How to get the most out of you practice?

Question:What are some important tips and things to keep in mind to get the most out of you daily piano practice?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: What are some important tips and things to keep in mind to get the most out of you daily piano practice?

Its all about how you practice.
Everyday you practice, you need to tell yourself something new about the piece that you didn't tell yourself earlier. Vocalize your practice. You need to speak to yourself, out loud about the concepts in the piece. Tell yourself the dynamics, but specifically how loud or how soft you want to play. Ask yourself if the sections can be softer, or are you soft enough. Tell yourself the fingerings. Reinforce this by memorizing hands separately. Tell yourself lengths of phrases, where the climaxes are, articulation marks, performance directions. The more vocal you are, the better the piece will be. You need to be active when you learn. The more you tell yourself, the more you will discover.

Aim to practice slowly and without pedal. Listen very carefully for well articulated notes, correct rhythm, balanced textures and voicing of chords. Memorize small sections hands separately. If you think you know the section, take up some manuscript paper and notate the music. You should be able to notate everything about that section - notes, articulation, rhythm, dynamics and fingerings.

Spend time listening. I imagine that you practice like most people so you think you listen, but not in detail. Listen to ends of phrases so they are not clipped, that your legato comes from finger legato and not pedal. Remember, pedal is a not a tool for playing legato, pedal is a tool to color music. Listen for eveness in all your running notes. Listen carefully to the phrase direction. Is it moving properly. A good way to listen is to record yourself, then sit with the score and objectively go through the piece.

A good way to improve tricky spots is to transpose the sections into different keys. Keep the same fingering as the original. This will help because it forces you to learn the intervalic relationship of the notes and refines your listening skills. Anything to activate your mind when you practice is good.

all these things can be done away from the piano as well. Learn to score study. Practicing doesn't have to be at the piano, it can be at a table. Conduct yourself through the piece telling yourself what you want to do in terms of musical qualities. That is how I practice when i am flying on tour. I open a score and go through each line reminding myself of what to do.

Practice needs to be conscious. Often, our practicing is not. We think we practice but we are just going over the motions. That is why things get worse. We assume we know things, but in fact we don't. The best practice philosophy is to know that you don't know the piece as well as you do. Always go back to practicing a piece the way you first did. Slowly, hands separately and in sections. When you know a piece, what you are to do is to continue to reinforce things. Tell yourself the notes, harmonies.... etc. The more active you are, the better you will know the piece.

Tips to help secure a piece:
You should always know what key you are in.
Practice all passage work slowly, memorizing the fingering.
Memorize in large sections - no patterns, sequences, look out for repeated sections and understand the form of the piece.
Practice without pedal so you clearly hear every note
Be able to sing all parts of the piece by memory out loud
Be able to start any where in the piece.

The mistakes you make when you play, again are because of detail and are usually a mental thing. When you make a mistake you must over come it consciously, not physically. Playing it over and over won't help. You need to tell yourself what the mistake was, why it happened and how to fix it. Mistakes are preventable, they are not accidents. Mistakes are caused by errors in practicing and preparation. Do not be fooled that mistakes are accidents. In music there are never accidents. Mistakes are also the result of a lack of focus and concentration.

Everything leads back to how you prepare for a piece. The first thing is to practice with detail - always do slow practice, practice more hands separate than hands together. Be humble, understand that even when you are done practicing, there is more to do. You never know a piece well enough until you can write it out on staff paper with every single marking and notation on the page. Horowitz would tell students in master class that knowing a score means you can notate the entire score out with every marking and that memory represents complete understanding of the piece.

Often students and teachers think memory is memorizing the notes and being able to play it back. This is wrong. Memory is the complete knowledge of a piece - notes are only 10%. You must know all the articulation marks, all the rests, every phrase marking, every dynamic, every fingering, note values, pedal marks... etc. Everything on the page, including the page numbers should be known.

This type of detail separates those who are great artists and professionals from those who are amateurs. Musicians with concerts, faculty positions, touring dates are those who respect the music and give it every ounce of focus and detail it requires. I suggest you look into the way you prepare. I often get this question when I do guest lectures from students and teachers and the root always comes down to how someone practices.

Nervousness is a result of poor practice and unconscious practice. The more conscious you are, the less nervous you will be because you will know more about the piece. When you know a piece really well, then you can move forward if you have a mistake, recover easily and continue to make music. You have to believe in your practice. When you trust what you do, the nervousness goes down. We get nervous because we feel we will make a mistake which means we think we didn't practice enough. Well if you are detailed in practice, and have gone through all the steps I've given you then you will feel much more comfortable. But you have to trust yourself.. even if you practice hours with good detail and don't trust yourself, then its over. You have to trust.

Make it deliberate. It should be as essential to you as eating if you really want to be good. Only deliberate practice will make you good.

when i practice, aswell as doing obvious other things and using other methods, my main one is this: when i start practicing each peice, i play from the start and as soon i hit a mistake i stop. i play over the mistake, work out the fingering etc etc until its right. then i play from the start again and try and get past, until i hit the next mistake and so on.

another probably obvious but much overlooked point, which i cannot stress more is maintaining the same speed. if you can play one part perfect, and another nearly, but only if you play slower, play the whole thing slower. this will mean that the peice will become more consistant and flowing rather than having many individual phrases joined very badly, which i hear alot of players doing.

another good idea, if you dont have long to practice is. if you know very well that you can play for instance, the first 40 bars of a piece well, and then the next 40 ok, and the next 40 not at all, sit down, play through the first 40, to stop it from worsening, and then play the next 40 over and over, and work on them in the ways describes above. then work on the last 40. this will help improve the whole peice the fastest, as often you can think your improving because you can play the start better and better.

i hope this helps =]