Tips to getting a productive Piano Practice - Part 1 of 2
So here in Ireland it's the start of Spring.
Do you feel refreshed and motivated towards practice or is it a struggle?
Perhaps a new routine or a way of doing things is in order, a different perspective.
Tip number one and most important:
Always have set goal in mind for practice
Easier said than done right?
How do you know what is an appropriate goal to set?
How do you know what's achievable?
How can you set something realistic?
The simple answer is to know the music, I mean really know the music, and what is required of you. You need to break it down into small sections, then break it down further into daily bitesize tasks. These tasks need to be completed in order to master technical aspects and to perform the piece with musicality.
Let's break it down even more!
How do you set an achievable goal for yourself to reach in one practice session?
Again, know the pieces you are trying to learn for repertoire, I mean really know them. Be able to hear them in your head and sing the melody, without the music playing.
You need to immerse yourself in the music and in more than just playing and sight-reading.
What do I mean by this?
Well here are some suggestions that I have found to help me immensely:
Take out the sheet music and find a recording on YouTube of the piece, if available, do try to source recording to listen to even the library has a catalog of music. While listening to the music follow along with the sheet music carefully multiple times.
Notice what is happening in relation to the markings on the sheet music. Listen to different interpretations from different artists. Make notes on the sheet music for yourself on the approach you would like to take, this can be inspired by the different artists interpretations listened to. Go to the piano and experiment with your touch on the keys, can you mimic what you hear in your head and your favourite recording?
Sing along with the melody line while the music is playing, follow along with the sheet music and notice what happens to the melody whether it changes from the left hand and right, is up on the top register or in the lower registers? Note the different melodic ideas on the sheet music, it can be as simple as labeling music ideas melody a and melody b for the moment.
Breakdown the piece using the sheet music into its parts; first section, second section, melody A melody B, development, recapitulation, repeating melodies, even as simple as this part joins melody a to melody b. You don't need to get hung up on terminology right now but you can learn that in time, don’t panic. What you need to know is what is going on in the music you're going to learn, and what composers intentions were, what they were trying to convey through the music.
As you play and sight read through the music do notice - Key signature of the piece, and its relative minor. Notice patterns and sequences, arpeggios, broken chords, broken octaves. key modulations and the building of tension and release through the harmonies.
Isolate the areas of technical difficulty in the sheet music with a big x in pencil.
Identify what is happening for example tremolos, trills, broken octaves and what exercises or other work you can do to help master these techniques.
Drill down into those technical areas and isolate the exact technical move (Czerny, Brahms) or mechanical (Hanon) move that you are having an issue with, it can also be tricky rhythms that are proving challenging. Find an exercise that would help this or a less challenging piece to learn that has the same technique but slightly easier.
For example the Chopin etudes range from extremely difficult to difficult, but as they are usually only one to 2 pages long there are much more chewable peace then some of his longer works. His etudes contain many technical aspects that can be practiced and isolated to improve technique as well as scales and arpeggios and all the variations and exercises you can do with them. These are for intermediate players to advanced however. There are many graded pieces available within all the different music schools exam repertoire that can be used as a guide for earlier grades along with exercises like Hannon, Czerny or a dozen a day combined with scales and arpeggios. For help on graded repertoire - R.I.A.M the Royal Irish Academy of Music has a youtube channel demonstrating all the exam pieces and you can purchase an exam repertoire book online off various retailers. ABRSM has similar for their graded exams.
Now we need to make a plan to tackle all the areas you need to learn to be able to master this music and the areas you need to polish and improve upon.
Aim for dedicated technical and mechanical exercises or any other activity that zones in on the technique required, by the multiple repertoire pieces, that you want to focus on. This would allow you to switch up exercises on a daily basis so as to avoid any repetitive strains.
Aim for including technical or mechanical exercises depending on what you need for the piece including them in every practice session or every other daily practice session. It is not necessary to do multiple exercises that work the same areas and only on white keys, transpose exercises into the keys of the repertoire pieces. These exercises will coincide with you learning the piece as well in a daily practice.
Take a moment to sight read through the piece but instead of playing the melody and harmony break it down into blocked chords and play through.
Note down on the sheet music what chords you are using and what is that overall effect on the music.
What you are doing is identifying the basic skeleton structure of the chord progression of the piece. This will help you remember it and will also help you understand what is happening at crucial points in the music. You will understand more by hearing and doing than you would by reading harmonic analysis of the sheet music by somebody else but these are fun to look at also.
The parts of the piece that you can comfortably tackle now, begin to sight read and play through moving on to memorizing, to be able to play without the sheet music. Start at random points in the piece, memorize bar and a half at a time, then joined together and play through with the sheet music turned around. Also starting with the last bar of a section and working backwards, helps during this process, as it defamiliarizes you and forces you out of learning by rote.
Repeat until you can play the bar and the next one beside it smoothly with an even tempo from memory. Now move on to the next bar and repeat. I would give 30 minutes daily to learning a new piece of repertoire like this if it is not the only one I am currently learning, I usually have 3 to 4 pieces of varying stages of completion on the go at one time. Feel free to continue repeating this for as long as you like if this is the only piece that you are learning.
What a good method to start with is to aim for 3 bars at a time memorised in one session of 30 minutes. This may need repeating, as in those same 3 bars daily for a while (weeks depending on complexity) until you speed up your memory and recall skills. As you speed up in your memorization skills 3 bars will take 10 minutes and you could have, depending on the piece, a page memorized in one session. At the beginning, it can also be useful to go to the Piano and try to play the memorized sections 3-4 times throughout the day, just 5 mins playing cold. This tests your recall, and will highlight any fuzzy areas, try to picture the sheet music in your head.
That would be about 10 minutes of technique and maybe 30 minutes learning another section that you can comfortably tackle now. That's 40 minutes dedicated practice down and always add in a warm - ups scales and arpeggios. Now we’ve suddenly got a one hour practice session schedule.
Well I hope I’ve inspired you with ideas for piano practice, talk you all in March in my next blog post, part 2 where I will structure out a full practice session in detail.. And everyone have a relaxed, musical February.