Get the most out of your efforts

Here are several tips to help you practice more effectively.

Go easy on yourself and ease up on your expectations. Remember, playing the piano is supposed to be fun. (Why do you think they call it "playing" the piano?) Feeling pressured to improve your skills on a self-imposed timetable will only create frustration and eventually you may stop playing altogether. Your playing skills will not improve in a linear line in other words, your skills will improve more on a chart that looks like the Dow Jones average.

Occasionally recognize your accomplishments. The tendency we all have to is compare ourselves to other pianists who are more advanced. This is good if it keeps you motivated to continue practicing. But, I encourage you to also, often, compare yourself to where you were last month, or last year, and feel proud for what you can do now.

5-minute rule: don't put off practicing because you don't have a full 30 minutes, or other self-imposed time frame. The 5-minute rule is an agreement you make with yourself (and it can be used everyday). If you feel that you don't have enough time to practice, or youre too tired, stressed, hyper, sleepy, etc. to play, then tell yourself that you only have to practice for 5 minutes at that particular time. Run through a quick warm-up and then practice a song, a passage, a finger drill, a chord progression, but practice something with purpose. After 5 minutes, you can quit and will have ethically lived up to your agreement. Or, you may continue playing, knowing that you have not tricked yourself into practicing more but are practicing because of your own free will.

Get in the habit of always warming up. Even if you only have a few minutes to play the piano, at least loosen your fingers through the 5-finger warm-ups, and/or one or two Hanons, and/or a scale and/or arpeggios and/or inversions, etc.

Practice alone, if possible. (I encourage you to occasionally play for family or friends, but playing and practicing are two different things.) If you have an electronic piano or keyboard, get a pair of headphones so that you can play when others are around.

Practice two different ways:

a. Keep your eyes on the music. When playing etudes and other written pieces, practice reading skips and steps and other intervals rather than looking at your hands. Youll soon have an excellent sense of keyboard geography and wont get lost as when you constantly look down at your hands and back at the music.

b. Practice without music. You can look at your hands then! (Liberace watched his hands all the time, but who wouldnt?!? Maybe he was just looking at his rings.) Its important that you spend some time playing without reading music. Regularly practice chords, chord drills and chord progressions without looking at the music. If you read it, you can't hear it, so you can't play it. In other words, when reading a song, its easy to be so intent on getting the correct notes, fingering, rhythm, etc. that you won't even hear what you're playing. This makes for very mechanical music not to mention that it gets boring after awhile. By playing chords and progressions without the music, youll find you play songs written songs easier, you'll develop your ear and get better at playing by ear, and you'll enjoy it immensely.

Practice songs in sections. divide a song in halves or thirds or even quarters, or the verse and chorus. Isolate difficult parts and play them several times even if its as short as two notes that your fingers can't seem to coordinate.

Occasionally, start your practice session at a different part of the music. We tend to always start at the beginning, which is often easier than a later section. Every time we play it, the beginning gets smoother, and we slide through a later, more challenging section. There are many songs we never really learn to play through completely.

Practice each hand separately first until you're comfortable playing that section. Practice until each hand can comfortably play at the required tempo. Put your hands together after youre fairly comfortable playing them separately, and occasionally, practice hands separately again.

Play as fast as you can. I know, you've probably heard advice to practice slowly until you can play smoothly and then increase your speed. It is a fact that a certain amount of slow practice and attention to detail is absolutely necessary. And you should never perform a song faster than you can play the most difficult part in other words, the tempo should be consistent. However, slow practice exclusively doesn't allow a chance to develop fluidity involving shading, dynamics, phrasing differences in touch and rhythmic vitality. Here are a few tips concerning tempo when practicing:

a. Take a section of the song, play it slowly at first, but then try it at the suggested tempo, or at least close to it. If you stumble, try again. Then go back to the slower tempo. You can play a short section 20 times in a few minutes at one sitting and even memorize the section. Then at the same sitting or another time, start another short section. This is more effective than learning the whole song slowly then gradually speeding up.

b. At times, practice sections faster than the suggested tempo and, when proficient, you'll be amazed at how easy it is to play it at the correct tempo.

By practicing sections this way, you will get more of a feel of the song when you start putting them together. You may change your mind about how to play the song as new sections are added this is interpretation.

Memorize a piece as you are learning to play it. You may not want to memorize every song you play, but there will be some that you definitely want in your repertoire. A mistake many students make (I know I did this) is to think, "I'll memorize the song after I learn to play it." But, to memorize a song you have learned to play will require almost as much times as it took to learn it in the first place. It may surprise you to find how difficult it is to play a section without looking that you can already read well. When working on any particular section, spend a few minutes playing the section without looking at the music. At first, you may have to look at the music over and over just to play 3 or 4 notes. In a few days or weeks of practicing a section, try to have it memorized, even if you still struggle to play it at tempo. Memorizing sections this way will help you when you're playing chords and chord progression without music. You'll have your own bag of memorized licks that will sometimes come out when you're not expecting them.

Aimee Phillips teaches adults and children, not only how to play the piano, but how to have fun playing the piano. She teaches in Bethany Beach and Lewes, Delaware.

by Aimee Phillips - December 2007

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