Priceless lessons on how to replace a short list of unproductive piano practice habits with a short list of highly productive piano practice habits…
Table of Contents
Piano Practice Principle: Habits-R-Us
FACT: The progress you make in playing piano is absolutely determined by the quality of your study and practice habits!
In other words, the reason you fail to make progress is NOT because you are untalented!
The highly likely reason you are frustrated is that you are studying and practicing the wrong things the wrong way. In other words, lack of progress is the absolutely predictable result of having unproductive practice habits!
And so, the key to success is utterly simple: Replace a very short list of bad habits with a very short list of good habits!
How to Study-Practice: Habits (YouTube)…
Practice Habits Video Highlights
The open secret: Getting good is the inevitable… I repeat inevitable reward for replacing a very short list of unproductive study and practice habits with a very short list of productive study and practice habits!
So, what are these highly-effective and efficient study and practice habits? Here are my top eight in no particular order…
- Quality First, Quantity Second.
- Record Yourself.
- Practice with a Metronome or Rhythm Track.
- Divide & Conquer.
- Slow. Things. Down.
- Rehearse Mentally away from the Piano.
Fundamentals of Habit Formation
- Every thought, belief, and action that you repeat over and over again turns into a habit–an unconscious, automatic behavior.
- Whether your thoughts, beliefs, and actions are useful or not, you deeply and unconsciously remember what you repeat.
- These habits are stored in long-term memory.
- Bad habits are hard to break because long-term memories are extremely hard to erase.
- Long-term memories can be permanent, so you need to be very careful what you store there.
The Big Takeaway: The key to success is utterly simple: Replace a very short list of bad habits with a very short list of good habits!
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The Four Stages of Competence
A framework for measuring progress on the road to mastery… with implications for both students and teachers…
There are Four Stages of Competence on the path to mastering a new concept or skill…
Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence (Ignorance)
The state of not knowing what you don’t know.
Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence (Awareness)
The state of being aware of what you don’t know… and realizing you have something to learn.
Stage 3: Conscious Competence (Learning)
The state of having studied or practiced something well enough to explain or demonstrate it to yourself or to others.
Stage 4. Unconscious Competence (Mastery)
The state of having studied and practiced something so deeply that you can apply it or express yourself without having to think about it.
Implications for Students and Teachers
The secret to graduating to Stage 4 (mastery) is that there is no secret.
Progress from Stage 1 to Stage 2 requires you to have the humility to consider that you may not even be aware that you don’t understand something or don’t know how to do something. At this stage, having an experienced teacher who will can gently make you aware of things that would otherwise go unconsidered or unnoticed is priceless.
Progress from Stage 2 to Stage 3 requires three things: The humility to admit you have something to learn, the belief that you are capable of learning it with the right kind of effort, and the discipline to study and practice accordingly.
Progress from Stage 3 to Stage 4 requires the discipline and perseverance to keep on studying and practicing until you “get it” and “it” becomes an enduring part of who you are as a musician and human being.
None of the behaviors described above are fixed character traits or talents. Each one is a choice… available to anyone at this very moment. Choose wisely–with love for what you are doing– and you’ll discover that you are lots more “talented” than you every dreamed possible.
“Mastery is the inevitable reward for studying and practicing the right things the right way.” ~fjp
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Piano Practice Habits: The Proper Mindset (YouTube)
FACT: The quality of your music-making is absolutely determined by the quality of your study and practice habits…
The Proper Mindset Takeaways
Twenty-two insights and principles that will get your whole attitude regarding studying and practicing moving in the right direction…
- The quality of your performance is absolutely determined by the quality of your study and practice habits.
- The real reason you are not making progress is typically not that you are untalented, but that you are studying and practicing the wrong way.
- The reason you make mistakes and seem to forget the music when you perform is that you never really learned the music properly in the first place.
- Quality first, quantity second. In other words, five minutes of mindful attention beats five hours of mindless repetition.
- If you study and practice the right things the right way you should expect super-fast progress… not painfully slow kind of sort of progress only after years and years and years of arduous effort.
- Every aspect of music-making… including how you conceive the music, how you perceive the music with your senses, and how you move your muscles… is controlled by your brain. Not some of it… not most of it… all of it! Therefore, the goal of studying and practicing is always… not sometimes… not most of the time… always… to change your brain.
- Because your muscles do exactly what your brain tells them to do, every mistake is a mental, not a physical, error. To use a computer analogy, when you’re having difficulty playing a piece of music, there’s nothing wrong with your hardware. When you’re having difficulty playing a piece of music, it’s because you are running inefficient or buggy software.
- Music is a language… a language that is unique, universal, and un-translatable… with its own wordless grammar and vocabulary. And so, studying and practicing the right way is the process of learning how to speak the language of music.
- Your brain is naturally wired to seek, appreciate, and respond to patterns. It enjoys patterns. It does not enjoy randomness. Once your brain recognizes a musical pattern, it doesn’t have to “try” to remember it. It a becomes permanent part of your musical mind.
- Studying and practicing the right way engages all four Musical Intelligences: Aural (how you want the music to sound and feel), Analytical (your theoretical understanding of the musical patterns), Visuospatial (the arrangement and sequence of notes on the keyboard), and Kinesthetic (the Fingering & Choreography).
- If you study and practice with all four musical intelligences engaged, you are doing more than merely memorizing the music. You are internalizing the music in multiple dimensions that mutually reinforce each other. So, instead of just kind of sort of knowing the music “by finger”, you’re understanding the music with your ears, brains, eyes, and muscles.
- Studying and practicing the right way… with all four musical intelligences engaged… builds enormous confidence when you perform… and is the best antidote to stage fright.
- If you study and practice the right way… with all four musical intelligences engaged… your musical intentions will automatically trigger the appropriate choreography when you perform.
- Every growing musician should be doing two things simultaneously: Adding music you love to your repertoire… and working on your general musicianship.
- Each piece of music you play is a unique combination of patterns… that you want to get into your ears, intellect, eyes, and muscles. To that end, general musicianship… things like scales, chords, chord voicings, chord progressions, tonality, form, meter, and rhythm… properly studied… give you the knowledge and skills required to hear, understand, see, and execute these patterns.
- Any behavior that you repeat eventually becomes an unconscious habit. In other words, practice makes permanent. In other other words, poor practice habits make it is possible to become quite “skilled” at making mistakes. So, you must be extremely careful about what and how you practice.
- Never ignore a mistake. A mistake is like a good friend telling you that you have something to learn… But a mistake is valuable only if you have the honesty, humility, and discipline to address it constructively. THIS is the hard part of learning to play the piano and what mastery is made of.
- You will never master something by repeating it poorly over and over and over again, hoping that it will someday, somehow become easy. In fact, you are just making matters worse by ingraining bad habits.
- When something is wrong, the very worst thing you can do is play it again the exact same way. To put into positive terms… If at first you don’t succeed… please do try again, but try again in a different way… by thinking about it in a different way and moving your body in a different way.
- What lots of people consider practicing is little more than mindless repetition and a bunch of bad habits… typically always starting at the beginning of the piece… typically going back to the beginning after making a Boo Boo… typically “practicing” at a tempo faster than you can play accurately… typically “practicing” with sloppy rhythm… and typically “practicing” with sloppy technique. Of course, this is not studying or practicing at all. It’s just playing poorly over and over and over again… and ingraining bad habits even deeper.
- Talent alone can take you only so far… The key to success is as simple to say as it is hard to do: If you want to get good, you have to change your study and practice habits!
- Getting good is the inevitable… I repeat INEVITABLE… reward for replacing a very short list… I emphasize… a very SHORT list… of UN-productive habits with a very short list… and I emphasize… a very SHORT list… of productive study and practice habits… to be explored in depth in the next video! I look forward to seeing you there!
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The Cycle of Motivation
Illuminating and inspiring insights into the Cycle of Motivation and how to generate self-sustaining upward spirals of success…
The Greatest Obstacle to Remarkable Progress
Assuming you’re a sincere piano student who makes a good faith effort to study and practice, the obstacle to making remarkable progress is not that you are un-talented. I repeat: Assuming you’re a sincere student who makes a good faith effort to study and practice, the reason you fail to make phenomenal progress is highly unlikely to be lack of talent. The real reason you fail to make phenomenal progress is highly likely to be extremely poor study and practice habits.
Upward Spiral of Motivation
Let’s say you try something at the piano and we get an enjoyable, pleasant, fun, musical result. “Hey, that was pretty good.” You’d naturally be more inclined to keep on practicing, right?
In summary: 1. You do something, 2. Something desirable happens, 3. You are motivated to do that something again. 4. If you continue, you get a self-sustaining upward spiral of success going. Super cool, right?
Downward Spiral of Frustration
Now let’s say you try something at the piano and we get an unenjoyable, unpleasant, unfun, unmusical result. “Wow, that was pretty bad.” You’d naturally be less inclined to keep on practicing, right?
In summary: 1. You do something, 2. Something undesirable happens, 3. You are now unmotivated to do that something again, 4. If you continue, you get a downward spiral of failure going and may quit trying altogether. Boo!
Why Do Sincere Students Quit Playing?
The reason why the overwhelming majority of sincere students quit playing the piano is because they mistakenly come to believe–despite years of sincere effort–that they don’t have “it”… that they are fundamentally untalented.
Importantly, deciding to “quit” when one’s sincere efforts bear little fruit isn’t the choice of a lazy person, but of a perfectly rational person. Why would anybody in their right mind continue expending time and energy without producing anything enjoyable or useful?
Implications for Students and Teachers
The discussion above should teach us all two huge lessons regarding the motivation to study and practice piano:
- Studying and practicing the wrong way things the wrong way is guaranteed to create a downward cycle of frustration… until one quits trying.
- Studying and practicing the right things the right way is guaranteed to create a self-sustaining cycle of effort and progress… and a lifetime of mastery.
So, if you can get this upward spiral going you cannot help but get excited about music. You can’t wait to sit down and study and practice. The results will speak for themselves and you will see and feel that your efforts are bearing fruit.
Sidebar: Instilling the proper study and practice habits is one of the primary responsibilities of your teacher and one of the greatest gifts they can give to you.
The Secret to Success
Getting the upward cycle going required three things:
- You’ve got to know what to study and practice.
- You’ve got to know how to study and practice the right way.
- You have to have the love of music and discipline to study and practice accordingly.
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Motivation (YouTube)
Some Words of Encouragement
If you’ve read this far, you’ve already passed the audition. I’d bet a million dollars that you are NOT untalented, that you love music, and that you’re willing to study and practice the right things the right way. No special talent required. Only the choice to learn what these productive study and practice habits are and the disciple to study and practice accordingly. Follow this path and you’ll enjoy a lifetime of fun and efficient learning and mastery… guaranteed.
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What the Difference Between Studying, Practicing, and Exercising?
To understand that studying, practicing, and exercising are three very different behaviors with three very different goals…
Studying Defined
Studying is the act of focusing ones attention on something with the goal of learning a fact, concept, principle, skill, and so on. Studying reorganizes and strengthens many electro-chemical connections in your brain and typically requires lots of mental effort.
Practicing Defined
Practicing is the act of repeating a complex motor activity until it becomes automatic. This process, where the motor pathways in your sub-conscious brain are reorganized, is called automatization.
Exercising Defined
Exercising is the act of imposing physical stresses on your muscles, ligaments, tendons, bones, heart, and lungs with the goal of improving strength, endurance, flexibility, etc. Repetitive exertions such as running, stretching, swimming, and lifting weights will accomplish this goal. While there might be incidental benefits to your thinking due to increased blood flow to the brain and general well-being, your brain is not meaningfully altered by such physical exertions.
Implications for Piano Students
Practicing, as done by most, is typically just doing something the wrong way over and over and over again hoping for a miracle that never comes. If you want to play like an artist, you must reject the widespread myth that getting good is accomplished by doing physical exercises. This is so important that it needs to be repeated: It is a huge mistake to believe that you need to do exercises in order to play the piano.
Why? Because fluent piano technique is NOT achieved by building strength and endurance. Fluent piano technique is achieved by changing the neural networks in your brain that control how you move your body. It crucial to understand that your BRAIN moves your muscles. Your muscles do not move themselves. In fact, the ability to move your body—to do things like walk, talk, write, eat, and drink—is the only reason for anyone to need a brain at all.
- Getting good at the piano is never a matter of doing physical exercises.
- Doing exercises can be worse than useless. Doing exercises can actually cause injury.
- Never practice anything without studying it first.
The Pareto Principle (80:20 Rule)
Powerful insights regarding effectiveness and efficiency that’s guaranteed to elevate your daily study and practice habits (not to mention everything you do in life!).
What is the Pareto Principle?
The Pareto Principle, also called the 80:20 Rule, is the empirical observation that, in human endeavors, the majority of effects come from a minority of causes and vice versa. In other words, only a small percentage of our time and energy is very productive, while most of our time and energy is wasted doing things that have little effect or value.
By the way, there’s nothing sacred or magical about the numbers 80% and 20%. Some activities can be 90%-10%, 99%-1%, or worse! In fact, some of our biggest investments of time and energy are less than useless; they’re destructive.
Implications for Studying and Practicing Music
Applied to studying and practicing the piano, The 80:20 Rule invites us to discover how to learn the most with the least effort. To that end, making the most effective and efficient used of your precious time and energy requires you to…
- Focus on the minority of efforts that produce the majority of fruit.
- Stop wasting time doing things that do not prepare you for performance.
- Align all of your study habits with your personal musical goals in mind.
- Stop trying to do everything, everywhere, all at once.
- Study and practice the kinds of music that you want to play.
- Stop practicing things that are not relevant to the music that you want to play.
- Can you think of some others?
Special Note: You will soon discover that the entire Piano-ology website is infused with a deep appreciation of the Pareto Principle. Enjoy!
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Managing Your Expectations
An honest and encouraging take on the ups and downs you can expect to have on your successful musical journey…
Expect to make mistakes… lots of mistakes.
Nobody’s perfect, no matter now good they are… and neither are you or me. Imperfection will always be an integral part of the learning process.
Expect to have off days.
You will have days when it seems that you have gone backwards. Everybody has them. Your body won’t do what you want it to do. You can’t concentrate. You are preoccupied with other things. Your timing is off. You feel tired. You are in a low mood. These aren’t “bad” days… just “off” days. It’s OK to give the piano a rest, OK to do something else you care about, OK to just take a break and relax.
Expect to make massive breakthroughs.
If you study-practice the right way, do not expect to make slow progress over many years of toil. If you study-practice the right way, you will make monumental breakthroughs in a heartbeat… quantum leaps in knowledge, insight, and skill… often when you least expect it… that will take your playing to the next level!
Expect to go through many cycles of despair and self-doubt.
Self-awareness, the essential first step in the self-improvement process, is about exposing weaknesses, bad habits, and blind spots. This blossoming self-awareness is a very vulnerable time for two reasons:
- You have to admit your imperfections and weaknesses. You have to admit that you have imperfections and weaknesses.
- Learning exposes you to higher standards than you had before. Rising standards increase the gap between your present state and your potential.
These realizations can be very humbling indeed and may be accompanied by the feeling that you just don’t “have what it takes”. But don’t despair. Every great accomplisher must go through these trials of self-doubt again and again.
“Unsuccessful people only see your successes. They don’t see your failures, frustrations, and self-doubt. They don’t see the perseverance, courage, and love it took to get there.” – Frank Peter
The real test of “having what it takes” is to keep trying when things seem impossible. This is where success is not about talent. It’s about HEART. It’s about GUTS. So, don’t give up, ever, and you will be richly rewarded with a deep satisfaction that most people never experience.
Expect your perspectives about music to change.
When you study-practice the right way, your standards of performance continue to rise higher and higher. As you grow in knowledge and skill, a curious thing happens: The distinctions between “easy” and “hard” seem to become arbitrary and pointless.
- Pieces that you thought were “hard” now seem “easier” than you imagined.
- Pieces that you thought were “easy” now seem “harder” than you imagined.
Why? Because you are going to be solving the same basic problems over and over and over again. As your knowledge and skills expand, you will realize that you never really learned the “easy” pieces in the first place. You also will realize that you do not need “more” technique for the harder pieces.
The Big Takeaway: Failures and frustrations are an essential part of any successful musical journey, but so are explosive leaps of mastery!
“I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy. I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it.” – Art Williams
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Piano Practice Principle: Quality First, Quantity Second
In other words: Study First, Practice Second!
In other other words, physical repetition is important… but only after (emphasis after) you have studied the music using all four musical intelligences… EARS, INTELLECT, EYES, MUSCLES!!!
Let’s take them one at a time and how they relate to the quality of your practice habits…
Ears (Aural Musical Intelligence)
Quality means doing more than just playing symbols (S Y M B O L S). You want to play SOUNDS that you are hearing in your minds’ ear. And you want to do more than merely play accurately. You want to play expressively! It’s amazing how having a crisp and clear musical intention will transform the quality of your performance.
Intellect (Analytical Musical Intelligence)
Quality means using your knowledge of music theory to discover the patterns in the music you are learning. Instead of just brute force note-by-note memorization, you will understand what you are playing as meaningful musical chunks.
Eyes (Visuospatial Musical Intelligence)
Quality means having a clear visuospatial image of the arrangement and sequence of notes on the keyboard in you mind’s eye… seeing not just one-note-at-a time, but as a complete musical pattern.
Muscles (Kinesthetic Musical Intelligence)
Quality means using a fingering that is both mentally and physically easy and experimenting to discover a natural, musical choreography that accurately expresses your musical intentions. Only then should you do mindful repetitions in order to make that choreography automatic.
The HUGE Takeaway: The quality of your performance is absolutely determined by the quality of your study and practice habits. In other words, The gift is not talent; the gift is LOVE. If you love what you are doing, the discipline will follow!
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“Memorization” Problems
“Memorization” in quotes because the goal of studying and practicing is not to memorize a sequence of obscure musical symbols…
The True Nature of “Memorization” Problems
- The reason we fail to remember music is not because we have a “memory” problem. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with our brain’s memory systems.
- The reason why most of us “forget” the music is that we never really learned the music in the first place.
- And we didn’t truly learn the because we never truly studied the music.
The Cure for “Memorization” Problems
- The solution to all “memory” problems is not to practice “memorizing”, but to study and practice the right things the right way.
- If you want to remember something, you need to find ways to make it memorable!
- The real goal is not to “memorize” the music, but to understand the music.
- Understanding the music is accomplished by studying and practicing the music using all four musical intelligences: ear, intellect, eye, and muscle.
- Instead of just having merely “memorized” the music, you will have internalized the patterns and essence that make that music tick: by it sounds, feelings, melodic and harmonic constructs, visuospatial keyboard layouts, and choreography.
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Piano Practice Habits
Small Doses, Repeated Often!
Doing a little bit every day beats doing a lotta bit once a week. In other words, five minutes every day beats one hour once a week for at least two huge reasons:
First, cramming is inefficient. Because your brain, like a sponge, can absorb only so much so fast before it becomes saturated and needs to rest. (ref: How Your Brain Works: Soak Time).
And second, every time you go to sleep your brain does something amazing. It automatically stores what you studied and practiced that day in your long-term memory. And so, if you study and practice every day, you take full advantage of every sleep to make your musical mind grow! (ref: How Your Brain Works: Consolidation).
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Record Yourself!
If I was allowed to give one and only one piece of advice to all piano students, it’s this: Record yourself, listen to the playback immediately, and ask yourself: Is THAT what you intended to play?
Paying attention to everything:
- Are the notes and rests accurately played?
- Does your tempo unintentionally speed up or slow down?
- Are there any hesitations?
- Are there unintended accents?
- Are the dynamics, phrasing, and articulations what you meant to express?
- Can you think of some others?
And if THAT was not what you intended to play, do something constructive with what you just learned. And do so immediately by experimenting with a different way to think about the music and your musical intentions… and how to move your body (choreography) in order to achieve your desired goal.
BTW, if you are an imperfect human being like me, expect to hear things in the recording that you did not notice while you were playing. While this can be quite the humbling experience, I can’t think of enough superlatives to convey how critically-important such feedback is to building your self-awareness and elevating your standards of what it means to play like a real musician.
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Stop Wasting Time!
This is so important that we need to scold ourselves in bold letters with three exclamation points… STOP WASTING TIME!!!
And so vitally important that I’m going to say it again: STOP. WASTING. TIME!
Common Time Wasters
Four common and habitual ways that we waste time at the piano…
- Studying and practicing pieces we don’t love to play… and that we have no intentions of keeping in our repertoire.
- Mindlessly “practicing” things we already know how to play… typically by always starting at the very beginning of piece, when the thing we really need to work on is on the middle of page 3.
- Automatically going back to the beginning of a piece when we make a mistake.
- Studying and practicing stuff that does not help us perform better. Specifically, wasting precious time doing contrived mechanical exercises. (Hint: If you want to get good at Bach, study Bach. If you want to play Jazz, study Jazz. There you will discover the musical patterns and technical problems that are particular to the music that you want to play.)
The HUGE Takeaway: STOP. WASTING. TIME!
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Use a Metronome!
Used properly, practicing with a metronome or rhythm track has the power to absolutely transform your playing in at least two ways:
- To help you discover and solving a problem in your conception, perception, technique, or rhythm.
- To help your, by training, to develop and internal sense of time and rhythm.
When to Know if a Metronome will Help
If you’re playing the right notes, but your music just doesn’t seem to flow, you almost certainly have one or all of the following three issues:
- You don’t have a clear conception (aural, analytical, visuospatial, kinesthetic) of how you want the music to sound and feel.
- Your conception or perception of the rhythm is distorted somehow. For example, you might mistakenly think a note is “here” within the meter, but it really belongs somewhere else.
- A hitch, tension, or awkwardness in your physical execution is upsetting your intended timing.
How the Metronome Helps
Playing along with regular pulse or rhythm gives you immediate feedback by letting you know:
- If you are synchronized with the underlying pulse and tempo of the piece.
- If you are playing the notes where in the meter you intend to play them.
- If and where your timing goes off due to sloppy or faulty choreography.
Once you expose the problem area, you can then solve the problem using the other study and practice habits you already know.
Mechanical or Electronic Metronome?
A fundamental shortcoming of mechanical metronomes is that they generate a series of undifferentiated clicks. In other words, all the clicks sound alike. In other other words, a mechanical metronome does not know what meter is and cannot tell you where “the 1” is.
The great news is that electronic time references can be set to various meters with clicks that emphasizes “the 1”. Quick advice: Download a free metronome app on your smartphone and use it!
Expert Ways to Use a Metronome
There are at least seven ways to supplement playing with a metronome or rhythm track that will help you deeply internalize the rhythm…
- Count the Meter Out Loud… for example: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &…
- Scat the Rhythm… meaning vocalizing the rhythm of what you are playing. babbadabbadbabbabad…
- Sway your Body or Bob your Head or Tap your Feet or do all three.
- Combine it with Slow Playing… I guarantee that you can always find a tempo slow enough to play accurately. Always!
- Combine with Fast Playing… faster than you ever expect to perform, a great way to expose a technical insecurity.
- Play One Hand at a Time and clap time on your lap with your non-playing hand.
A Word of Caution
- Don’t get “metronome-happy”. For some kinds of music, there is such a thing as playing too straight! While it is okay to play with the metronome in order to diagnose and solve a problem, the metronome and counting are just training wheels that should be abandoned as soon as you understand what you are playing and start to work on developing your interpretation.
- Music as-written can never represent the full expression of music as-performed. Playing with “good time” is measured by the coherence of fully formed musical ideas, not by the exact alignment of isolated events on rigid timeline. Such coherence comes from the unified expression of the entire musical phrase, not from machine-like precision.
- Natural-sounding music breathes and ebbs and flows with each phrase, always sensitive to the larger artistic context.
- Record yourself... always… and listen to the playback immediately. This is the best way to know if your musical intentions were met… and if what you think you heard and felt while you were playing is actually what happened. Also, a great way to check if you played with good time is to stand up and see if you can Stroll, Swagger, March, or Dance to the playback.
The HUGE Takeaways: The metronome, used appropriately, can be a valuable teaching aid, but do not let it become a tyrant. Use it as needed to diagnose a blind spot with rhythm or to solve a technical problem, but do not become a slave to the ticker. The reason to be able to play accurately in time is so that you can go beyond robotic precision in order to play musically and artistically!
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Divide and Conquer!
Did you ever notice how you can play the first few bars of a piece so much better than the rest?
And did you ever notice that, when you are having difficulty playing a piece, there’s probably just one or a just few places that are causing you trouble?
So, if you want to get good, you must break the time-wasting habit of “practicing” a piece by always starting at the beginning… and then compounding that horrible habit with yet another horrible habit: going back to the beginning when you make a mistake, hoping by some miracle that things will just work out right.
The proper way to study and practice any piece is to break it into sections… and break sections into phrases… and phrase into subphrases… and and so on… until you’ve broken the music up into digestible chunks… and then to study and practice each digestible chunk using the practice habits you already know until you internalize it using all four musical intelligences.
What does digestible mean?
Digestible means small enough to pay full attention to what you need to pay attention to. In other words, small enough to fit into your short-term memory… where the music can be transferred to your long-term memory where it becomes a permanent part of your musical mind.
And when you have identified a weak area, you must relentlessly go after each and every insecurity like a brain surgeon… where no detail is too small: every intention, note, rest, fingering, articulation, and gesture. For particularly difficult spots, a digestible chunk may be no bigger than a single chord, single beat, or a particular transition in just one of your hands. Whatever it may be, the digestible chunk must be small enough to give your full attention to the detail in question.
The Payoffs
There are at least two huge benefits of dividing and conquering:
- Instead of just a single memory trigger point at the beginning of a piece, you will have multiple memory trigger points… and will be able to start any musical phrase with the same conviction and confidence as the beginning!
- You will learn a lot more music in a lot less time. Think of it this way: Suppose it took you 5 minutes to play through an entire piece, but that the part that was causing you trouble was only 5 seconds long. If you just focused on the problem part, you could study and practice that particular spot 12 times in one minute instead of mindlessly playing the whole piece one time in five minutes! That’s a sixty to one ratio!
The HUGE Takeaway: The discipline to divide and conquer takes no special talent. Doing so is a choice available to you at this very moment.
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Slow. Things. Down!
Slow practice canworks wonders for your playing, but how slow is slow?
How Slow Should You Go?
- Slowly enough to pay attention to what you need to pay attention to.
- Slowly enough to be aware of the sounds you are making (Ears).
- Slowly enough to think analytically about the patterns you are playing (Intellect).
- Slowly enough to visualize the arrangement and sequence of notes on the keyboard (Eyes).
- Slowly enough to feel the sensations created by your body movements (Muscles).
- And slowly enough to play accurately… with a clear musical intention, correct notes, good rhythm, and natural choreography.
Benefits of Slowing Things Down
Slow playing gives you lots of time to think… and therefore is a great way to test if you really do know everything you think you know about a piece.
Slow playing gives your four musical intelligences time to be fully conscious of what your brain is doing.
Slow playing gives you enough time to always play accurately… which is absolutely essential for training your brain to move your muscles repeatably and reliably in response to your musical intentions.
Slow playing exposes every physical and mental insecurity… things that easily go unnoticed at performance tempo.
Slow playing allows sufficient soak time for the information in your short-term memory to transfer to your long-term memory where it can become permanent. In doing so, you will discover that you have memorized a piece without even trying.
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Speed Things Up!
Another practice habit that has the power to level up your playing is to speed things up!
Playing a passage faster than you expect to perform it has two immediate benefits:
- It imposes a stress test on your technique, which helps your discover some previously unconscious insecurity.
- It forces you to play without thinking (which helps you deepen your sub-conscious muscle memory traces!)
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Rehearse Mentally!
An incredibly effective way to deeply internalize your music almost anywhere and anytime, even away from the piano…
When and How to Do It
Once you’ve studied a piece or section or even just a phrase of music well enough to know your musical intentions and choreography, try closing your eyes and imagine everything about it in your musical mind… making full use of all four musical intelligences (Ears, Intellect, Eyes, and Muscles)…
- Use your aural musical intelligence to imagine the sounds you want to make (your mind’s ear).
- Use your analytical musical intelligence to imagine the musical patterns you’re playing (using your knowledge of music theory).
- Use your visuospatial musical intelligence to imagine the arrangement and sequence of the notes on the keyboard (your mind’s eye).
- And use your kinesthetic musical intelligence to imagine the fingering, choreography, and the sensation of your muscles moving in response to your musical intentions.
It’s important to do all the above no faster than you can pay full attention to what you need to pay attention to.
What Makes Mental Rehearsal So Effective?
Mental rehearsal is an extremely effective study habit for at least three reasons:
- It’s a honest test to see if you really know the music.
- It forces you to slow down and concentrate deeply on every detail.
- Such brain work results in much deeply learning than is possible by just playing.
Benefits of Mental Rehearsal
Adding mental rehearsal to your regular study and practice sessions elevates the quality of your playing to the genius level, enables you to will learn lots more music in just a fraction of the time, transforms self-doubt into feelings of competence and confidence, and becomes a self-motivating practice habits when you see the remarkable results.
And, as a bonus, such mental rehearsal enables you to study and practice almost anytime and anywhere even without a piano: while taking a walk, being stuck in traffic, or waiting in line at the store!
The HUGE Takeaway: Mental Rehearsal, like every other effective study and practice habit is simple and easy to do. The problem, of course, is that it is also easy NOT to do. And so the discipline required to rehearsal mentally is like a superpower that is guaranteed to elevate your playing. And most importantly, practicing as such is choice, not a talent… a choice that’s available to every one of us at this very moment.
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Before We Begin: A Meditation on Gratitude
What more honest and inspiring way to begin a study-practice session than with a sincere meditation on Gratitude…
Before We Begin: A Meditation on Gratitude (Audio)
Before We Begin: A Meditation on Gratitude (Transcript)
- Go to the piano… and sit as you normally would.
- Close your eyes… and take three deep breathes… all the way into your belly… slowly in through your nose… and slowly out through your pursed lips.
- With your eyes still closed… reach out with your hands and touch the keys… and realize what a privilege it is to have access to the remarkable instrument in front of you.
- With your eyes still closed… think about the music you love to play… and realize what a privilege it is to have access to such a rich inheritance.
- With your eyes still closed… realize what a privilege it is to have the time and freedom to make music part of your life.
- With your eyes still closed… realize what a privilege it is to have two working arms… and two working hands… and ten working fingers.
- Realize what a privilege it is to have… two good ears to hear… and two good eyes to see.
- With your eyes still closed, realize what a privilege it is to have the opportunity to share your love of music with others!
- Finally, drop your shoulders and breathe deeply… feel your whole body relax… and allow an easy smile to come to your face.
- Now we are ready to begin our work.
The HUGE Takeaway: Make gratitude a routine practice every time we sit down to study, practice, and perform… until it becomes so automatic that it permeates who we are as human beings.
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Piano Practice Habits: No Talent Required (Micro-Lessons)
An illuminating collection of truisms, attitudes, and practice habits that are guaranteed to pave the road to mastery…
If you want to get good, you have to do more than just play. You have to STUDY and PRACTICE. ~ frank peter
The quality of your performance is absolutely determined by the quality of your study and practice habits. ~ frank peter
Getting good is the inevitable reward for replacing a very short list of UN-productive study and practice habits with a very short list of productive study and practice habits. ~ frank peter
When you practice the wrong things the wrong way, learning is slow and insecure. When you study and practice the right things the right way, learning is fast and enduring. ~ frank peter
The reason you make mistakes and seem to forget the music is that you never really learned the music properly in the first place. ~ frank peter
If you study and practice the right things the right way you should expect fast and explosive progress… not painfully slow kind of sort of progress only after years and years and years of arduous effort. ~ frank peter
Quality first, quantity second. In other words, Study first, practice second. ~ frank peter
Never practice something faster than you can hear it, think about it, see it, and execute it ACCURATELY. ~ frank peter
Exercising makes your muscles tired. Studying makes your brain tired. If you want to get good, you don’t need to exercise. You need to study! ~ frank peter
Five minutes of mindful attention beats five hours of mindless repetition. ~ frank peter
The best way to remember something is to make it memorable! ~ frank peter
Music that is merely “memorized” is at risk of being forgotten. Music that is understood is never forgotten. ~ frank peter
Once your brain recognizes a musical pattern, it doesn’t have to “try” to remember it. It automatically becomes a permanent part of your musical mind. ~ frank peter
A mistake is like a good friend telling you that you still have something more to learn. ~ frank peter
Every mistake is a mental error, not a physical error. ~ frank peter
Practice makes permanent. So stop “practicing” your mistakes! ~ frank peter
Record everything, listen to the playback immediately, and ask yourself: Is THAT what you intended to play? And if it isn’t what you intended to play, experiment with different ways to think about the music and move your body until you get it.” ~ frank peter
If, at first, you don’t succeed… please try again… but try again in a different way. ~ frank peter
Mindless practice, sloppy performance. Mindful practice, crisp performance! ~ frank peter
Stop wasting time doing things that don’t help you perform better! ~ frank peter
Stop wasting time “practicing” stuff you already know how to play! ~ frank peter
Stop going back to the beginning of the piece every time you make a mistake! ~ frank peter
“Men trip not on mountains, but on stones.” ~ Hindustani proverb
You know you know the music when you can imagine playing it with your ears, intellect, eyes, and muscles! ~ frank peter
Doing a little bit every day beats doing a lotta bit once a week. ~ frank peter
Mastery is largely about discovering simplicity in apparent complexity. Once you see the simplicity, you realize that complexity is just an illusion. ~ frank peter
One reason to play music is to discover your limits… so that you can transcend them… and realize that they weren’t limits after all. ~ frank peter
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