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Here are tried and tested piano practice tips and exercises to help you get better results and improve the effectiveness of your practicing.
I like my students to work on several pieces at once. We work on different types of repertoire, etudes, exercises, scales, chords, sight-reading, and chord piano, for example.
This can be rather a lot of material to work on and can lead to confusion unless the material and the practice time are organized.
It's a good idea to start the piano practice session with some form of warm-up.
Scales and chord practice, for example. If you are working on any particular exercises for piano technique, do this first as well.
Next comes the study of repertoire.
Your pieces will be in different levels of completion so to create a sense of where you are with each piece and to quickly assess what needs to be done, I have found the piano practice tips below to be of big help.
I can recommend: The Musicians Way, it's a book crammed with great tips and plans on how to organize your practice. It has inspired me and my teaching a lot.
Also The Practice Revolution: Getting great results from the six days between lessons is a fun resource for both kids and adults.
Here are piano practice tips in a plan that you can work with step by step.
Each piano piece will be worked on through 6 different levels:
This part of the piano practice is done in your mind, away from the piano.
Have patience! Even though you now may feel so revved up, you’d love to just start playing the piece hands together- DON’T!!
Your goal is to learn each hand separately, slowly, and then at tempo.
Once you can play the whole piece hands separately slowly without mistakes, learn how to use a metronome to gradually increase speed a little every day.
Do this until you can play the whole piece hands separately in full tempo.
Finally you are “allowed” to play both hands together. Use this simple formula:
"The speed with which you can play your hands separately must be halved when playing both together."
This will feel very slow but will make it possible to coordinate both hands without mistakes.
Work each small section by section coordinating both hands like this:
Master, and then combine the small sections like this:
Continue until you have learned the whole piece. Then combine the larger sections: A+B and C+D, etc., until you have learned everything slowly with both hands together.
Again, working with the smaller or medium-sized sections, work with the metronome to gradually build up the tempo until you can play the whole piece in full tempo with both hands.
Congrats! Record or videotape yourself and evaluate what you need to improve.
More Piano Practice Tips: A very successful way of practicing is to use random or interleaved practice. Learn more about an interleaved piano practice routine here.
Learning how to memorize music is something that comes easily for some people and is harder for others.
If you are lucky to belong to the latter category, you will already have learned the piece by heart by now!
For the rest of us, it's back again to the smaller sections...
Although it will be easier now, you need to patiently go through each section as you did before. But this time to memorize each hand separately, then both, and rinse and repeat each section as before.
Once a piece is memorized, it will only stay that way if you review it occasionally.
I hope this gave you some tips on how to practice more effectively!
Found a great way to practice? Share your favorite piano practice tips or a practice routine that works well for you. Maybe you can help someone else with a problem? You can also add a helpful comment!
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Why After Practicing Do I Make Mistakes When Performing? Not rated yet
I would like to know why after carefully practicing a piece of music and feeling that I have mastered it, I then find myself making mistakes in performance. …