Are You Practicing Your Music Enough?

This article comes from Megan, a piano teacher and author of Pianissimo: A Very Piano Blog!

Let me introduce you to 4 of my piano students. They are all coming up against completely different challenges, but interestingly, I give them all the same advice.

Margo is 6 and just started piano about 6 months ago. She was so excited to get started and learned several short songs by rote really quickly. She dived right in to a lesson book and the first several songs went great. She learned them quickly and loved moving from one song to the next. Then, as more pieces of the musical puzzle started coming together, she started to get stuck on her songs. Starting new songs felt more challenging. Playing 1 new song from start to finish now feels really labored and slow. It’s not as fun as it was in the beginning when everything was so easy.

Ben has been playing the piano for 4 years. In the last year, his sight reading skills have really improved. He’s just at the point where he can start new music on his own and work his way through all of the notation without getting stuck reading the notes. But, it doesn’t come quickly to him. He often pauses between measures. While all the notes are there, his music doesn’t really have continuity or forward motion.

Grace is in high school and has been playing the piano for almost 10 years now. She’s working on some really exciting advanced repertoire. She loves to play fast, exciting music and she has the technical ability to play it really well. When Grace is playing through her music, it often starts out really great, but it’s pretty common for her to gloss over trickier sections. Sometimes she fumbles through a few measures, then quickly moves on to the next section and returns to her original tempo and enthusiastic playing.

Barbara is 62 and has wanted to play the piano all her life. Her parents couldn’t afford lessons growing up and now that her kids are grown she’s finally doing something for herself. She loves to practice and will often stop by her piano several times a day to practice the songs she is learning in her lessons. She’s progressing well, but she notices that her music doesn’t sound as polished as when her teacher plays it. It’s slower and just doesn’t flow like she wants it to.

Are you or your child one of these students? Or, do you also teach one of these students?

Even though these are 4 vastly different students, I find myself giving the same advice to students over and over again.

Play it one more time.

And, one more time.

And another.

And one more.

Over and over.

That’s right, practicing more repetitions of music is the number 1 piece of advice I’d give to all of the students mentioned above.

For Margo, finishing a short song seems like such a monumental task. It feels like it takes forever. But, if she can do it again right away it will already be much easier. And, if she does it a 3rd time, she’ll start to feel really confident. By repetition number 5, she’ll start to really enjoy it. But, stopping after playing it only 1 time while struggling really won’t help her improve.

Ben’s music is starting to get harder and there’s really no way to master it by playing it just a few times each week. In each practice session, he really needs to play his music over and over again to help him get good continuity and to make his music sound musical and interesting. Otherwise, he’ll just be playing a clumsy string of notes.

Grace probably already has a lot of good practice techniques up her sleeve. No doubt, she knows how to put in the time. But, digging into those tricky sections isn’t always the fun part of practicing. It’s really common for advanced players to ignore those few measures that don’t come as quickly as the rest of the music. Grace needs to isolate those trouble spots, slow them way down, and play them over and over.

Barbara probably feels like she’s already playing her music a lot, but many adults are surprised that it takes even more practice than they thought to get really comfortable at the piano. They assume that they are doing something wrong or they don’t have a natural gift. But really, they just need to play their music over and over and then play it some more.

In my studio, we’ve made it our collective New Year’s resolution to practice more repetitions of everything. In the first week of lessons after the new year, my students made these cool little practice counting beads.

(You can learn how to make your own here. Or, just find 10 small objects to keep on your piano to track your repetitions.)

These practice counters are a great tool to help pianists remember to practice everything just a little bit more than they think they need to. Just a couple of weeks later, my students are already making great progress in their everyday practicing.

Here are a few ways I’m suggesting to my students to use them:

• For shorter songs, we’re deciding how many repetitions would make a good practice session. For many students, 3-5 times a day does the job. Students slide a bead over for each repetition to help them track how many times they played.

• For students who have tricky spots in their music to work on, we’ll isolate that challenging spot, either with a highlighter, markers or sticky tabs. Then we decide how many repetitions that 1 section needs in a practice session. 10 is a good number of repetitions for shorter, trickier spots like this.

• We have a handful of students who have trouble prioritizing their weekly practice. It’s not uncommon for them to show up without any practice. For these students, we’re challenging them to use their beads to get in 10 repetitions total of 1 song in the course of a week. Practicing 1 thing 10 times is much more than 0 times. And, sometimes, the hardest part is just getting to the piano. Once they sit down to play 1 time, it’s easier to do a second time and maybe even a 3rd time.

One caveat about repetitious practice: mindless repetition isn’t the same as strategic repetition. It’s important to count repetitions while fully engaged. Each repetition should be done well – not rushed, sloppy or monotonous like a machine. If you catch yourself or your students rushing through repetitions just to get them over with, it probably isn’t helping.

If you can see yourself in any of these students, or if you teach students like this, grab some string and 10 beads and make a handy practice counter. If you don’t have beads around, use any small object lined up on your piano and slide one over for each repetition – pennies, toy cars, buttons – anything around your house will do the job!

This post was written by Megan, piano teacher and author of Pianissimo: A Very Piano Blog. Visit her website for more piano related blogs for teachers, parents, students, and all things piano.

Published on February 14, 2022