Piano Practice Tips

Getting started and looking for new music to practice? You can find tons of Beginner and Easy Piano arrangements on Musicnotes.com.

If you’re pursuing the piano as a hobby or professionally, you probably enjoy getting to the piano most days and chipping away at your music. Practicing the piano is an enjoyable and fulfilling task. But, if you’re looking to really improve your piano chops, you’ll want to make sure your piano practice is as smart as possible.

The last thing you want to do is spend hours at the piano mindlessly playing your music over and over.

Keep in mind that playing the piano and practicing the piano are two different things. There’s nothing wrong with chilling out at your piano, turning your brain off and just enjoying your music in the moment. But, this type of playing isn’t a true practice session.

Use these 14 tips to make every piano practice session as productive as possible.

1. Make A Game Plan

Just like anything else that you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll find the most success if you have a solid plan. You likely have long-term goals of music that you’d like to learn or skills that you’d like to acquire. This is a good start to making a practice plan.

Be sure to always start each practice session with a plan as well. What are you hoping to accomplish in this practice session? What are specific things you can do to make that happen?

Setting SMART goals can help you make an effective game plan toward your desired endpoint. SMART goals are:

• Specific – rather than setting general, broad goals, get specific and narrow in on what it is you want to accomplish.
• Measurable – set goals so that you can measure and track your progress while working towards your goal.
• Achievable – the goals you set should be attainable within the time frame you set.
• Relevant – make sure your goals align with what you’re working on.
• Time-bound – set a reasonable time frame for when you want to accomplish your goals and hold yourself to it.

Setting weekly and daily goals is a great way to structure your efforts while attaining your overall goals. First, identify what you will be working on in the week, such as a scale, etude, technical work, or a piece. Then, think about what you want to accomplish by the end of the week, whether that be improved intonation in your scale, memorizing a certain passage, accurately playing through a tricky section at a goal tempo, or whatever it may be. Then you can break that down even further in your daily goals:

• Like your weekly goal, write down what you’ll be working on in your practice session and what you want to accomplish in that material.
• Identify what practice tools you’ll be using, such as a metronome, practice rhythms, a tuner, drone tones, recording yourself, etc.
• Divide your practice time amongst your practice material. For example, for an hour-long practice session, you could devote 10 minutes to a scale, 20 minutes to an etude, and 30 minutes to your piece.

Perhaps you’d like to work on the continuity of your piece. In this case, it would make sense to use your practice time running through your music, stopping as little as possible.

Or, maybe you’d need to clean up some messy rhythms in the middle of your piece. Don’t run through your piece if you know there are some problem areas that need attention. Instead, go straight to the problem area and woodshed.

Are you trying to master the musical expressiveness of your piece? In this case, don’t let yourself obsess over playing all of the correct notes and rhythms and instead focus on what your music is communicating. You’ll find that when you shift the focus from the logistics of what to play to the art of how to play, the notes and rhythms often fall into place.

Tracking your progress is a great way to help you stay motivated while practicing. A music teacher can help you track your progress, or you can utilize goal setting, journaling, and recording yourself to look back on how you’ve progressed. Being able to look back on where you were vs. where you’re at now in your musical journey can show you how much progress you’ve made!

2. Actively Listen To Quality Recordings Of Your Music

Keep in mind that your brain is like a sponge that absorbs the music that you hear. The more you let it soak up the sound of your music, the easier it is to get that music back out of you.

Make a point to actively listen to the music you are learning.

Active listening is its own unique activity that deserves all of your attention. When you are actively listening for the sake of learning your music, stop all other activity. Don’t try to clean your house, drive or browse the internet while you listen.

Instead, close your eyes and really focus on the sound of the music. Think about the logistics of what your hands might be doing in order to make those sounds happen. Open the score and follow along. Listen several times in order to observe and take in everything that is happening in your music. Then, repeat this activity many times throughout your learning process.

3. Take The Score Away From The Piano And Study It

This is especially helpful when you’re first starting a piece, but it’s also a worthwhile thing to do throughout the learning process.

Before you begin a new piece, take the time to make every possible observation you can about the music. What do you expect it to sound like? What is the music trying to communicate or portray? Think through all of the logistical aspects of the music like the time signature, key signature, roadmap, fingering, etc.

Make a solid plan about what you’ll do when you take the music back to the piano. This will ensure that you start learning the music quickly and effectively.

4. Practice Sight-Reading

Sight reading is an important skill for musicians to use to enrich their musicality. It’s helpful when playing new pieces for the first time and you can get better at it by playing music that’s new to you and staying familiar with notes, rhythms, and other expression markings. Practice the major and minor scales so you’re familiar with different keys and their pitches and practice counting rhythms as well.

This interactive book series is a great tool for improving your sight reading on the piano. Because the book is interactive, you can listen to the exercises to see if you played them correctly!

5. Break Your Music Into Small Sections

Sometimes it makes sense to play the piece all the way through from start to finish. You might choose to do this first, just to get a scope of the entire piece. But, when you’re ready to get to work, break your music into small, workable sections.

Focus on practicing phrases, whether it is 2, 4, or 8 measures at a time. Other ways to break apart the music would be to work through the A section, the exposition, or until the first repeat sign. Whichever approach you take, find clear starting and ending points in your music.

Don’t stop at the first page just because it’s the end of that page.

Playing to the end of a phrase will likely mean you’ll have to stop just before the end of a page or keep playing a few measures into the next page.

6. Slow Practice

Practicing slowly is probably the very most important skill to employ at the piano. It’s tempting to want to always play music up to tempo, but the magic happens in slow practice. This is where you gain accuracy, hone your technical skills and train your hands to achieve perfection.

Some people claim that they can’t play their music slowly. They say that when they slow down, they make more mistakes. This is a sure sign that slow practice is crucial! If you can’t play your music slowly, then you’re not playing it well when you play fast. However, if you’re playing it correctly slowly, it will speed up over time and you’ll maintain the same level of accuracy that you had at your slower tempo.

7. Hands Separate

Don’t be afraid to split up your hands whenever it’s necessary for your practice. There might be times that you can sight read with both hands with no problems. But, if anything starts to feel too complicated or messy, do some hands separate work.

8. Practice Rhythmically

Pianists are notorious for fudging tempo and rhythm in music. Since we spend most of our time alone at our piano, it’s easy to have some give and take in the tempo, play rhythms inconsistently and go back to fix tiny mistakes. All of these bad habits can add up to big rhythm problems over time.

If you find yourself struggling to play with even rhythms and a consistent tempo, consider one of these techniques:

• Play with a metronome. If the metronome is a frustrating or intimidating thing for you, don’t worry, you’re not alone! Many people have to practice how to practice with a metronome. Back up a few steps to an older piece or an easy scale and do some metronome work to get used to how to use it.
• Play with a drum track. Some people are more successful playing along with a rhythm track on a digital piano or on an app. These tracks feel a little more musical than a metronome. You can hear the emphasis on different beats and it might be easier to stick with it.
• Find backing tracks to accompany your music. Depending on what music you’re learning, you may be able to find instrumental accompaniment tracks that go with your music. If your music came with a CD or has the option to download audio files, be sure to check it out and see if it’s something you can play along. Or, check YouTube and see if there’s a backing track for your song available there.

8. Use Technology

Technology is a great resource for musicians to utilize in their practice. You can record yourself to listen back to, use tuning and metronome apps, and even use digital sheet music! The Musicnotes App is the best place to get and store your digital sheet music and digital music books; you can use the playback tool to listen to your sheet music, use the markup tool to write or highlight, transpose your music, upload your own PDFs, and more great features! Learn more about the Musicnotes App here.

9. Be Consistent With Fingering

As soon as you start learning a new piece, find the best fingering that works for you stick with it. One of the most unproductive ways to practice is to practice something differently every time. When you ignore proper fingering you spend valuable practice time learning your music incorrectly, then you’ll just have to go back and learn it the right way later on.
This is perhaps the most valuable of piano practice tips. Playing with the wrong fingers is literally training your hands to do the wrong thing. Would you train your dog incorrectly? No? Then don’t do it to your hands, either.

10. Find A Good Practice Routine and Stick With It

Sometimes the hardest part about practicing the piano is getting started. It’s easy to get swept up in a busy schedule and not make time to practice the piano.

Make your piano practice be a very deliberate part of your day. Schedule it in just like you would schedule other important activities and appointments.

Find an optimal time of your day for piano practice. Some people feel the most mentally alert and clear in the morning and make piano practice a morning routine. Others might find mornings to be too rushed and hectic, but enjoy using piano practice as a way to wind down in the evenings. Think through your day and find what works for you.

Short frequent practice sessions are often more productive than longer infrequent sessions. You can’t cram to learn the piano. Just 10-15 minutes of daily practice will take you much further than one hour-long session each week.

11. Play Music You Like

It’s quite simple, really, if you like the music you are working on, you’ll want to practice it. So if you are learning on your own, make sure the music you are choosing appeals to you.

What do you do when you are studying with a teacher and they assign music you don’t care for? First of all, when you begin taking lessons, you should always let the teacher know what your goals are so the two of you are on the same page. It won’t work very well if you want to play with your praise and worship band and your teacher thinks you want to be the next Horowitz.

Then if your teacher gives you a song you don’t like, ask why. There’s probably a good pedagogical reason. If you know what the reason is, it makes it easier to practice the piece to achieve the goal.

Feel free to bargain with your teacher. Let them know you’re happy to practice that Czerny exercises if you can play some Star Wars, too.

12. Journal Your Practice

Keeping a practice journal to track your goals and progress is a great tool to keep organized and plan your practice. Reflecting on practice sessions can be a valuable exercise for identifying areas that need improvement, seeing what practice strategies worked and what didn’t, and can help you track progress and set goals.

 You can keep a physical practice journal or a digital one, whatever works best for you to record your progress to look back on. This free printable practice log is a great template for beginning to log your practice:

13. Know That Progress Doesn’t Happen in a Straight Line

Don’t expect your piano progress to always happen in a forward motion. It’s very common that pianists put in the time practicing and don’t feel an immediate improvement. Just remember that this is a very normal part of practicing the piano.

Acknowledge that all of the time you put into your piano practice will add up to long-term success. But, also accept that the rewards are almost never immediately and sometimes might even feel like, despite all of your work, things are going worse. It’s a frustrating feeling but learning to play an instrument is the ultimate form of delayed gratification. It will all pay off over time

Your challenge today is to choose one of these tips to implement to your practice right away. Bookmark this post and next time you’re in a practice rut, pick one more to tackle. Over time, you’ll become an expert piano problem-solver with optimal practice techniques!

14. Practice Healthy Habits to Avoid Injury

Long hours of practicing, rehearsals, and performances can lead to injury if musicians don’t practice healthy habits. Like an athlete, be sure to properly stretch and take breaks periodically, hydrate, eat, and get plenty of sleep. Try incorporating stretching into your warm-up and after your practice session, or even give yoga a try! Maintain proper posture while practicing and listen to your body and mind. Mental health is just as important as physical health, and to avoid frustration and burnout, make sure to take breaks, stay organized, and incorporate fun pieces into your practice routine!

FAQ

• How much time should I spend practicing? How much progress do you want to make? The more you practice, the more quickly you improve. However, it’s a mistake to think that there is a magic number of minutes you need to spend each day. It’s better to set a piano practice goal for each day, and when you’ve achieved it, you’re done. If you’re going to practice for more than an hour, take a break for 10 minutes out of the hour to walk around and stretch to give your muscles a break.
• Does it matter what music edition I use? You can use any music edition, but a quality edition will enhance your practice and may even make it easier. Often free music that you can download from the internet is riddled with mistakes and poorly notated. It can be frustrating to figure out what is meant by the notation. High-quality editions, on the other hand, are usually well edited. They have great suggestions for dynamics, expression, and fingerings. This can make your piano practice strategies much more efficient. Musicnotes has wonderful editions that are expertly edited for your edification.
• Will I get as good as (fill in your favorite concert pianist)? Realistically, probably not. Especially if you are an adult beginner. The great concert pianists start very young and dedicate their lives to the instrument. You likely have a job, maybe a family and a dog, and many demands on your time. Don’t let this discourage you, though. Everyone can learn to play well enough for their own enjoyment. Through careful practice, you can play songs that make you and others happy. It doesn’t get much better than that.

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