Let’s begin with the end and work our way back: we want to become a great pianist, we have identified the requisite qualities (namely musicality and technicality), and we have seen how to acquire them (through the integrative approach of learning repertoire). We have the destination, we know the direction, now we need to make the path. We need to practise.
Before I discuss how I structure my practise, I want to deal with the two most common roadblocks people experience regarding practising.
No time
The most common roadblock to practising piano (or anything, really) is a lack of time. Unfortunately for us, magic necklaces that can turn back time don’t exist. Rather than fooling ourselves into thinking we have unlimited time and energy, we need to work with the reality of our busy schedules, figure out our priorities and set realistic expectations based on them.
Practise requires focused time, whatever your life looks like, you want to be able to allocate at least 30 minutes where you are mentally alert and can have uninterrupted focus. Obviously, practising every day is ideal, but if the choice is between seven blocks of low-focus, interruption-filled 30 minute blocks, and three high-focus 60 minute sessions, I think the 60 minute sessions are better, even if the total time is lower. Spending any less than 2h on piano a week will yield poor results. If you can’t commit to that, you will need to make some decisions about what you find important in life, and how piano fits into the picture. If life gets too busy, park the piano, or understand you will not be making a lot of progress, and come back to it with full steam later on.
You may only have time for a few hours a week at the piano, but that doesn’t mean you can’t practise away from the piano. Hours spent commuting can be transformed into hours spent practising.
As long as your commute doesn’t require a lot of mental attention, you can practise in your head. Mental practise is the invisible skill of the best musicians. Obsessive musicians spend all their available mental space on practising. On the bus, rather than reading a book, or listening to music, close your eyes, and imagine yourself practising a passage you have been working on. Imagine what the keys feel like under your fingers, imagine the sound the piano produces as you play, imagine reading the music, or looking at your hand. The sound of the notes should resonate in your head. Like meditation, mental practise requires you to constantly battle mental distractions and to keep bringing your attention back to practising. As such, don’t be discouraged if you find it almost impossible at first – like all things, it will get better with more practise. Mental practise isn’t limited to practising repertoire. Anything you can physically practise at the piano can be practised in your mind.
Outside of mental practise, there are many other ways to practise music away from the piano. Below are a few examples:
- Sight-singing in your head
- Different rhythms and polyrhythms with your hands or fingers on knees
- Finger independence, and other fundamental piano technique movements
- Transcription: you could start the process of memorising the sound of a piece you are trying to transcribe
- Functional ear training using various apps
- etc.
Not enough energy
You could have two hours of free time at the end of the day, but after working a full time job, making dinner, cleaning up, and putting the kids to bed, you may have no energy left. If you can’t move your schedule around very easily, there are still some things you can try to boost your energy for the end of the day:
- Breathing exercises
- Power nap
- Stretching and mobility
- Light work out
Those are not permanent solutions and may only give you another 30 minutes for mental energy. After a long day, nothing other than sleep will truly restore your energy. Try to organise your time such that you can reserve a few good practise sessions earlier in the day throughout the week. Again, it’s better to have three high-focus practise sessions than seven low-focus ones.
What to practise
What you choose to practise will be highly individual: it will depend on the time you have, specific priorities, and your natural preferences. If you want to become a great jazz pianist, you may spend more time working on improvisation than learning Chopin Études. If you want to become a great session musician, you may focus on sight-reading rather than memorising repertoire. Be careful specialising too quickly; you want to ensure that your foundation is complete and solid before you start building too far up.
Here is a list of the things I think everyone should practise until they get to a satisfactory level:
- Repertoire
- Theory
- Technique
- Sight-reading
- Ear training
Hopefully, following the Integrative Approach, and practising all of the above in the context of music.
Three-scale planning
Personally, I structure my practice on three scales: quarterly, weekly, and daily. Instead of having to remind myself everyday of why I am practising something, or questioning whether it really is the best thing to practise right now, I can trust that I have already done that thinking. At worst, I’ll change course in three months time.
Rather than giving abstract descriptions of this planning process, let me give an example of what that may look like:
At the beginning of a quarter, I will make a list of the projects I want to achieve, and the things I want to focus on and improve:
- Learn (memorise and get performance ready) the first movement of Bach’s Partita in C minor
- Improve sight-reading
- Apply concept of rise and fall in improvisation
- Work on 5:4 polyrhythm
Then, at the beginning of every week, I will review the previous week and apply any learnings, as well as plan the amount of time, or milestones to get closer to the quarterly goals:
- Spend 3h sight-reading
- Memorise pages 2-3 of Bach hands separately
- Spend 5h working on rise and fall concept on: Blues for Alice and All the Things You Are
- Get comfortable playing 5:4 polyrhythm with hands on knees and counting out loud
If I don’t have enough time (or energy) to work on everything every day, I will also schedule the days when I will work on each thing. For example, I may not have enough time to practise sight-reading every day, and so I will schedule 1h on Mon, Wed, and Fri and I won’t work on it any other days.
Finally, each day I will pick something from the weekly list, or whatever I scheduled for that day. By the time we get to the day, there shouldn’t be much planning left to do. Remember when learning a piece to allocate time for analysis and investigation. In reality, the work should already be set out in front of you based on what you worked on the day before and what you are trying to achieve by the end of the week.
Throughout the practice session, you should be taking notes and keeping a log of what you do. At the end of the week, when planning the next one, you can compile the logs and learnings and use them to improve the coming week. Similarly, at the end of the quarter, you can follow the same steps for improving the next quarter: for example maybe you were too ambitious, and you need to adjust your goals.
Conclusion
Time and energy are finite resources. In order to practise well, we need to give ourselves time to focus without distractions on getting better at playing the piano. Remember, practising does not necessarily mean sitting at the piano, we can also practise just as effectively away from the piano.
We should set high, but realistic expectations on what we can achieve with the amount of time we have to practise. In that time, we should ensure to cover all aspects of our musical development.
Work hard, make practise enjoyable, and be kind to yourself.
This marks the end of the core of this book. In the next section, we look at how to take our music education further than simply learning the piano. I discuss composition, improvisation, ear training, and performing.
