How to organize your practice time
It’s a common complaint many adult learners share: they get so excited about one of the pieces they’re learning that they can’t tear themselves away from it to practice anything else. Other repertoire suffers from neglect, and technical exercises and sight reading usually gets ignored completely. This leads to uneven progress and pianists find themselves floating from one favorite piece to another without any solid learning plan.
In a perfect world where adult players would be able to spend as much time as they want at the piano this might be less damaging. For most adults, however, practice time is limited by the constraints of the rest of life and so the part of practicing they’re not really excited about never really gets done.
I know this from experience. As a teenager, I resisted structuring my practicing because I wanted to feel musical and creative all the time and I hated working on things like scales and arpeggios or drilling notes for technical security. Choosing to become a professional pianist—and encountering the time constraints of adulthood—transformed me into a fierce advocate of structure because it was the only way I could perform at a professional level.
It might surprise inexperienced pianists that many professional musicians don’t have the time to practice 8 hours a day, yet we learn a staggering amount of music in the time that we do have. How do we do this? Organization. What I had to learn was how to divide up my practice session, how to make solid progress on everything every day, and how to maintain performance repertoire—all within however much time I had available. It made me very efficient, very quickly.
Each professional pianist has specific things that work well for them when they practice, but all of us know we need to work on technique, learn new repertoire, and polish and maintain other pieces. How does everything get done? Here are some tips to help pianists at any stage of learning make the most of their time at the piano:
Make a plan
What do you have on your practice list? Before you launch into playing, consider your priorities and then schedule each thing within your available time. Some days that may mean more technical exercises or sight reading, other days you may need to focus on learning new notes. The choice is yours. Putting a time limit on how long you practice each thing (and sticking to it) encourages focus. Set an alarm or use an egg timer if necessary to stay on track.
Warm up slowly
Too many pianists want to launch into scales or technical exercises the second they sit down at the piano. This can be dangerous because the hands need time to warm up to avoid injury. Choose a short, slow, easy piece (or section of a piece) you know well and begin your practice with it each day.
Practice your least favorite things first
I don’t know about other pianists, but I’m more successful practicing things I’m less enthusiastic about if I get them done first. This is why, after I warm up, I work on technique. Experience has taught me that if I wait until later in my practice, technical work never gets done. Got your own “least favorite” thing to practice? Consider doing it first.
Learn new notes
In my experience, I’ve found that I learn new music more easily when I work on it at the beginning of my practice time when my mind is fresh and my enthusiasm and energy is high. An added bonus? Doing this kind of practicing when I’m at my freshest also helps me retain what I’ve learned.
Drill rough sections
That scale passage I just can’t quite get through? The ending that trips me up? This is the point in my practice that I drill these parts for technical security and musicality. Because I tend to want to “play and pray” my way through sections I don’t know well, it’s best if I focus on them individually rather than playing the whole piece.
Polish almost-learned pieces
In my practice, these pieces are ones I can play all the way through and have a musical grasp of. This stage of practicing is my favorite as it’s where I deepen my relationship with the music, work on interpretation, and become such good friends with the piece that it eventually feels like an extension of my fingers.
End with something you know well
I don’t always do this, but on particularly rough practice days, I reward myself by playing through a piece I know well. It’s a reminder to me that all the hard work I put into practicing each day is worth my time.
One more thing…
I’ve had times when I’ve been learning and maintaining more repertoire than I can constructively work on each day. My answer to this? I make two practice lists and practice them on alternate days. It took me a long time to trust this particular bit of advice, but if I’ve done my work properly it has yet to backfire on me.
Still not convinced? Try a “divide and conquer” approach to your practice routine for a week and see if it makes a difference in how quickly and easily you make progress on everything you’re learning. You may surprise yourself.
Got any practice tips I haven’t suggested in this post? Feel free to share them in the comments below.
Happy—and productive—practicing!
Photo by Josh Hild, courtesy of UpSplash