Practice Piano Less but Learn Music More 1

Proper Piano Practice Accomplishes More Music with Less Effort

Do you want to practice piano more efficiently, that is, spend LESS time learning MORE music? One part of doing this is being appropriate. HA! Now I have the attention of every piano student in the world! This is something I say and say and say to my own piano students. Unfortunately, some resist and resist. One day, however, they actually try it, it works, and suddenly their practice is dramatically better. They enjoy time practicing piano MORE because they fail LESS.

Consider this - you hear a symphony by using your ears. You taste a meal by using your tongue. You play the piano using your hands. It's a "feeling" thing. Your hands are all about feeling things. It's simply not appropriate to use your eyes to guide your fingers. The sense of sight doesn't work all that well for this purpose. Yes, many of you THINK it does - but notice how you still make the same old mistakes!

I'm talking about a thing called "proprioception" and you should do a little reading up on it. Google it right now.

Let me pass on to you the words of another teacher, a gentleman well known 50 years ago, but almost unrecognized today, Guy Maier. He sums it up this way in this book The Piano Teachers Companion:

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"Naturally, I don't mean that a pianist should NEVER look at his hands, but only contend that he ought to train himself to be much more independent of his visual sense in playing the instrument.... It goes without saying that you will occasionally glance at the keyboard. But if you do succeed in reading new short pieces without once looking down you have made gratifying progress not only in reading but in keyboard orientation and control. Playing without looking brings more security to the player than any other single item in pianistic approach: it develops concentration, accuracy, ease, confidence, intensified listening objectivity...indispensable qualities to a pianist, but difficult of attainment."

Confidence, security, accuracy - all those things piano students pine for. All any piano student, whether taking online piano lessons or lessons with a piano teacher, has to do is:

Quit watching your hands with your eyeballs.

Focus instead on how your hands FEEL

Do you know what keys are under your fingers at all times? How it feels to reach for an octave or six keys? If you don't, you have been using the wrong sense, an INAPPROPRIATE sense. That's easy to fix. Just grit your teeth, have a little faith, and keep your eyes on the music but your mind on your hands. And all will become a new reality in your playing. You'll make some mistakes at first but you'll easily and permanently correct them.

“Satan's Ticker” - The Metronome

Many Piano Students Hate Them but Used Properly Metronomes are Great Tools

The metronome, that thing that sits on many pianos, is the subject of a love/hate relationship for many piano students. Most adults who took piano lessons in their youth likely had some experiences with the metronome, often bad experiences. In this essay, I hope to offer advice that will make the metronome your favorite tool for improving both your piano practice and piano performance.

What good is a metronome?

Metronomes are used to assist the pianist's rhythm. They do this by being completely objective. They are not thrown off track by any problems the piano student might have. They just keeping ticking along at whatever pace you set them. If your piano music is easy, the metronome can slow you down. If your music is hard, they force you to keep going. Thus, the metronome helps you avoid the most common rhythm problem of all - playing the easy parts fast and the hard parts slow.

What's that you say? You can't play the hard parts so fast? Well, then you had better set your metronome more slowly until you can keep up during the hard sections of your music. In this, the metronome is also completely objective. It has numbers which are “beats per minutes” and you simply find one low enough to be able to keep up all the way through. My advice is to pencil this tempo into your music. Next practice maybe you can beat it. Always keep track of how fast you are playing properly and eventually your “piano practice tempo” will be as fast as your would like to perform the music.

What to purchase?

Get a metronome that is loud enough to be heard clear over the sound of your piano. This is by far the most important consideration. Another thing to consider is the metronome's range of bpm (beats per minute.) A wider range is definitely better, but wider in the higher direction. For example, a metronome that will tick at 280 bpm is more useful than one that only goes to 220. Let me explain why.

Let's say you have piano music with a constant eighth note LH part. You could set the metronome so 1 tick meant (represented) a single eighth note. Thus, you might have 8 ticks per 4/4 measure, which is, in this case, much easier to follow than 4 ticks per measure. Since you will have twice as many ticks per measure, however, you need to set your metronome twice as fast to get the same tempo in the music.

Of course, if your metronome doesn't go that high, you are out of luck. By the way, don't be intimidated by the ticking of the metronome at a fast pace. Once you play the music you will see that it really doesn't sound all that fast, no matter what the metronome sounds like.

Electric, battery, windup - not important compared to these other items. Also irrelevant is any particular metronome's “definition” of tempo marks like "allegro." Did you know that various company's metronomes has DIFFERENT definitions of these. Use your own definitions.

When to Use it and When to Quit Using it

Use the metronome to do these two things when they are a problem

Force you to even out your tempo

As I said above, piano students, both those learning at home with online lessons AND those learning with a live teacher in private piano lessons, have a strong tendency to play the hand parts slowly and the easy parts rapidly. They practice this way and it becomes a VERY bad habit, one difficult to break. How do you know if you are playing evenly and keeping the beat? Easy. If you have a digital piano or portable keyboard, record your piano playing and then play it back. You'll hear it easily. If you don't have recording ability, get a family member or friend to clap along with your playing. It will soon become obvious if you have uneven playing.

If you do find yourself uneven, then try just starting the metronome and then turning it off. This develops your sense of evenness. If this doesn't work, then keep the metronome on for the entire piece. Makes it mechanical but it will be EVEN and that's an improvement. Once evenness is a "given" you can turn off the ticker.

Keep track of your progress in learn the music

I've had many piano lessons where I instructed the student to slow down and instead they played their piece at the same tempo. For various reasons, the student could NOT actually slow down. In these cases, I set the metronome and found the slowest setting they could keep up with and remain accurate. We penciled this into their books as their current state of success. I then gave them a higher tempo to strive for next lesson.

You can do this at home. It's very satisfying to learn this way, as you can see your progress each practice and know for sure that you are improving. Finally, you are at full performance tempo and the job is done. If you have no trouble staying even, then just start the metronome to get the feel of the current tempo and turn it off.

Piano Mistakes NOT to Correct !

Mistakes at the Piano are Inevitable but not All Mistakes are Worth Correcting

Many folks are perfectionists by nature, and the adult piano students I teach seem to be part of this group. They all hate to make mistakes at the piano, especially in front of their piano teacher at their piano lesson. It frustrates them no end, and I've written extensively about this "problems at the piano lesson" situation. However, unless they are all "secret Mozarts" these pianists also make mistakes at home and when practicing or performing for others. I know I do, after over 40 years as a professional pianist.The difference is that such mistakes do NOT cause me upset. This essay, then is about what to do about mistakes made, mistakes which are inevitable.

To understand this properly, first we must be clear that a mistake, for a pianist, is when the reality of the sound you make doesn't match your desire. For example:

You wanted a G, but you got an A.

You wanted to use the second finger, but the third played instead.

You wanted a quarter note, but you held it a bit too long.

You wanted it forte (loud) but it came out mezzo forte (medium loud.)

You wanted a bit more of a phrase break, but you played too legato.

Your accelerando was a tad sluggish.

That sforzando chord could have been a bit more emphasized.

The certain sense of agitation needed for proper development was missing in the left hand, third measure, that F#minor arpeggio...

You can see how detailed things can get and thus how many opportunities there are for "piano mistakes." I purposely started with an example of what most piano students consider to THE mistake and moved towards subtle failures that many students never get to considering. For the professional pianist, however, the last few situations could be VERY upsetting. My point, obviously, was that some mistakes are bigger and significant than others. Not all piano mistakes are created equal.

Thus, your first decision is where to draw the line at mistakes you want to correct and mistakes you simply ignore or save for another day.. A good piano teacher does this automatically. When the student plays their piece, the teacher must choose what to correct and what to ignore. The piano student may have finally gotten the rhythm right but still has is still playing too softly. The teacher can either congratulate the student on their success or shift the focus to this new "mistake." I believe a caring teacher will "give the student a win" and move on, keeping in the back of their mind the need to soon approach this volume situation, but in due course.

Many of you are taking online piano lessons. Without a piano teacher to point out the things you do correctly and incorrectly, you likely wonder what mistakes should you worry about, and which should be left for another day.

Here's my “PRIORITY OF MISTAKES”

1. The fundamental mistake is learning music you dislike.

2. Right below that is playing with an UNEVEN tempo.

3. Finally we get to every piano student's favorite mistake - hitting wrong notes. Notice that this is only the third most important. Almost every piano student gets this one wrong and thinks there is no worse mistake than hitting a wrong note.

4. Using the wrong fingering, which includes playing with a really bad technique. If your fingering gets the note played but results in your hand not being in position to play the rest of the piece, what have you gained? What if you learn your music but also learn a new bad habit which will prevent you from playing other pieces of music?

Now there are LOTS of other things that could be called mistakes but I suggest that these are the realm of the professional pianist, or at least of the advanced intermediate played and above. Many of you reading this would be perfectly happy and your music sound perfectly wonderful if you only were able to correct those four types of mistakes listed above.

Adult Piano Students and Memory Problems

Good News! Your Memory is NOT Likely to be Your Main Piano Problem

It's a sad day but an inevitable one for every adult piano student when they realize that the piece of piano music they studied so hard three months ago cannot be easily played easily today. They've forgotten much of it.. Many of my piano students, especially those over 50, fear that age and deterioration has set in. Thus, I give the following lecture during a piano lesson about once a month. You had better read on for you are going to feel better after you are done.

First, let me tell you that 22 years of teaching adult piano students and watching them worry and fret has shown me that their worries are unfounded in almost every case.

The fault is very likely HUMAN memory, not YOUR memory in particular

Everybody forgets pieces they have mastered and even memorized - EVERYBODY! Here is a quote by a famous piano teacher:

"Very few pianists have ever enjoyed so many multiple talents as these two. But they, too, could forget music they had carefully memorized and played hundreds of times. What they did not do, however, was panic."

Who is the "they", the "these two?" None other than Sergei Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Horowitz, two of the greatest pianists of all time. The author is Ozan Marsh, a concert pianist turned university music professor and the quote is from his wonderful book The Pianist's Spectrum.

Human memory itself is inherently fallible - age is seldom the issue

Children forget just as readily as seniors buy you wouldn't know that unless you taught piano to all ages, as I do.

Unless you continually refresh your repertoire you will lose it

I can attest to this. I am, at this moment, relearning my own compositions for an upcoming concert. I wrote many of these pieces in 2000-2001 and have relearned them at least 10 times since. Here I go again! But I don't worry about it, because I KNOW that the relearning process WILL happen as it always has - it just has to be done. The “how” of that process is on the next page.

As for your basic skills of playing the piano, do you remember that old saying about riding a bicycle, that once you know you never forget, even in old age? This is true with piano as well. To carry the comparison out a bit more, you may forget the exact route to ride downtown but you don't forget HOW to ride. Get me? The fingers might be rusty but they haven't forgotten.

Quit worrying. Do this instead:

1. Make a short list of pieces you always want to be able to play well, 5 to 10 such pieces. These will be your repertoire, what you play when someone asks or you just want play piano for fun.

2. Gather all the sheet music into one notebook.

3. Each day, run through as many pieces as possible. This is NOT practice, this is polishing and memorizing. It won't get done in a single day, nor even a single week, but if you simply ensure that you have refreshed your memory daily and perhaps made some improvement that day, it WILL get done.

4. Once the full list is being played well, then take the sheet music away. You will be VERY happy to find that muscle memory has set in and you and can play huge amounts completely from memory. Those parts you still need the sheet music for can be restudied. Eventually, all will be memory.

5. Now your task is to maintain this memory, which means you have to run over this about once a week.

6. Permanently.

Sorry I can't offer some magic approach to learning and keeping a piano repertoire. There isn't one, no matter what some “teachers” might say, but this, the tried and true approach, WILL work for you.

Finally, I offer this if you are still afraid that age dementia is setting in. Do you drive? Good. You'll be fine. My two students who come to my house, the 87 and the 82 year old, do just fine, thank you.

Dan Starr
Piano/Keyboard Instructor and Performer