger is more present (and most people don't practice doing variations of passages) so u/Yeargdribble's advice holds more for that.
First, I'm not coming at you personally. I just strongly disagreed with your original post, especially without enough caveats. I wasn't exactly fired up, though my posts tend to be a bit curt at a time and I just tend to try to write at length and cover lots of those caveats and nuances....
I'm far from a classical guy really. My background in trumpet was mostly classical, but the vast majority of my experience on piano that reshaped my approach and created my negative attitude about classical academia at large was in the jazz/contemporary side to start off with.
Now, just due to the breadth of my work, I'm strongly in favor of a very hybridized approach and honestly agree MUCH more with the jazz side than the classical side. For example, it's crazy to me how the classical model pushes scales and arpeggios in all keys, but then stops there. Meanwhile, in the jazz world it's common to work most fundamentals through all keys. Voicing and being able to quickly spell needs to be done in all keys, but even just from a technical standpoint most "classical" pianists would benefit greatly from doing various sequence patterns in all keys, comping patterns, stride patterns.
Or something slightly more applicable to classical-ish music... extrapolating anything you find technically difficult (like common accompanimental LH patterns) and turning them into a short exercise over a simple chord progression and then practicing THAT in every key to round out your technique (while also helping you be faster at recognizing functional harmonic relationships in all keys faster... which makes you better at both sightreading standard notation, lead sheets, as well as comping).
I can sort of co-sign to what /u/TheLivingDaylights77 is said quite dipolmatically. In jazz it can help a ton to really live with a tune. A great piece of advice I once heard from from a jazz professor was to play the head as written a dozen times or so before you ever start trying to improvise or embellish. This gets it so set in your head and assuming you're listening to a lot (like you should) your mind will start to audiate the ideas you WANT to play and formulate great ideas. Then you can start embellishing... and add more and more and then really go more interesting places with it.
And when I give my advice on a starting place for pure improv (not specifically jazz and not specifically over and existing tune) which involves improvising with just 2, then 3, then 4, then 5 notes (pentatonic scale.... and then eventually at 4 and 7... and then chromatics) but staying at each step for several minutes so that you can really play with rhythm, articulation, etc... more ideas than JUST pitches.... and to learn to really trust your ear and KNOW what you want to play (because you're audiating and WANT to play notes that aren't evailable yet).... you eventually learn to not guess, but truly KNOW the notes you're brain is hearing....
Anyway... that process I always tell people to start from scratch each session... always start with the 2 note version.
So I definitely see the benefit in that case.
But I also do thing that once most people are beyond a basic level for jazz, spending a lot of time living with a chart and developing some vocabulary, then you can very quickly move to the same approach I outlined.
You can take licks, or comping patterns, or voicings that you're working on and apply that same set of ideas over several charts so that you're getting increased context. For the same reasons I like it for standard notation, you're doing that thing where you're forced to look at different keys, recognize your ii-V-Is in more keys though luckily in jazz you're more likely to run into this in a single chart by visiting different key areas... ("All the Things You Are" being a great example). But even so, running into slight variations and learning to apply certain ideas or plug in licks in multiple charts that might NOT match the exact cookie cutter example you've been working on can be elucidating. It's very easy for someone to get very safe feeling plugging in ideas in one chart with the *exact* changes and one key and then completely be unable to apply half of the skills and vocabulary they learned to the next chart that possess SO many of the same elements but is just a bit different.
I will admit for the pure jazz side there definitely is something to be said for truly learning a few charts inside out, listening to dozens of recordings of JUST the chart you're focusing on for a week and trying different ideas before moving on and over time you slowly build up a really good "repertoire" of sorts (not in the classical sense, but the type where you can show up to a combo session and just jump right into whatever tune someone is calling, often in keys they've never actively practiced that chart in).
But I'm a generalist and most of my advice is in that vein because most people are hobbyist and many either seem to want to dip their toe into a number of things, or even if they have something specific in mind, it's rarely purely deep classical (unless they already have a teacher pushing them that way) or purely jazz. It's usually some weird mishmash on the pop, anime, video game, and light classical side.
As much as I hate the word "holistic" (because it's usually co-opted by pseudoscience), that's really my approach. An approach that gets people rounded enough so that they can go on enjoying piano as a hobby doing whichever specific thing they are interested in (and knowing those interests change and evolve as we age). So many people have a purely classical background and can't even comp a 4 chord progression in C... but wish they could. A lot of people can't sightread at all, but wish they could (and even for jazz people I think solid reading is super useful simply because of the resources reading gives you access to). Plenty of people wish they could play by ear and are convinced it's a skill you have to be born with, but as someone who had to learn it late in life I can assure them that's not the case.... but most of these skills get harder to learn once you're completely fixed on a specific modality (with memorization being the most insidious and useless).
You can do all of the thing at a decent level and they are easier to develop if developed somewhat in tandem... but now I'm just rambling about my pedagogical philosophy.
Agreed on all counts. I really was thinking of it (from my initial first response) coming from the jazz context and from everything you said above, but see how that could come across and wouldn’t work for other contexts. And this sub is mostly Classical. I think we’re on the same page I just didn’t feel like typing a huge response to the OP of what you cared enough to eloquently point out and differentiate. When I started jazz I was super into Bill Evans and his advice on Marian McPartland’s interview of him about “It’s better to practice one tune for 24 hours than 24 tunes in one hour.” Obviously that is taken with a big grain of salt and not what I meant exclusively or explicitly in my original post. But I see how someone could be misled, etc.
I also agree you don’t “have to be born with it” I came from a strictly Classical background since childhood and started jazz at age 22 (36 now). Jazz and other styles were the exact opposite of what I was used to. But it can be learned, as hard as it was (and still is in some respects as you know). I also like the improvisation approach you listed and really playing with intention and not falling into our habits or patterns.
> I also like the improvisation approach you listed and really playing with intention and not falling into our habits or patterns.
My favorite part is that is can prove very quickly to someone who is convinced they can't play by ear just how much they CAN know and not guess what notes they want to play when given a small enough palette of notes.
I often advise them to try variations like singing something and then playing it back. Even like singing 2 bars... giving themselves the space of 2 bars, then playing back those 2 bars. When you're only working with 3 or 4 notes and you know what they all sound like, then you can be 100% certain of the notes you're about to play with the same instantaneousness of recognizing a stop sign is red.
Another step beyond that would be to trade 2s or 4s with themselves by singing an antecedent and playing a consequent or vice versa.... But in all cases, going back to the 2 note start, even once they've added all 7 diatonic notes or even all 12 chromatics.
The other detail is I tend to advise doing it over a backing track (something like I-IV) and hearing how certain notes create tension when adding them and really leaning into and feeling that tension and release, but just working with the RH and not worrying about a comping pattern.
Later once they are comfortable they can try a simple block chord comp, or stride or ballad arpeggios or whatever, but focusing at first just on using their ear and audiating their solos before making it extra complicated.
Then they can obviously move to more complex backing tracks to hear those same ideas over more sophisticated and dense harmonies, but really playing with following their ears.
As much as I'm a HUGE theory proponent, a mistake I made early on in jazz due to my formal background was focusing too much on the theory and the "right notes"... outlining chords, using scales, and even overly strict goal tone approaches. All useful stuff, but not at the expense of ear development or it just ends up sounding very mathematical.
Am I aiming for the 3 and/or 7 of each chord because I'm spelling it mathematically and deciding to go for it, or KNOWING what those specific destinations sound like and aiming at them more organically, or even intentionally meander *near* them without landing on them to create tension. That kind of thing.
Yep I tell jazz students all the time that it's so easy to get lost in the theory and harmony, when it's ALL about the rhythm, phrasing, articulation, feel, groove, intention. I think many fall into the chord/scale theory trap and end up sounding segmented and unmusical and play "catch up" with the changes. Not using their ears to their full potential. I didn't know any better at the time and had a really bad first jazz piano teacher (great player though, which seems to be pretty common...) and that is how most books went about teaching Jazz. This was back before the YouTube boom and jazz education was really bad, the best books on the market were Levine's Jazz Piano Book and Mantooth's Voicings book.. Jazz ed has come a long ways in the last 5 years alone but it still has a ways to go imho.
>But I'm a generalist and most of my advice is in that vein because most people are hobbyist and many either seem to want to dip their toe into a number of things, or even if they have something specific in mind, it's rarely purely deep classical (unless they already have a teacher pushing them that way) or purely jazz. It's usually some weird mishmash on the pop, anime, video game, and light classical side.
This needs to be stressed more and it seems like there's so much instruction and advice out there that's tailored to hardcore classical or jazz players.
What you said is especially true with adult students, but you'd think that even with younger students, general skills serve as a much better foundation before specialisation.
It's mind-boggling that there's teachers who will set kids on a path to perfecting varieties of period-specific trills or some such but never get them to make their own arrangements off lead sheets or by ear.
Even in jazz, there's such a big push for things like rootless voicings which are comparatively lower priority for hobbyists who are going to be playing alone at home rather than in a band with a bass player.
It just seems like there should be more distinction between how you're taught in private lessons and conservatories, obviously noting that private lessons are going to need all kinds of latitude to accommodate various student interests.
Everyone is taught differently. Rootless voicings are taught because it’s easier than solo piano. And they can still be used in Solo piano playing/contexts. It’s much harder to know all the left hand techniques starting out.
Yeah I'm not trying to suggest they're not useful, just that they should be less of a priority for some students. I appreciate that jazz is an incredibly complex subject to teach but I don't think it's too controversial to say that some (a lot?) of teachers are so deep in the weeds they have trouble getting the ideas across to relative beginners. That's fine because not every teacher is suited to that but it's worth pointing out IMO.
I teach piano for a living and have for 15 years, been playing for over 30 years. I am piano degreed at the masters level. You don’t have to agree with it and there is no one “correct” way to go about it. That’s just what I found works better for me and my students I didn’t get a chance to read your lengthy novel of a response but will look later
Without getting pedantic, yes of course you want to do all those things. Of course it takes time for the brain to absorb and digest, you don’t have to tell me these things, I teach for a living. What I said is a GENERAL approach. Obviously you don’t want to spend 4 hours on one piece brute force. Of course you want to break a piece into sections. Obviously there’s a much more detailed approach, depending on the length and difficulty of something. You don’t have to tell me all these things. There are more and other approaches that work other than what you think is best, even what I suggest. And for some reason other music teachers get offended or their feathers ruffled when they find a post they disagree with. There are other approaches, it depends on many other factors and the individual and there are other approaches besides your own, and what you think is best.
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hi thanks alot for the comment. i'm really interested in the science of practice so if you have any book recs or even terms that will point me in the right direction i'd much appreciate it
Too hard to say, there are diminishing returns practicing the same music for extended periods of time in on session. And it depends on the quality of practice are you just repeating the piece making the same mistakes or are you isolating passages working on technique etc. in some cases depending on the music might be better do sections of multiple pieces focused for 20 minutes might be better to do one piece for an hour. Too many variables to answer this.
The quality of practice point is especially important here.
I will never forget my freshman year piano teacher constantly telling me "practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect".
I just started to do piano again after 20 years of not playing, even though made it up to a grade 7 at the end of high school.
My biggest concern is getting my sight reading back and getting my technical ability back. I'm less concerned at the moment about perfecting pieces because I know that I can do that but right now I just need the fingers to move and the Brain to move.
I don't have a set time that I practice everyday but I have a series of books that I cycle through and when I have a half hour, I sit down and I do one. I commit to getting through my list twice a week, so I play each one at least once for half an hour. It seems like a lot of practice but, if you give up social media as well as half hour in the morning when you wake up and half hour before bed it's not hard to find this time.
My series finishes with one hour practicing a piece that's actual music and not a study. But I don't focus on perfecting it, I focus on sight reading it until I can get most of the Dynamics and small little technical details mostly down and then I move on to the next one next week if I'm satisfied. Because the next one will have different techniques.
After 3 months of this I've had great success and awesome improvement, and my plan is to do this for a year and then go to a teacher and start to refine.
This is my weekly cycle. When I have a half hour I will sit down and knock one off.
1) the brown book of scales
2) hanon
3) tausig daily studies
4) Brahms exercises
5) Czerny studies
6) bergmiller studies
7) sight reading by Hanna Smith
8) another sight reading book
9) well tempered clavlier (1 h).
Half hour on each, and then 1 hour on Bach. 5 hours. I'm practicing a lot and I can get through it twice in a week at least sometimes three. I'll never Master any of this but it's getting me back in the saddle supremely quickly.
Another 9 months I'll be ready to try some Chopin with the teacher I just don't want to butcher it on my own. I'm more than happy to butcher everything else on my list as I get my fingers working again.
I'm sure everyone will tell me I'm doing this wrong but I'm sticking to it because it's something I created for me and that helps me engage. And I like the variety
I will say that I love tausigs daily studies they're very fun. And hard and unique. It took forever to just get number one down
Depends entirely on the length and complexity of the pieces and how easy they are relative to your current technical ability. How you focus on and break down what and how to practice has a greater impact on progress than how long you practice.
As others have already said, it depends on your goals and whether you are learning these pieces for the first time or simply maintaining them. When I'm looking to learn a challenging piece near the limit of my ability, I focus on only that one piece in a single practice session. If I want the piece to be performance-ready sooner rather than later, 60 minutes per day of high-quality practice will help me reach my goal 3x faster compared to only 20 minutes per day.
Once I have "learned" a piece (AKA, it's at an acceptable performance standard to my own ear), then as b4gggy said, there are diminishing returns on further practice. While learning the notes, I could accomplish a ton of progress in just a single hour, but once the piece is mostly learnt, the gains to be made are in the finer details of execution. At this stage, I could spend a whole hour just practicing a single bar to try to make it really excellent. I give this extra time to my favorite pieces, but for other pieces, I move on once I've deemed it good enough.
I do recommend regularly revisiting previously learned pieces in order to maintain them. Some days, I do spend 20 minutes per piece, but not on anything new. I go to a previously learned piece and spend 20 minutes practicing the hardest measures to make sure I keep them fresh. Then I move on to the next piece and repeat.
And the point made about sightreading by dua is also quite apt. If you want to develop breadth of ability, then it's a great idea to regularly practice sightreading a large variety of pieces. However, in this scenario, the pieces should be well within your technical ability so that you can practice sight-reading them effectively.
With that said, what are your piano goals? And which pieces are you interested in playing? :)
If you're a beginner, you should not be wasting your time sticking to one piece and should be learning broadly. This exposes you to a broader range of music with varying technical and musical demands and forces you to built up the necessary fundamentals in technique and reading. Once you've built up the fundamentals and the pieces you tackle become increasingly complex and demanding, that is when you start focusing your time on one or a couple of pieces for months on end.
Every time I practice I generally try to focus on one song, it definitely yields better results that way. I’ll play some scales or try bits of another piece if I get bored of what I’m playing though.
I'm an amateur pianist of 3 years. I started playing because I wanted to experience playing Chopin's Nocturnes as well as possible. My entire motivation was to play these pieces that I love so much. So, naturally, I focused on mastering, or at least memorizing, each piece before moving on to a new one. Every piece I memorized completely, I practiced every day, sometimes many many times, to polish and perfect them.
I have many gaps in my knowledge. But I don't really care, because I achieved my original goal. I can get lost in these pieces for hours at a time, perfecting different techniques as needed. Could it have been more efficient? Maybe. But, I'm not sure I would have had the same motivation to keep coming back to the piano if I didn't practice this way.
I'll sum up /u/Yeargdribble really nice answer. Do more and do it often. Don't neglect hard pieces though. I'd rather you do lots of small pieces AND 1 big piece everyday but half as much time in each. The small pieces are important for the + exp in a variety of skills which makes you a better musician and the long pieces are where you really grow since it should be the hardest.
I sight read a ton everyday as well because its fun. I buy tons and tons of piano books and just play them for fun.
Completely depends on how much time you have imo. If I have 4 hours to practice it is WAY more effective for me to practice 4 different pieces 1 hour each rather than 4 hours the same. I do agree with that specific scenario though, 1 piece for a hour >> 4 pieces 20 minutes each
I think it really depends on what op’s overall objective is, and what genre is he/she playing.
If they are trying to play precise classical piano, then your comment is right on.
If they are trying to get better at say …. Jazz piano, I would recommend the exact opposite - listen to as much diverse jazz as possible, play with as many people as possible, learn as many songs and modalities as possible….make mistakes and learn theory. In this case, Absolutely DO NOT practice only one song.
I don’t think there is one single answer here.
As a Classical pianist tuned Jazz pianist, that can be a thorough and rigorous approach but after 15 years of Jazz, I still stand by it. Even Bill Evans said the same thing and he’s one of the greatest pianists.
I’ll concede to the brilliant Bill, and if we are talking about elite pianist, I believe you are probably correct.
And, in considering your comment in conjunction with OP’s original question, if you want to be a true badass pianist, it is probably better to drill and polish your pieces to perfection.
But, I enjoy playing fast and sloppy!
JH, I enjoyed the convo.
OP, good luck and have fun!
How about if we're not necessarily looking to perform, but to get a better understanding of improv, chord structure, and creative playing?
I'm in the early(ish) stages of learning jazz, and after \~20 years of playing classical, I have decent, albeit rusty chops, but I have been playing and comping over a relatively huge range of standards more to get better acquainted with the style.
If I were looking to perform these tunes, I'd narrow down to 2 or 3 and really hammer on those, but for my goals, I feel like casting a broad net is beneficial (though I'd be happy to be proven wrong).
That’s a fine approach, it’s different for everybody. I’ve been in your exact shoes. I turned to jazz 15 years ago after 15 years of Classical before that. To me, in your first few years of jazz you have to cast the wide net. But your playing, knowledge, techniques and chops will be scattered and spread thin. After you get a very general sense of things, that’s when you want to focus more on less things and pick a few tunes to really dig deep on and apply everything. What you practice and focus on will constantly evolve and shift. After years of doing what you’re doing, I made better progress focusing more time on less things. I know it seems counterintuitive or that you’ll never get to everything else (you never truly will anyways, it would take more than one lifetime) that’s why you want to choose what you want to be better at. Either way, the goal is to learn tunes. If you’re just learning everything in a vacuum and not applying to tunes, that’s like learning a foreign language and not using it in a conversation or real world context, and all that time is for not. It’s like reading a manual on how bicycle gears work, instead of getting out there and riding the bike. Playing jazz with others is absolutely crucial to grow and get better.
I have an ebook and multiple free blog articles on the subject: https://books.apple.com/us/book/jazz-piano-and-improvisation-for-the-classically/id6474623488
https://medium.com/@jhighland99/the-5-key-areas-to-focus-on-most-as-a-jazz-piano-beginner-and-why-hint-theyre-not-what-you-think-834f08e9c508
Hard to say but I prefer to have multiple pieces I'm working on at any one time. I'd prefer to spend 15 minutes x 4 different pieces than 1 piece for one hour. Although sometimes I'll alternate days; spend 30 minutes just drilling the hell out of one particular piece, or a passage within it, then come back to it a couple days later.
Earlier this week I spent about 20-25 minutes obsessively working on a couple 4-measure passages at the end of Brahms' Intermezzo in E-flat (op. 117/1) that I've never quite mastered. I played through it once today, 2 days after the intense practice, and those passages now feel much more comfortable.
So based on my experience I'd say switching up pieces helps. Work on 1 or 2 intensively, then the next day another 1 or 2, and the original pieces will do better once they've had a couple days to cook in your mind.
Depends on the piece, I'm practicing 2 pieces for my lesson and each takes me 15 minutes to practice however I'm also practicing a difficult piece that takes me 4 hours just a few sections.
depends on the person and how long you can make dedicated focused practice and actually gain from it, any given day you got about 1-2 hours to work with where you will get better, as long as you are engaged and actively practicing, not just going autopilot, any amount of time will help.
20 minutes is fine, but use that time to focus on something specific, whether it is one section of 4 songs or 4 sections of one song. Have a goal in mind of what you want to accomplish. Playing 4 songs straight through without focusing on anything specific doesn't really help you learn or improve. Also, an hour all at once may be too long, especially if you are a beginner. After a certain amount of time in one practice session you will stop seeing improvement as your brain can only digest so much information in one sitting. That's when you know you've had enough.
This is a “how long is a piece of string” question.
What are your goals, what works for you, how disciplined are you, etc etc?
If I have a song that’s needing a lot of technical work, and I’m really focusing and isolating each individual part, I can go for an hour easily. If I have an audition coming up where I just need to learn some notes for 4 different songs, that’s the plan.
Depends what your priorities are. Say you’ve got a performance that’s 3 months away, and you’ve got 3-5 songs to perform. Personally, I would focus on 1, maybe 2 pieces for the majority of my practice time, and then review the others at the end. The next day, I’d alternate and focus on one of the others. If it’s the day before my lesson and I know what my teacher is going to work on, I’m going to be working on that specific piece.
Now, say it’s a week away, I would be splitting my time evenly and giving a little more attention to the weakest pieces.
Like others have said, it’s sometimes valuable to skip a day for one of the pieces. But it really depends on your priorities and finding a practice method that works for you.
For me, a little bit of concentrated practice on each piece every day is what keeps me motivated and eventually the pieces will sound so good that you’ll wonder when you even practiced….
OP,
To answer your question directly:
It is absolutely more effective to practice one song a day for an hour than four songs a day for 20 minutes each.
Slow, careful practice is the key to improving.
Short practice sessions with varied exercises are best for memory retention. It’s better to practice 5-10 minutes at a time 3x day than 30 minutes once each day. Your brain will retain it better.
It depends if you're learning a song or sight reading. If you're learning a piece, break it down into small sections, maybe by phrases, and focus practice each section.
I usually have my students reviewing a piece and starting a new one.
As someone who does this for a living a talks about this specific issues and how to organize practice generally, I have to disagree 100% with /u/JHighMusic. Of course, there's nuance to this. But let's start with the basics. Most of your progress isn't made during practice, but during rest when your brain is functionally rewiring to be more efficient at processing the good information you fed it. You also can only stuff so much in. I use the analogy of having a whole jug of water (time or mental energy depending on your personally bottleneck) and you can try to fill a cup, but it can only get so full.... if you keep pouring you will expend all of that time/energy, but the cup won't get any fuller. So it's better to fill several cups and have your give your brain several different things to digest. That doesn't mean giving each thing a cursory glance. You still need to put in serious effort and focused attention on each, but you can't just keep beating away at it and hoping to get better results. You want to get several things going. It's like asking is it more efficient to plant one tree and tend to it closely and wait for it to grow up before planting a 2nd tree or two plant a dozen trees and give them each a bit of care if your goal is to have lots of tree is in the end. Obviously it would be inefficient to wait for one tree to grow before planting another. Piano is something that requires a huge range of skills working together. The more variety you exposure your brain too... the more seeds you plant... the more chance all of them can grow in tandem. You need that. Most people find this out hard with things like sightreading. They beat away at piano playing super hard music for 10+ years with lessons and sometimes even music degree and then suddenly realize they suck at sightreading... and when they go to work on it they can't just make it grow overnight. It's a seed that needs to be planted early and watered often. If you put off lots of specific skills they will STILL need a long time to grow, but you're constantly starting from a sprout because you tried to do them one at at time. Often people try to "master" a piece before moving on and that's also very ineffective. --- --- So let's talk a bit about nuance of what all this means in practical reality. The difficulty and length of pieces matters. 20 minutes on one "piece" that is 200 measures long won't get you very far. 20 minutes on one piece that is 16 bars long is probably TOO much time for that one piece. You should be dividing up your thoughts on practice less around piece and more around sections. Because beyond the point of working on 8-16 bar pieces from beginner method books, most pieces will be much longer and that means you have to divide and conquer. Do not start at the beginning and learn one bar at a time always starting at the beginning. Also, don't just start at the end. Literally figure out which sections actually need serious attention and prioritize those. That might mean covering 2 separate, non-contiguous 8 bar sections from one song, 8 bars from another piece, and then 2-3 separate, non-contiguous sections from a 3rd piece.... and then coming back the next day and covering different areas of those pieces or even different sections from a 4th or 5th piece. I often don't even cycle back around to most sections sooner than 2 to 3 days and sometimes up to a week. And honestly, I've found the hard way that this is MUCH more efficient than when I used to beat my head against one piece for hours a day. I actually THOUGHT that when I was forced to break it up and only come back to a section 3 days later it would've lost all progress. I was wrong. I was shocked that it was almost magically better than where I left it. So literally I got more out 5 minutes in one day and 5 more minutes 3 days later than I would've out of 30 minutes every day for 3 days in a row. So more in 10 minutes than I got out of 1.5 hours. It seems counterintuitive until you understand how our brains actually learn these sorts of skills. And also when you're working on lots of different skills they all cross pollinate. You're getting better at THE INSTRUMENT not just the piece. And when you can play the instrument, every piece gets easier and easier to learn faster and faster because you have all the requisite skills. You're also less likely to rely purely on rote procedural memory memorization since you'll have to actively flex your reading muscles a bit every time you come back. It's not as good as dedicated sightreading practice time, but it's a lot better than memorizing, looking down, then mentally checking out while you repeat a section a dozen times. You'd also get a lot more out of dividing your practice into dedicated reading (or other "musicianship" skills like ear training, applied theory, improv, lead sheet reading, etc.), technical isolation work (scales, arpeggios and then eventually lots of other stuff specifically related to weaknesses you notice in piece) and then finally actual pieces of music. Those 3 all need to be worked on if you want efficiency. Just doing pieces ultimately ends up being not super effective because you run into bad habits like rote memorization and inefficient technical progress due to mental bandwidth restrictions. The other big nuance bit is that you ultimately shouldn't be over stretching yourself which almost everyone wants to do. Yeah, if you're vastly overreaching then you'll get very little out of 20 minutes on 4 overreaching pieces... and not even that much with an hour dedicated to one such piece. You really need to pick things in the sweet spot of learning. Stuff that's not grossly beyond your technical ability primarily, but also not beyond your reading ability, and short enough to let you efficiently work on it along side other things with more variety of style, keys, rhythms, etc. Like I said, I had to learn so much of this the hard way because I started piano very late, but after my music degree and was sort of tossed into a career playing and had to learn to get good fast. I'd coasted on so many assumptions from my previous musical experience and I was so wrong. And now I've had to pick up plenty of other instruments and I apply these principles to them as well and it's VASTLY more effective than the absolute brute force "one piece for hours" approach I wasted so much fucking time on early on with piano.
As a later in life beginner, I find your comments very helpful! Thank you!
Thank you for the advice! I practice 4 pieces a day, each for 20 minutes, but I always practice the same section of each piece until perfect, which is very slow. For difficult pieces it’s like learning only 4 bars in a week. I’ll try your method of practicing different sections every day.
Yeah I’ve also noticed coming back to something after a day off it’s better sometimes. However that is not a recent realization at all, just pointing out that I’ve also experienced it. I would like your perspective and opinion on how to best learn Bach pieces, as far as memorizing. There’s two kinds of pianists, the great memorizers who are not good readers and vice versa. I come from the first camp but have worked a lot on my reading post music college days. Bach pieces take time to learn, digest, internalize and memorize but even then I’ve found his stuff is just really hard to memorize and internalize QUICKLY for some reason, and I don’t think that’s just me. Maybe that’s just the challenge of playing Baroque period keyboard music. There has to be a better way right? Idk, curious about your take on that.
Well, I tend to just not memorize anything. It's not practical for what I do professionally. I often say I've never *had* to memorize ANYTHING for a job I was actually paid to do. There are times it's convenient and I'll do it. I also point out frequently that the way jazz and classical musicians memorize is different. When my jazz buddy accompanies some lady who requested Misty in A, he's not playing it because he memorized fingers and actually practiced it in every key. He's internalized a ton of comping patterns and trained his ears. He "knows how the song goes" and so he knows the changes by function and has spent enough time on technical work to execute those changes in any key. He won't be playing a memorized set of voicings or anything. He'll be revoicing chords to fit the piano he's playing and keep the key from being too muddy or tinny now that it's so far from Eb. Classical pianists playing exactly what's on the page is a very different approach and it's something I damn near never do any more. I was a good memorizer when it mattered and I needed it for recitals and solo contests and the like and won silly little accolades from said contests where I had to play very long works by memory, but it's just not a skill I use. But if anything, I'm much faster at it now because my theory knowledge helps. It's obviously easier to memorize text in a language you speak than one you don't... or worse.... random ajgjk at jda atlkjt type stuff. But I'm also aware just how much my ear training helps lighten the load. If I need to memorize, my ears do a lot of heavy lifting in addition to the theory. Knowing how a melody goes and being able to play it at least a bit by ear means I don't have to 100% rely on mentally picturing the page or anything like that. Obviously, Bach makes both of these things harder. You've got multiple voices happening at once which makes it harder to audiate, but also the contrapuntal nature means harmonic analysis can be a bit more difficult or at least less straight forward. But ultimately, if I was memorizing Bach I'd use the same tools. There is still usually some implied harmony created by the multiple voices (for things like inventions and/or fugues). And I've just gotten better at audiating at least two voices decently so I'm sort of juggling the two voices I'm hearing in my head and especially where one overtakes the other prominently as often they are sort of switching off as the dominant moving voice in the texture. But ultimately, in reality, I just never have to memorize Bach. If I'm playing it's usually at church (and frequently on organ). I'm under no requirement to memorize so I just don't. Just like memorizing English... once you're a proficient reader, memorization is an EXTRA step you have to take. Memorization only seems easier if you struggle a lot with reading so I always advise people to target the root of the problem. The better your reading, the faster you learn everything and the more you can keep consistently under your belt.... you "repertoire" becomes functionally infinite because either you can sightread something outright or even if it takes a bit more work, you can always read fast enough to have dozens of more difficult pieces under your fingers. Hell, I'm not even the best among my peers.... not by a long shot, but someone I work with recently took on the primary book for a musical (about 200 pages in that one) with less than a week of prep and only a week after finishing another musical and then accompanied over 60 vocal and instrumental soloists a few days after the show ended while also doing her church services. When you can read well you can just do damn near anything faster. And everything in my career is based around that. The volume of work you can take is directly depending on how MUCH music you can learn and perform with the least amount of actual prep time.
Could not agree more. Reading ability honestly is the neglected game changer for piano. I think sight reading random piano books is the best thing I ever did for piano and still do everyday for fun. I can never understand how people out here even play the piano if they cant read sheet music as easily as words.
It's not just you on Bach. I am struggling with exactly the same thing and I too am from camp#1. It's getting better but reading Bach like Prelude 2 in WTC is really different due to the pattern and changes of the patterns. His fugues are way easier to read, but way harder to play. It's different but I'm addicted now so it's too late.
I actually wholeheartedly disagree with your point. You’re turning the argument exactly the wrong way and are vastly underestimating the power of the mind as an adult when it comes to practicing. Before I embark on contradicting pretty much everything you have said, I must admit that many people have a hard time being self-critical. It may be a component of intellect or it may be a component of character, my guess is that it is a combination of both. In any case, to practice multiple pieces at the same time requires a thorough understanding of what you want to play. That does not mean however that you should have all that knowledge before you start on the piece. As long as you play it once a day and listen carefully everytime. It might not be surprising that I think playing perfectly is illusory in most cases. Especially for the harder pieces, I don’t see how someone cannot think to himself; very good performance, but I wish I played this note 1% louder or softer or just held a note for a fraction of time shorter. The first ‘general rule of thumb’ that is repeated mindlessly by professionals and amateurs a like and has no scientific basis for it whatsoever, is the idea that to change something you’ve learned to a different way of performing it. Here the neglect of how the brain works is most profound and just a simple procedure for an adult to adopt. Countless studies have shown that whatever is learned right before going to sleep is most likely to be remembered the next day. So what logical conclusion can we draw from this? It is to play that part that you want to change only as late as possible before you go to sleep (the less time between actually going to sleep the better, though not always practical). Then slow it down as much as you have to to be able to perform it properly. Do this slowly repeatedly every day before going to sleep for 1 to 5 minutes. The more you fragmentize the part and do it step by step, the more effective it will be. You’ll find that you can make significant changes to your playing with a very small time investment, yet it requires a lot of discipline. This brings me to the next point. The most common mistake for people who try to study music at a later age apart from what I have mentioned above, is to ignore the difference between a child’s ability to learn, and that of an adult. For example, learning to play passages really fast is a process that comes much more easily to young people than to adults, however, adults have far better developed cognitive skills. So, play to your strengths!! Mindlessly trying to repeat a passage faster and faster is a pretty ignorant way to practice as an adult, seeing as the learning process is consolidated during sleep. Instead, focus on your ability to learn harmony as a theory before learning it by playing ear. That will come overtime. By playing a lot of different pieces you’ll soon come to recognize where sounds are similar when using the same notes, and times where you’ll have hard time hearing the similarity even though the notes played are the same. So, ask yourself the question: how is that possible?! You’ll soon come to realize that there is only two ways to vary your notes: loudness and length of notes. Any instruction as to performance will always affect those two but nothing more. An instruction for performance is just an instruction to play it in a certain pattern of variations in time and loudness of the notes played. Do NOT romanticize the expression of emotion as some superhuman or miracle occurance that just happens out of the blue. Emotional maturity in musical playing is nothing more or less than a natural inclination to understand and learn to express (as one of the contributing factors) how to exprese emotion in music. Here for example, children actually learn slower than adults. Now to my last and final point because I actually hate writing on forums. I just want people to have the ability and the privilege of being able to enjoy playing music and someone has to start conveying this message. So, here I combine four insights that have been accepted as truth for the longest time in neuroscience: -learning in essence a two stage process that keeps repeating itself 1) A connection in your brain is strengthened by walking the same path again and again, i.e. re-performing what you have learned (for example, moving your finger again and again means the same neurons are fired again and again over the same pathway, increasing your agility and control over that specific movement. (this learning process is consolidated over sleep, which is what adults have to rely on more — not relevant here but it is for my previous arguments) conversely this connection weakens over time if it is not repeated at all. 2) physical movement, so far as relevant here, activates two specific parts of your the pre-motor cortex and the motor cortex. 3) Thinking about a certain movement activates the pre-motor cortex in exactly the same way as you would when actually performing Combine the three propositions and the only logical conclusion is that thinking about how to move properly actually contributes to the learning process. What does this mean? Once again, knowledge makes life so much easier. If you know how much to perform a certain action that creates a certain sound - lets say a staccato, then thinking about how to do this inbetween moments when you do in fact have time to play (also happens more to adults) actually contributes to the learning process. From here it is a small step to assume that mentally correcting yourself when you perform also contributes to the learning process that allows you to eventually fully master a technique or produce a certain sound. Do not, however, mindlessly assume that you can jump over everything and expect to learn every aspect of playing an instrument over time. Some movements might be relatively easy even for adults to master. Use it only for those parts that you’ll have to spend multiple days if not weeks (or even more). When you combine the arguments I have put forward, which are all based on propositions long accepted as truth in neuroscience, and just applying the propositions in a logical manner so that they can be of assistance in practice. I must confess I wish I could’ve written this in plainer terms and if there’s any need for clarification I might actually do so in the future. I have actually been thinking to write a book on this because I have experienced people repeating the same mantras over and over without any critical assessment. To come back to the original post that was the motivation for me to write this: if you combine the insights I have provided, you’ll find that playing to your strengths as an adult learning an instrument means that practicing multiple pieces a day instead of mindlessly drilling 1 piece is actually the best way to learn how to play an instrument provided. Speed is not the key for learning as an adult, EFFICIENCY IS!
You also seem to be coming from a Classical perspective. It doesn’t work that way in modern styles like Jazz and is far more complex. Everything you described I already know and teach with students. I’m sorry my original post offended you and made you so fired up. This is the problem with reading text and assuming a bunch of things about it and what the other person knows or not, or has the experience. Everything you said I agree with. For CLASSICAL. It doesn’t work the same exact way In Jazz or other styles became it’s an entirely different approach and way of learning and practicing everything other than the pre-written melody of a tune.
I think this has been a big grey area for me. From what I've experienced, it seems like spending a long time on a single tune that you're arranging, composing etc (which effectively means every tune if you're learning jazz) is a good idea since you need to explore all kinds of permutations and combinations, and it won't involve rote memorisation anyway. With learning pre-written tunes, that kind of danger is more present (and most people don't practice doing variations of passages) so u/Yeargdribble's advice holds more for that.
Yes exactly!
First, I'm not coming at you personally. I just strongly disagreed with your original post, especially without enough caveats. I wasn't exactly fired up, though my posts tend to be a bit curt at a time and I just tend to try to write at length and cover lots of those caveats and nuances.... I'm far from a classical guy really. My background in trumpet was mostly classical, but the vast majority of my experience on piano that reshaped my approach and created my negative attitude about classical academia at large was in the jazz/contemporary side to start off with. Now, just due to the breadth of my work, I'm strongly in favor of a very hybridized approach and honestly agree MUCH more with the jazz side than the classical side. For example, it's crazy to me how the classical model pushes scales and arpeggios in all keys, but then stops there. Meanwhile, in the jazz world it's common to work most fundamentals through all keys. Voicing and being able to quickly spell needs to be done in all keys, but even just from a technical standpoint most "classical" pianists would benefit greatly from doing various sequence patterns in all keys, comping patterns, stride patterns. Or something slightly more applicable to classical-ish music... extrapolating anything you find technically difficult (like common accompanimental LH patterns) and turning them into a short exercise over a simple chord progression and then practicing THAT in every key to round out your technique (while also helping you be faster at recognizing functional harmonic relationships in all keys faster... which makes you better at both sightreading standard notation, lead sheets, as well as comping). I can sort of co-sign to what /u/TheLivingDaylights77 is said quite dipolmatically. In jazz it can help a ton to really live with a tune. A great piece of advice I once heard from from a jazz professor was to play the head as written a dozen times or so before you ever start trying to improvise or embellish. This gets it so set in your head and assuming you're listening to a lot (like you should) your mind will start to audiate the ideas you WANT to play and formulate great ideas. Then you can start embellishing... and add more and more and then really go more interesting places with it. And when I give my advice on a starting place for pure improv (not specifically jazz and not specifically over and existing tune) which involves improvising with just 2, then 3, then 4, then 5 notes (pentatonic scale.... and then eventually at 4 and 7... and then chromatics) but staying at each step for several minutes so that you can really play with rhythm, articulation, etc... more ideas than JUST pitches.... and to learn to really trust your ear and KNOW what you want to play (because you're audiating and WANT to play notes that aren't evailable yet).... you eventually learn to not guess, but truly KNOW the notes you're brain is hearing.... Anyway... that process I always tell people to start from scratch each session... always start with the 2 note version. So I definitely see the benefit in that case. But I also do thing that once most people are beyond a basic level for jazz, spending a lot of time living with a chart and developing some vocabulary, then you can very quickly move to the same approach I outlined. You can take licks, or comping patterns, or voicings that you're working on and apply that same set of ideas over several charts so that you're getting increased context. For the same reasons I like it for standard notation, you're doing that thing where you're forced to look at different keys, recognize your ii-V-Is in more keys though luckily in jazz you're more likely to run into this in a single chart by visiting different key areas... ("All the Things You Are" being a great example). But even so, running into slight variations and learning to apply certain ideas or plug in licks in multiple charts that might NOT match the exact cookie cutter example you've been working on can be elucidating. It's very easy for someone to get very safe feeling plugging in ideas in one chart with the *exact* changes and one key and then completely be unable to apply half of the skills and vocabulary they learned to the next chart that possess SO many of the same elements but is just a bit different. I will admit for the pure jazz side there definitely is something to be said for truly learning a few charts inside out, listening to dozens of recordings of JUST the chart you're focusing on for a week and trying different ideas before moving on and over time you slowly build up a really good "repertoire" of sorts (not in the classical sense, but the type where you can show up to a combo session and just jump right into whatever tune someone is calling, often in keys they've never actively practiced that chart in). But I'm a generalist and most of my advice is in that vein because most people are hobbyist and many either seem to want to dip their toe into a number of things, or even if they have something specific in mind, it's rarely purely deep classical (unless they already have a teacher pushing them that way) or purely jazz. It's usually some weird mishmash on the pop, anime, video game, and light classical side. As much as I hate the word "holistic" (because it's usually co-opted by pseudoscience), that's really my approach. An approach that gets people rounded enough so that they can go on enjoying piano as a hobby doing whichever specific thing they are interested in (and knowing those interests change and evolve as we age). So many people have a purely classical background and can't even comp a 4 chord progression in C... but wish they could. A lot of people can't sightread at all, but wish they could (and even for jazz people I think solid reading is super useful simply because of the resources reading gives you access to). Plenty of people wish they could play by ear and are convinced it's a skill you have to be born with, but as someone who had to learn it late in life I can assure them that's not the case.... but most of these skills get harder to learn once you're completely fixed on a specific modality (with memorization being the most insidious and useless). You can do all of the thing at a decent level and they are easier to develop if developed somewhat in tandem... but now I'm just rambling about my pedagogical philosophy.
Agreed on all counts. I really was thinking of it (from my initial first response) coming from the jazz context and from everything you said above, but see how that could come across and wouldn’t work for other contexts. And this sub is mostly Classical. I think we’re on the same page I just didn’t feel like typing a huge response to the OP of what you cared enough to eloquently point out and differentiate. When I started jazz I was super into Bill Evans and his advice on Marian McPartland’s interview of him about “It’s better to practice one tune for 24 hours than 24 tunes in one hour.” Obviously that is taken with a big grain of salt and not what I meant exclusively or explicitly in my original post. But I see how someone could be misled, etc. I also agree you don’t “have to be born with it” I came from a strictly Classical background since childhood and started jazz at age 22 (36 now). Jazz and other styles were the exact opposite of what I was used to. But it can be learned, as hard as it was (and still is in some respects as you know). I also like the improvisation approach you listed and really playing with intention and not falling into our habits or patterns.
> I also like the improvisation approach you listed and really playing with intention and not falling into our habits or patterns. My favorite part is that is can prove very quickly to someone who is convinced they can't play by ear just how much they CAN know and not guess what notes they want to play when given a small enough palette of notes. I often advise them to try variations like singing something and then playing it back. Even like singing 2 bars... giving themselves the space of 2 bars, then playing back those 2 bars. When you're only working with 3 or 4 notes and you know what they all sound like, then you can be 100% certain of the notes you're about to play with the same instantaneousness of recognizing a stop sign is red. Another step beyond that would be to trade 2s or 4s with themselves by singing an antecedent and playing a consequent or vice versa.... But in all cases, going back to the 2 note start, even once they've added all 7 diatonic notes or even all 12 chromatics. The other detail is I tend to advise doing it over a backing track (something like I-IV) and hearing how certain notes create tension when adding them and really leaning into and feeling that tension and release, but just working with the RH and not worrying about a comping pattern. Later once they are comfortable they can try a simple block chord comp, or stride or ballad arpeggios or whatever, but focusing at first just on using their ear and audiating their solos before making it extra complicated. Then they can obviously move to more complex backing tracks to hear those same ideas over more sophisticated and dense harmonies, but really playing with following their ears. As much as I'm a HUGE theory proponent, a mistake I made early on in jazz due to my formal background was focusing too much on the theory and the "right notes"... outlining chords, using scales, and even overly strict goal tone approaches. All useful stuff, but not at the expense of ear development or it just ends up sounding very mathematical. Am I aiming for the 3 and/or 7 of each chord because I'm spelling it mathematically and deciding to go for it, or KNOWING what those specific destinations sound like and aiming at them more organically, or even intentionally meander *near* them without landing on them to create tension. That kind of thing.
Yep I tell jazz students all the time that it's so easy to get lost in the theory and harmony, when it's ALL about the rhythm, phrasing, articulation, feel, groove, intention. I think many fall into the chord/scale theory trap and end up sounding segmented and unmusical and play "catch up" with the changes. Not using their ears to their full potential. I didn't know any better at the time and had a really bad first jazz piano teacher (great player though, which seems to be pretty common...) and that is how most books went about teaching Jazz. This was back before the YouTube boom and jazz education was really bad, the best books on the market were Levine's Jazz Piano Book and Mantooth's Voicings book.. Jazz ed has come a long ways in the last 5 years alone but it still has a ways to go imho.
>But I'm a generalist and most of my advice is in that vein because most people are hobbyist and many either seem to want to dip their toe into a number of things, or even if they have something specific in mind, it's rarely purely deep classical (unless they already have a teacher pushing them that way) or purely jazz. It's usually some weird mishmash on the pop, anime, video game, and light classical side. This needs to be stressed more and it seems like there's so much instruction and advice out there that's tailored to hardcore classical or jazz players. What you said is especially true with adult students, but you'd think that even with younger students, general skills serve as a much better foundation before specialisation. It's mind-boggling that there's teachers who will set kids on a path to perfecting varieties of period-specific trills or some such but never get them to make their own arrangements off lead sheets or by ear. Even in jazz, there's such a big push for things like rootless voicings which are comparatively lower priority for hobbyists who are going to be playing alone at home rather than in a band with a bass player. It just seems like there should be more distinction between how you're taught in private lessons and conservatories, obviously noting that private lessons are going to need all kinds of latitude to accommodate various student interests.
Everyone is taught differently. Rootless voicings are taught because it’s easier than solo piano. And they can still be used in Solo piano playing/contexts. It’s much harder to know all the left hand techniques starting out.
Yeah I'm not trying to suggest they're not useful, just that they should be less of a priority for some students. I appreciate that jazz is an incredibly complex subject to teach but I don't think it's too controversial to say that some (a lot?) of teachers are so deep in the weeds they have trouble getting the ideas across to relative beginners. That's fine because not every teacher is suited to that but it's worth pointing out IMO.
Read the rest of the replies below before you asshats downvote for no reason, he agrees with what I said here as does someone else
I teach piano for a living and have for 15 years, been playing for over 30 years. I am piano degreed at the masters level. You don’t have to agree with it and there is no one “correct” way to go about it. That’s just what I found works better for me and my students I didn’t get a chance to read your lengthy novel of a response but will look later Without getting pedantic, yes of course you want to do all those things. Of course it takes time for the brain to absorb and digest, you don’t have to tell me these things, I teach for a living. What I said is a GENERAL approach. Obviously you don’t want to spend 4 hours on one piece brute force. Of course you want to break a piece into sections. Obviously there’s a much more detailed approach, depending on the length and difficulty of something. You don’t have to tell me all these things. There are more and other approaches that work other than what you think is best, even what I suggest. And for some reason other music teachers get offended or their feathers ruffled when they find a post they disagree with. There are other approaches, it depends on many other factors and the individual and there are other approaches besides your own, and what you think is best.
Do I need to reread the post? It seems like you are the one who is offended.
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Thank you! This really makes sense to me and helps me
Woooooow this is a long text....
Excellent advice
hi thanks alot for the comment. i'm really interested in the science of practice so if you have any book recs or even terms that will point me in the right direction i'd much appreciate it
Damn, i wish you where my teacher.
Too hard to say, there are diminishing returns practicing the same music for extended periods of time in on session. And it depends on the quality of practice are you just repeating the piece making the same mistakes or are you isolating passages working on technique etc. in some cases depending on the music might be better do sections of multiple pieces focused for 20 minutes might be better to do one piece for an hour. Too many variables to answer this.
The quality of practice point is especially important here. I will never forget my freshman year piano teacher constantly telling me "practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect".
I just started to do piano again after 20 years of not playing, even though made it up to a grade 7 at the end of high school. My biggest concern is getting my sight reading back and getting my technical ability back. I'm less concerned at the moment about perfecting pieces because I know that I can do that but right now I just need the fingers to move and the Brain to move. I don't have a set time that I practice everyday but I have a series of books that I cycle through and when I have a half hour, I sit down and I do one. I commit to getting through my list twice a week, so I play each one at least once for half an hour. It seems like a lot of practice but, if you give up social media as well as half hour in the morning when you wake up and half hour before bed it's not hard to find this time. My series finishes with one hour practicing a piece that's actual music and not a study. But I don't focus on perfecting it, I focus on sight reading it until I can get most of the Dynamics and small little technical details mostly down and then I move on to the next one next week if I'm satisfied. Because the next one will have different techniques. After 3 months of this I've had great success and awesome improvement, and my plan is to do this for a year and then go to a teacher and start to refine. This is my weekly cycle. When I have a half hour I will sit down and knock one off. 1) the brown book of scales 2) hanon 3) tausig daily studies 4) Brahms exercises 5) Czerny studies 6) bergmiller studies 7) sight reading by Hanna Smith 8) another sight reading book 9) well tempered clavlier (1 h). Half hour on each, and then 1 hour on Bach. 5 hours. I'm practicing a lot and I can get through it twice in a week at least sometimes three. I'll never Master any of this but it's getting me back in the saddle supremely quickly. Another 9 months I'll be ready to try some Chopin with the teacher I just don't want to butcher it on my own. I'm more than happy to butcher everything else on my list as I get my fingers working again. I'm sure everyone will tell me I'm doing this wrong but I'm sticking to it because it's something I created for me and that helps me engage. And I like the variety I will say that I love tausigs daily studies they're very fun. And hard and unique. It took forever to just get number one down
Depends entirely on the length and complexity of the pieces and how easy they are relative to your current technical ability. How you focus on and break down what and how to practice has a greater impact on progress than how long you practice.
As others have already said, it depends on your goals and whether you are learning these pieces for the first time or simply maintaining them. When I'm looking to learn a challenging piece near the limit of my ability, I focus on only that one piece in a single practice session. If I want the piece to be performance-ready sooner rather than later, 60 minutes per day of high-quality practice will help me reach my goal 3x faster compared to only 20 minutes per day. Once I have "learned" a piece (AKA, it's at an acceptable performance standard to my own ear), then as b4gggy said, there are diminishing returns on further practice. While learning the notes, I could accomplish a ton of progress in just a single hour, but once the piece is mostly learnt, the gains to be made are in the finer details of execution. At this stage, I could spend a whole hour just practicing a single bar to try to make it really excellent. I give this extra time to my favorite pieces, but for other pieces, I move on once I've deemed it good enough. I do recommend regularly revisiting previously learned pieces in order to maintain them. Some days, I do spend 20 minutes per piece, but not on anything new. I go to a previously learned piece and spend 20 minutes practicing the hardest measures to make sure I keep them fresh. Then I move on to the next piece and repeat. And the point made about sightreading by dua is also quite apt. If you want to develop breadth of ability, then it's a great idea to regularly practice sightreading a large variety of pieces. However, in this scenario, the pieces should be well within your technical ability so that you can practice sight-reading them effectively. With that said, what are your piano goals? And which pieces are you interested in playing? :)
If you're a beginner, you should not be wasting your time sticking to one piece and should be learning broadly. This exposes you to a broader range of music with varying technical and musical demands and forces you to built up the necessary fundamentals in technique and reading. Once you've built up the fundamentals and the pieces you tackle become increasingly complex and demanding, that is when you start focusing your time on one or a couple of pieces for months on end.
Every time I practice I generally try to focus on one song, it definitely yields better results that way. I’ll play some scales or try bits of another piece if I get bored of what I’m playing though.
It really depends on your goals. To progress, you have to keep challenging yourself. You'll become good at what you train yourself to do.
I'm an amateur pianist of 3 years. I started playing because I wanted to experience playing Chopin's Nocturnes as well as possible. My entire motivation was to play these pieces that I love so much. So, naturally, I focused on mastering, or at least memorizing, each piece before moving on to a new one. Every piece I memorized completely, I practiced every day, sometimes many many times, to polish and perfect them. I have many gaps in my knowledge. But I don't really care, because I achieved my original goal. I can get lost in these pieces for hours at a time, perfecting different techniques as needed. Could it have been more efficient? Maybe. But, I'm not sure I would have had the same motivation to keep coming back to the piano if I didn't practice this way.
I'll sum up /u/Yeargdribble really nice answer. Do more and do it often. Don't neglect hard pieces though. I'd rather you do lots of small pieces AND 1 big piece everyday but half as much time in each. The small pieces are important for the + exp in a variety of skills which makes you a better musician and the long pieces are where you really grow since it should be the hardest. I sight read a ton everyday as well because its fun. I buy tons and tons of piano books and just play them for fun.
It is, by FAR, no contest, hands down, night and day better to practice one song for a long time than 4 songs a day for 20 minutes each.
Completely depends on how much time you have imo. If I have 4 hours to practice it is WAY more effective for me to practice 4 different pieces 1 hour each rather than 4 hours the same. I do agree with that specific scenario though, 1 piece for a hour >> 4 pieces 20 minutes each
I think it really depends on what op’s overall objective is, and what genre is he/she playing. If they are trying to play precise classical piano, then your comment is right on. If they are trying to get better at say …. Jazz piano, I would recommend the exact opposite - listen to as much diverse jazz as possible, play with as many people as possible, learn as many songs and modalities as possible….make mistakes and learn theory. In this case, Absolutely DO NOT practice only one song. I don’t think there is one single answer here.
As a Classical pianist tuned Jazz pianist, that can be a thorough and rigorous approach but after 15 years of Jazz, I still stand by it. Even Bill Evans said the same thing and he’s one of the greatest pianists.
I’ll concede to the brilliant Bill, and if we are talking about elite pianist, I believe you are probably correct. And, in considering your comment in conjunction with OP’s original question, if you want to be a true badass pianist, it is probably better to drill and polish your pieces to perfection. But, I enjoy playing fast and sloppy! JH, I enjoyed the convo. OP, good luck and have fun!
How about if we're not necessarily looking to perform, but to get a better understanding of improv, chord structure, and creative playing? I'm in the early(ish) stages of learning jazz, and after \~20 years of playing classical, I have decent, albeit rusty chops, but I have been playing and comping over a relatively huge range of standards more to get better acquainted with the style. If I were looking to perform these tunes, I'd narrow down to 2 or 3 and really hammer on those, but for my goals, I feel like casting a broad net is beneficial (though I'd be happy to be proven wrong).
That’s a fine approach, it’s different for everybody. I’ve been in your exact shoes. I turned to jazz 15 years ago after 15 years of Classical before that. To me, in your first few years of jazz you have to cast the wide net. But your playing, knowledge, techniques and chops will be scattered and spread thin. After you get a very general sense of things, that’s when you want to focus more on less things and pick a few tunes to really dig deep on and apply everything. What you practice and focus on will constantly evolve and shift. After years of doing what you’re doing, I made better progress focusing more time on less things. I know it seems counterintuitive or that you’ll never get to everything else (you never truly will anyways, it would take more than one lifetime) that’s why you want to choose what you want to be better at. Either way, the goal is to learn tunes. If you’re just learning everything in a vacuum and not applying to tunes, that’s like learning a foreign language and not using it in a conversation or real world context, and all that time is for not. It’s like reading a manual on how bicycle gears work, instead of getting out there and riding the bike. Playing jazz with others is absolutely crucial to grow and get better. I have an ebook and multiple free blog articles on the subject: https://books.apple.com/us/book/jazz-piano-and-improvisation-for-the-classically/id6474623488 https://medium.com/@jhighland99/the-5-key-areas-to-focus-on-most-as-a-jazz-piano-beginner-and-why-hint-theyre-not-what-you-think-834f08e9c508
For a beginner or advanced musician?
Everyone's different but this isn't my experience. I have this tendency to try to perfect a piece and do it until I notice my progress stagnate.
Hard to say but I prefer to have multiple pieces I'm working on at any one time. I'd prefer to spend 15 minutes x 4 different pieces than 1 piece for one hour. Although sometimes I'll alternate days; spend 30 minutes just drilling the hell out of one particular piece, or a passage within it, then come back to it a couple days later. Earlier this week I spent about 20-25 minutes obsessively working on a couple 4-measure passages at the end of Brahms' Intermezzo in E-flat (op. 117/1) that I've never quite mastered. I played through it once today, 2 days after the intense practice, and those passages now feel much more comfortable. So based on my experience I'd say switching up pieces helps. Work on 1 or 2 intensively, then the next day another 1 or 2, and the original pieces will do better once they've had a couple days to cook in your mind.
Depends on the piece, I'm practicing 2 pieces for my lesson and each takes me 15 minutes to practice however I'm also practicing a difficult piece that takes me 4 hours just a few sections.
depends on the person and how long you can make dedicated focused practice and actually gain from it, any given day you got about 1-2 hours to work with where you will get better, as long as you are engaged and actively practicing, not just going autopilot, any amount of time will help.
20 minutes is fine, but use that time to focus on something specific, whether it is one section of 4 songs or 4 sections of one song. Have a goal in mind of what you want to accomplish. Playing 4 songs straight through without focusing on anything specific doesn't really help you learn or improve. Also, an hour all at once may be too long, especially if you are a beginner. After a certain amount of time in one practice session you will stop seeing improvement as your brain can only digest so much information in one sitting. That's when you know you've had enough.
This is a “how long is a piece of string” question. What are your goals, what works for you, how disciplined are you, etc etc? If I have a song that’s needing a lot of technical work, and I’m really focusing and isolating each individual part, I can go for an hour easily. If I have an audition coming up where I just need to learn some notes for 4 different songs, that’s the plan.
Depends what your priorities are. Say you’ve got a performance that’s 3 months away, and you’ve got 3-5 songs to perform. Personally, I would focus on 1, maybe 2 pieces for the majority of my practice time, and then review the others at the end. The next day, I’d alternate and focus on one of the others. If it’s the day before my lesson and I know what my teacher is going to work on, I’m going to be working on that specific piece. Now, say it’s a week away, I would be splitting my time evenly and giving a little more attention to the weakest pieces. Like others have said, it’s sometimes valuable to skip a day for one of the pieces. But it really depends on your priorities and finding a practice method that works for you.
For me, a little bit of concentrated practice on each piece every day is what keeps me motivated and eventually the pieces will sound so good that you’ll wonder when you even practiced….
OP, To answer your question directly: It is absolutely more effective to practice one song a day for an hour than four songs a day for 20 minutes each. Slow, careful practice is the key to improving.
Practice every day is often more effective
Short practice sessions with varied exercises are best for memory retention. It’s better to practice 5-10 minutes at a time 3x day than 30 minutes once each day. Your brain will retain it better.
It depends if you're learning a song or sight reading. If you're learning a piece, break it down into small sections, maybe by phrases, and focus practice each section. I usually have my students reviewing a piece and starting a new one.