5 Ways to Practice Effectively

I think when people envision piano practice, they see you sitting down and playing through pieces beginning to end. It's a completely understandable assumption, and this is also what our students think until we teach them otherwise. The reality is that a good, effective & dedicated practice has a lot of work that isn't just playing through pieces. So the third post of the Ship Shape Pianist series gives you 5 tips to making your practice more effective for 2018. If you want to see some real progress in your playing, try implementing these. If you aren't sure what resources to use for any of these, just ask your teacher what they'd recommend.


1. Scales & Technic: Warm up your fingers & your brain with some scales & arpeggios. Practice them at different tempos from slow & deliberate to very quickly. Play them legato & staccato, or try a swing or drop-roll pattern. Work on finger placement & thinking ahead to eliminate any pausing. Then transition into a technical exercise. This could be a Fingerpower exercise, Hanon, Czerny, or maybe a short Bach piece.


2. Sight Reading: Fluency in sight reading does not happen overnight, but it will happen much faster if you sight read for even just few minutes of each practice. Either with an app, or a book, or a piece of sheet music you want to sample on your phone or tablet, spend some time sight reading. Be aware of both pitch AND rhythm.

3. Score Analysis: Think of your sheet music like a road map. When we are going on a trip, we usually think about how we're going to get there. We typically won't just start driving without at least plugging an address into your GPS, right? So before you play, glance through your piece. Look for patterns in the music, changes in time & key signature, dynamics, passages to make notes on the fingerings, tricky rhythms you may want to count out beforehand & get a general sense of where the music is going before you dive in. 

4. Tricky Bits: After analyzing your score, & playing through your piece once, identify the tricky passages and practice them in isolation. Break them down, work on the fingers both hands separate & together, practice the rhythm slowly at first and gradually increasing until it is a comfortable speed for the piece. This is so important for your muscle memory & your ability to anticipate these trickier bits when playing through the whole piece.

5. Take a break: Often, you won't solve every single tricky bit in one practice session. If you feel yourself getting frustrated, take a 5 minute break. Or if you've got it 'good enough' for that day, end your practice being ready to pick it up the next day. One of the amazing things about our brains is that they will keep working on those neuron connections we've built in practice all through the rest of the day & while we sleep. When you come back to play the tricky passage again, you'll notice the improvement. This is why we need to practice consistently, so every night while you sleep your brain can keep building & reinforcing the neuron pathways that are not only crucial to playing piano, but really good for your cognitive health in general. Who knew your playing could improve while you sleep?!

Next week's Ship Shape Pianist article is going to be a little different. This one is for the teachers & business owners out there. So stay tuned!