About every other month or so I get the urge to try and conquer (or re-conquer) a classical piano piece. As I've been practicing more and more these last few weeks, I wanted to revisit some things I've touched on in the past. Here's a segment from an older post about practicing:
When I started working on this piece, I told myself that I had to keep one truth in my head at all times. That truth is that any time your hands are on the keys, you are teaching your brain something. Simple right? The reason this has become so important to my practicing, is that it reminds me that when I am going over a series of notes- and I hit a wrong note- I have just "rehearsed" the passage with a bad note. If I play that passage 10 times in a row, and hit that same wrong note 5 or 6 times, I have gained nothing by rehearsing it. In fact, I will probably have to practice it twice as many times correctly to try to retrain my muscle memory to hit the correct one. Every key that I hit, is a lesson learned by my brain, regardless of if it's correct or incorrect. I try to spend at least 85% of my practice time playing at speeds where I am able to clear every measure flawlessly. This usually means that at the start of my practice (for the Hindemith sonata) I will set the metronome for 90. I will keep it there for the first two hours, then bump it up about five beats per minute every 30 minutes. This helps to ensure that I am keeping perfect "performances" even in practice.
You can read the entire post here.
I'd like to add one little gem of information that I realized this week. Spend time working out the fingerings for difficult passages! I spent an entire week working 6 hours a day on an 8-bar passage this year. One day, I looked on youtube to watch some other people performing the piece and noticed that Glenn Gould had used a different fingering than me on these measures. So, I ran to my piano and tried out this alternate fingering. I perfected it that afternoon. Initially, I probably tried the fingering that seemed most intuitive, and just ran with it. I could have saved myself a LOT of time, had I just spent 30 minutes trying out different variations.
Thanks for reading.
Jeremy
i just read the 'practices makes promises' post and i completely agree with you about practice rooms at college/university. Although I didn't study music, I was taking my grade 8 and then working towards my diploma whilst at university, and the practice rooms were lethal because like you, I always avoided the parts I couldn't play because I was aware everyone in the rooms around me could here, and I was practically a novice in comparison to them!
i play the piano purely for leisure now, but have recently been playing a lot more and trying to challenge myself as much as i can again. I often find I'm so eager to be able to 'play' or 'perform' the piece, even to myself, that I skip over some fundamentals and it's *always* the fingering that I don't spend enough time working out or give enough importance to...and it's always that which lets me down! So i think it's time for me to try and go back to basics and really try to force myself to not skip over all the nitty gritty stuff at the beginning. Easier said than done though, right?!
Posted by: Rosie | October 06, 2011 at 10:08 AM
I play piano, this is so smart, thanks for the advice, I will try playing 'perfectly' now so I can train my memory well :-)
Posted by: Shesh | October 12, 2011 at 05:24 AM