How to Practice: 10 Tips for New Pianists

Once students understand why practicing is necessary and how to get motivated to do it, students need to know what to do during a practice session. Many students take for granted that if they just play their pieces over and over that's enough to get better. This is never enough to bring a piece to performance level. Here are a few ideas to get a new student started practicing in a better way:

1. Warm up before diving into your pieces. Many students forget that scales, arpeggios and other technical patterns are important tools to get your fingers and your brain ready to play. Make it fun by inventing new rhythmic patterns or challenging yourself to play at a fast tempo while staying steady, smooth and even. Take this time to focus on technical details like hand shape, posture and articulation.
2. Play a piece while saying or singing the note names. If that is too hard you can say the note names while pointing at the notes on the page at first. This helps students become excellent note readers early on.
3. Play a piece while counting. First count out loud for several days, then count in your head. If the rhythms are new or very tricky, begin by clapping the rhythms while counting out loud.
4. Play while focusing on the interval shapes. Think to yourself up a 2nd, up a 3rd, down a 5th, etc.
5. Take time to fix your mistakes. Focus in on the measure where the mistake happens, repeat that measure until you can play it 3 times in a row perfectly. Next put it in context, include the measures surrounding the mistake and then play the entire phrase. When you return to the song the next day, check the trouble spots before you play the piece.
6. When pieces require hands playing at the same time, start by playing left hand alone, right hand alone, then hands together.
7. Work backwards in small sections while learning a piece. We all have a tendency to start at the beginning and run through a piece in it's entirety. Instead take the last 4-8 measures first, then add the previous 4-8 measures continuing until you get back to the beginning. This way you give the end some extra practice time.
8. Use a metronome. Coordinating with a machine may seem counterintuitive while working on art but it will help students be very precise with rhythms while learning so that once they know a piece they can keep that precision without being stiff and mechanical. To get used to it, start by playing scales. When you work on a piece, start at slow tempo; one where the piece can be played perfectly, without pauses. Once a tempo is mastered, students can speed it up. One way to do this is to go up by 5 clicks in each shift, another way is to go 10 clicks faster and then back 5 clicks slower (i.e. start at 90 move to 100 and then back to 95) continuing until you come to the final tempo.
9. Remember to use your imagination. The reason you work on technique is so that you have the tools to make beautiful music. Make up a story or a picture in your head to go with the piece you are playing. It will make it more fun for you, and those listening will enjoy your performance more.
10. Reward yourself! End a practice session playing your favorite piece. This will help you remember that your hard work will pay off.

All By Myself

It's been a whole week since I've posted! I'm working on several posts, but none are ready quite yet. Here's my latest video to tide you over.

This song is a gem by Irving Berlin from 1921. Early recordings of "All By Myself" were by Aileen Stanley and Earnest Hare, but it's been recorded by many others including Ella Fitzgerald. It had a resurgence in popularity in the late 1940s when Bing Crosby sang it in the film Blue Skies.

For Me and My Gal

Here's a little tin pan alley tune I recorded a few weeks ago. It's "For Me and My Gal" Music by George W. Meyer, words by Edgar Leslie and E. Ray Goetz, written in 1917. I hope you enjoy it! For more ukulele tunes see my Youtube channel.

On Practicing

Good friend, colleague, excellent teacher, and director of Musical Beginnings (where I teach most of my students), Linda, has a blog where she has posts on why to practice and tips on how to get students to practice.

Getting students to practice regularly is one of the biggest challenges of teaching music. It generally boils down to making it a priority. Here are a few Practicing Tips from Linda:

·      Stack the deck with loaded choices such as “Can you help me with these dishes or were you about to go practice?” or  “I’d like you to fold the laundry, unless you were on your way to practice…?”

·      A sticker chart, that old stand-by, works well with younger children. The concept of sitting down to practice 5 Steps Up today so they can know how to play a Mozart sonata in many tomorrows may be too abstract to motivate them. The knowledge that they’ll get to pick a sparkly sticker and that five stickers equals a trip to the park isn’t.

·      A no-screen-time rule until practicing has been done.

Part of getting students to practice is understanding why it is necessary. From Linda's Why to Practice post:

…rarely does a child stop music lessons because they just couldn’t abide their 20-minute-a-day practice regimen. Mostly they stop because they so seldom sit down to practice that they’re not learning to play, and so it gradually becomes less important to both them and their parents. And, the vast majority of our advanced students throughout the years have had a practice routine dictated to them, at least at the beginning...

For more excellent advice and insight, visit Teacher Linda Talks. 

French Airs: L'aimable Iris est de retour

This post combines two projects - my public domain project and my French airs project. I've realized the figured bass for "L'aimable Iris est de retour" by Joseph Chabanceau de la Barre. It would have originally been accompanied by theorbo, lute or harpsichord, but I've arranged it for piano which is much more common in a modern voice studio. I'm singing just the first verse; the second verse (called a double) is highly ornamented. Performance of just the first verse was standard practice for voice students in mid-seventeenth-century French airs and makes the piece very useful for lessons today. This way students can work on the French language while singing simpler vocal lines and they can also master the small ornaments that are expected on repetitions. As they master the language and technical skills required they can begin to work on the double.

Here's an idiomatic translation:

The lovely Iris has returned, but she has not changed. She is as indifferent as always, Just as I am enamored as always.