Before starting
By now you have hopefully chosen a piece that seems to be at the correct level, and you have probably listened to at least one recording of it. Before starting to learn the notes of the piece, I would recommend putting in a little bit of extra time to learn about the piece and the composer first.
Find 2-3 recordings of the piece. Avoid digital piano recordings as they will not have the same depth of playing as physical pianos. You can look up the name of the piece on Youtube or Spotify and try to find recordings by great pianists. Refer back to Musicality for how to listen.
Depending on the level of the piece, you might be able to find some tutorials or masterclasses online. I would recommend watching those. If you can’t find any for that particular piece, you might be able to find some for that composer or for that style. These will also be useful.
First look
There are several things to pay attention to when first looking at a piece. The first two are the key signature and the time signature. Given the key signature, figure out if the piece is in the major key or its relative minor. You should make sure you are familiar with this key; that means you should be familiar with the scale, triads, chords, and other patterns. I will discuss this more in the Integrative Approach. The same concept applies to the time signature; again I will discuss getting familiar with a time signature further in the Integrative Approach section.
Once you have identified the key and time signatures, you should try to play through the piece. This will help you identify the difficult sections, or the sections that might need more attention. Depending on your level and your reading ability, you might be able to play through hands together, but if that’s too difficult, hands separately is fine.
Divide and conquer to memorise
In order to memorise the piece, you must break it into smaller manageable chunks. The length of these chunks depends on how much you feel like you can remember. Depending on the difficulty of the music, this could mean one phrase, or several bars. Whatever the length of these chunks, you must be able to store the entire chunk in short term memory without too much difficulty. If you don’t remember the first few notes by the time you get to the end of the chunk, it’s probably too long.
In order to stitch the chunks together, it is important to learn them with an overlap. Always add the first few notes of the next chunk along with the one you’re currently learning. This little overlap will act as glue when you put the chunks together.
The purpose of these chunks is primarily to memorise the music. Until you have memorised the piece, you don’t want to spend too much time refining it. You should, however, make sure that you are learning it with the correct fingering; which means you should be able to play it at speed. This is important because sometimes a particular fingering will work at slower speeds, but be impractical as you speed up the passage.
For each chunk you memorise, you should analyse the music and understand what is going on in terms of music theory and piano technique. I will discuss this more in the Integrative Approach.
Each chunk should also be memorised with musicality. You don’t want to be learning the music mechanically, without any emotion or feeling. Musicality is not a detail, or a finishing touch you put on a piece, it is a way to approach all of our time at the piano such that we are producing music, not a series of sounds from notes written on a page.
There is no set order to learn or practise the chunks. You can begin anywhere you see fit. Sometimes I will start with the most difficult sections, other times with the easiest. There is no correct order. However, changing this order regularly is beneficial. By continually looking at the music from different angles, you will be able to notice things that would’ve otherwise gone over your radar, and you will inevitably memorise it better.
Some other exercises to try when memorising:
- pick a random point in the piece and start from there (try starting on off-beats for greater difficulty)
- mentally reorganise the bars and play them as a new piece
- play the chunk reading from right to left
Practise cycle
Our time at the piano is valuable. In the time that we have, we want to be as efficient as possible. If we want efficiency, we need to make learning a simple process. By having a process, we don’t need to keep thinking about how to learn something, we can trust that following a set of steps will bring good results every time. The process in question is what I call the practise cycle: preview, play, and review.
Preview
In this first stage, you build a mental image of what the perfect version of this chunk sounds like. This is why listening to the piece beforehand is important. If you don’t have a model in your head to aim for, how can you hit it, and how do you know if you have?
In the beginning, it might be difficult to imagine all the details at once. If that is the case, narrow your focus (e.g., phrasing, time, technique). Now imagine hearing the passage, imagine yourself playing it. Form the perfect mental model.
Play
Once you have a strong mental image of what you are aiming for, you must now execute on this vision with all your focus. Direct all your energy on playing exactly as you imagined.
Do not fall in the trap of reviewing, or making value judgements as you are playing. Simply play without thinking about anything else.
Review
Once you have played the section of interest, you can review. Compare it to the ideal you had in your head: in what ways was the execution different from the intent? Be as specific as possible, adopt the problem solving mentality I discussed in the Be a Great Teacher section.
Once you have figured out the problems and possible solutions, go back to the preview stage, taking into account your new insights. This continuous iterative approach will provide results in the most efficient way possible.
As the passages get longer and longer, especially later on in the learning stage of the piece, you might find it difficult to remember what you played when you are reviewing. Recording yourself will solve this issue. Even if you do remember how you played, recording yourself will provide an invaluable resource. Recordings don’t lie: you will be able to review what you played with perfect recollection and insight. The extra time and effort taken to record oneself is not always worth doing, but every now and then will prove extremely useful.
This kind of practise is exhausting, it takes a lot of focus, intent and energy. It is easy to get distracted, in the beginning, you might only be able to do this for 15-30 minutes at a time. Be satisfied with that amount, take some time, work on something else (maybe more creative and exploratory), and come back to that kind of practise later.
Keep a log
Earlier in the book, I mentioned the importance of keeping a log. Let me reiterate why it is important.
When you keep a log of what you are working on, the problems you encounter, and the solutions to those problems, you are able to track your progress and assess the difficulty of pieces you are working on. If you find you are spending a lot of time on a particular piece, and struggle with problems you don’t have the solutions for, it might be a sign that the piece is beyond your current capabilities.
Let’s say you put that piece on pause and move on to something slightly easier (maybe even something that allows you to address an easier version of the current problems). If you have kept a good practise log, you will be able to come back to the original piece and have all your previously found insights available to you for no extra work. You will be able to pick the piece up with more ease than if you hadn’t kept this log.
Keeping a log is also useful for planning purposes. When you know what you worked on in the previous session, it’s easy to carry on. Looking the other way, once you have finished a session, it’s easy to know what the next steps are and to plan for the next session. You can have a longer plan for how to tackle a particular problem. You can keep track of the methods that seem to work, and the ones that don’t.
What kinds of things to keep in your log? I already gave a few ideas above but here is a more comprehensive list of the kinds of things I would keep in my log:
- what passages I worked on,
- the difficulties, and the exercises I used to overcome them,
- plan for the next session,
- ideas for how to creatively practise something,
- long term plans for what to improve about my playing,
- longer form thoughts about how to improve areas of my playing,
- longer form reviews and ideas for how to improve a section,
- musical analyses (both of sheet music and of recordings)
Conclusion
Before we even start looking at a piece, we should know how it sounds, we should know how different pianists have interpreted it. The first look is about identifying the key and time signatures, as well as highlighting any difficult sections. When we are learning a piece, we want to break it apart in smaller sections that make it easier to memorise. The bulk of the learning is done using the practise cycle of preview, play, and review, where the idea is to form a strong mental image of the passage, play it, and compare it to our image. Throughout the whole time, you should keep a log of what you do, what you find out, and what you plan on doing next.
This is not the be-all and end-all for practise advice, but it should serve as a great starting point for you to figure out exactly what works for you. Next, I will discuss what I call the Integrative Approach, which forms the core of my teaching and learning philosophy.
Appendix: Common issues
I alluded to some of these common problems and possible solutions earlier in the book, but I wanted to go through these in more depth here.
Difficulty memorising
This problem can manifest itself in one of two ways: in one instance you’ll find that trying to memorise a chunk, once it reaches a certain size, gets increasingly difficult; in the other instance, you’ll find that you keep having seemingly random memory lapses while you’re playing. Let’s address each problem individually, even though they are similar.
Problem statement: I can’t seem to memorise this passage.
The biggest culprit for difficulty memorising is a lack of theoretical understanding. Imagine having to memorise a speech but you can only look at one letter at a time. Imagine having to memorise a poem in a foreign language. These tasks are practically impossible because you can’t make meaning of what you are trying to remember. Memorising music without a good foundation of theory is sort of like learning a poem in a foreign language or memorising a speech one letter at a time: you are trying to remember a series of individual notes with no underlying understanding of their purpose or meaning.
We don’t memorise speeches one word at a time; we learn sentences, or paragraphs – meaningful chunks. In music, a meaningful chunk can be a chord, a scale, or a common chord progression. The more you learn about theory, the higher your abstractions can become. Higher abstractions hold less space in our memory, they encode information more efficiently.
Consider this simple example:
Memorising the sequence of notes: C E G B D C E G B D C B A G F E D C is much more difficult than remembering two ascending C maj9 arpeggios and a descending C major scale. Both representations contain the same information, but the second encoding of the information is much more efficient.
Solution:
Analyse the passage you are trying to learn: think about the scale, the chords, the rhythm. Try to understand as much of it as possible, try to recognise as many concepts as you can. For example:
Once you’ve identified the theoretical building blocks as above, practise those separately as exercises, for example:
- practise the chord progression with the LH 7th chord and the RH triad
- practise different inversions with the same chord progression
- practise the patterns on different chords
- transpose the section to a different key
- practise the patterns with different rhythms
Problem statement: Whenever I play this piece, I feel like I have random memory lapses.
Random memory lapses are more difficult to pin down and extremely frustrating to deal with. The first thing to address is whether those memory lapses are indeed random. Play the piece a few times in a row, while recording yourself and look for any patterns in how you forget sections. Memory lapses tend to occur either when the connection between chunks is not secure enough, or when you don’t actually know the piece well enough. You should be able to hear the piece from start to finish in your head.
Solution:
Securing the connection between two chunks is relatively easy: start by isolating the overlap, and gradually expand it in both directions until you feel like it is secure enough.
In terms of being able to hear the piece from start to finish, there are several strategies you could use:
- pick a random bar in the piece and start from there
- pick a recording, go to a random moment, listen to a few seconds, and mentally continue
- play the RH part with your LH and vice-versa
- only play every second note (while hearing the missing notes in your head)
There are endless ways to break apart a section, the idea is that by continually looking at the same section from different perspectives, you can get a much better understanding of it, meaning that you are able to abstract it more in your memory and thus able to memorise it with more ease.
One last thing to keep in mind is that if you keep switching the fingering of a phrase that you’re finding difficult, it might be the reason you are forgetting it. If you find that to be the case, find a good fingering, and stick to it.
My fingers don’t move fast enough, I can’t play this at speed
Speed issues almost always come from lack of technique (sometimes lack of patience!) Technique is about playing the piano with as much efficiency as possible. Efficiency translates to speed, as it takes less effort and energy to produce the same result.
Most of the time, I will advise my students to not worry too much about speed, especially in the beginning: playing piano is an awkward dance, it takes time to get used to the synchronisation of movements. If you are a beginner and you can’t play something at the speed you would like to, I would recommend making sure you are using the appropriate movement patterns, and if you are, I would say to not worry about speed right now. Speed will come with more experience. Move on to something else, and come back to it later.
Finding the correct movement pattern is the difficult part of applying technique. If you are struggling with that, look at the reference material I have on technique.
Another common scenario is being able to play hands separately with relative ease, but being unable to combine the hands. This is a viscous trap I often fall into. Here’s the thing: tapping your stomach is easy, rubbing your head in a circle is easy, but doing both at the same time, more difficult. Once the hands know how to move individually, you have to learn how to move them together. In the same way you learned the hand movements slowly at first, you must learn them combined slowly at first. It feels like you’re taking a step back, but you’re taking a step back to be able to take two steps forward. It’s worth it.
I don’t have time to practise
It’s no secret that learning to play piano takes time. Finding time, no matter the age, is often difficult. Time management is a whole topic of its own, but let me give you a few strategies for maximising the time you spend at the piano.
- Plan your practise session: how much time will you spend on each thing you want to practise.
- Be specific: spending 20 mins on one section is better than fumbling your way through the piece for 20 mins.
- Keep a regular schedule: knowing that you play piano for 30 mins every day after work or school turns it into a habit.
- Keep reminding yourself of why doing this is important, and make the time for it according to your priorities.
- Use the free time you have during your day to practise in your head. Whether you are on the bus, or waiting in line, or cooking dinner; when your mind is free, it can focus on music and piano. I discuss mental practise in more depth here.
Everyone has different methods for managing time. Things that work for me might not work for you. The one recommendation that applies to everyone is to experiment and find what works for you. Spend a week, a month trying something, then reflect on how well it worked, and adapt.
I’m struggling with the rhythm of this section
Whether it is a complex hands together interaction, or just a difficult rhythm in one hand, the solution is always to simplify.
Simplifying rhythm can be done by taking away the melodic aspect, and simply tapping hands or fingers on your knees, or on a table.
Counting is perhaps the best thing you can do for your time. There are many different counting systems, the Western and Carnatic ones are probably the most common. In English, we count beats with numbers, divide them by half using the word ‘and’ and divide those further ’e’ and ‘a’. All together we get 1 e and a 2 e and a 3 etc. This is often notated 1 e + a 2 e + a. Counting out loud while tapping or playing the music will go a long way.
For more difficult rhythms and subdivisions, I prefer to use the Carnatic (sometimes also spelt Karnatic) system for counting. It works by assigning single groups of syllables for different groups of notes. Let’s say you have a group of three and a group of five, you would count ta-ki-da (3) ta-di-ghi-na-to (5). Indian music theory goes much deeper than I could here. If you are interested in learning more, here is a PhD thesis on the topic.
I’m speeding up/slowing down through the piece
Speeding up and slowing down are common pitfalls when playing music. There are several things you can do to work on keeping a consistent pulse throughout the music. One way is again to have a strong mental image of what the music is meant to sound like, and the speed of the music. If you have that, things will be much easier.
You can also practise with a metronome, and as you get more and more precise, have the metronome click on fewer and fewer beats: i.e., every second beat, every bar, every two bars. Make sure to land strongly on the click of the metronome. Once this becomes easy, you can make it such that the metronome clicks on the ‘and’ of the first beat of every bar, and play that way. Again you can get as creative as you want to keep increasing the difficulty. This is one of the most difficult metronome exercises and takes drummers years to master.
My hands start to hurt after playing for a while
Stop playing.
Playing piano should never be painful, it can feel awkward and challenging, but it should never be painful. Pain is often the result of unreleased tension when playing, it is a technical problem.
Avoiding injuries at the piano is a two-front effort: you must strengthen your arms and core, and you must learn to play with no unnecessary tension.
Working out and being active is more important than simply for the purposes of being better at piano. You should be physically active, and work out, anything about that topic is unfortunately out of the scope of this book. A simple internet search for wrist rehabilitation or strengthening will yield a lot of good results. Practise those regularly, especially if you are not particularly physically active.
In terms of avoiding unnecessary tension at the piano while playing, it is important to 1) always keep that concept in mind when playing and 2) ensure you are using the correct set of movements for the passage you are trying to play.
Going into the full details of piano technique is beyond this chapter, you can find some reference material on technique here.
Tone balance and voicing issue
This is a much more advanced problem, but nonetheless a common one at higher levels. Tone balance and voicing relate to not only the independence of each hand but also the independence of each finger in each hand.
Volume at the piano is entirely controlled by the speed at which we press a key down. That means that whatever note we want to play louder than the rest has to be pressed faster than all the others. This information is useful to know, but impractical to use. Going into the full mechanical details is – I believe – counter productive, it makes us overthink something that should be based on feeling.
This problem often manifests itself in chords, when we want to highlight the top, bottom or even a middle note in the chord. The way to practise this is to play the highlight note first very loud, and follow the rest of the chord as quiet as possible. Starting with extremes makes the differences more obvious. Now the bulk of the work goes into reducing the time gap between highlight note and the rest of the chord, as well as reducing the volume gap between the highlight note and the rest of the chord.
When you are playing a section with multiple voices, and you are trying to bring a particular voice out, you can use the same idea of extremes: play it as slowly as you need to in order to be able to play one voice much louder than the rest. Once you have achieved a clear separation, you can work on reducing the difference between the two to a point where you are satisfied with how it sounds.
There are some things that are not practical (or even useful) to teach, I believe this is one of them. Everyone will have to learn what makes physical sense to them. I think the method is generally applicable, but I can’t give a set of particular magic movements to solve this problem. This is something that you need to figure out for yourself.
