How Should I Organize My Practice Time?

 

One of the most common questions I get from new students is "how much should I practice?" I reply that the quality of the practice is far more important than the quantity. The amount of time spent would depend on how much you have available, of course, and the quantity and difficulty-level of your pieces. So there is no one answer to that question. 

People rarely ask if they should follow some sort of plan for their practice sessions, but I think it's worth considering. I write detailed notes for all of students at the lessons, not only what they are to practice, but how to practice for the most efficiency and best results. I don't specify any order to follow, because I want them to have the flexibility to adapt their practice sessions to their schedules and their own moods.

When I was young, all my teachers said to do your "exercises" first. Scales, arpeggios, Hanon, Czerny and so on. Supposedly it was to help you "warm up" and prepare for the technical challenges in your pieces. I'm quite certain that many, many teachers still recommend the same thing today.

As you might have guessed, I disagree with that idea altogether. For most students, playing a lot of scales and arpeggios is not necessary. They are skills you need, yes, but from what I see, most students just play them over and over in a mechanical way. Scales and so on are only worth practicing if you are going to really work at doing them better, that is, more smoothly, faster, in different combinations, etc. If you already have the basic skill, you don't need to keep doing it over and over. Plus, you will encounter scales and so on in your pieces, so you will still get ample chances to work on those specific skills.

I really believe most people do not need to "warm up" their hands. We do thousands of manual tasks in our daily lives and do not need to warm up for them. True, piano is much more complex than all of our normal tasks, but if you are playing with the right technique, meaning integration of the arm, hand and fingers, you won't be over-taxing your muscles. If you have arthritis or another medical condition in your hands, you need to be especially mindful of your technique, that is does not rely solely on the small muscles of the fingers. If you are relying more on your larger muscles, the arm, then they are fine without any special type of warm up.

If you really do want some sort of warm up, then those exercises mentioned would be the worst way to do it, especially if you do them in the manner that is often prescribed, with high fingers and lots of articulation and isolation of the small muscles. Those exercises could potentially cause strain, the very thing you are trying to avoid by "warming up!"

In addition, if you do exercises first and then get interrupted and run out of time, you may not get to your actual music, which is the reason you probably want to play the piano in the first place.

Some people will advise you to organize your practice in a very rigid way, even down to the level of detail such as how much time to spend playing with the metronome. I couldn't disagree with this approach more. (On that note, please see my post "Burn Your Metronome.")

Instead, start with the music you are currently working on. You could start with the newest piece, the one you know least well, so you make sure to get to it. Or you could start with the one you know better, maybe one you can play by memory, so you have a nice gentle easing into your practice session. Of course you don't have to do them in the same order every time. 

I usually recommend you play the piece through, then go back and work on "spots" that need extra attention, then end by playing through again. Playing through after spot work will tell you if, and how, your spot work was effective. I know many other teachers would disagree with this and say you need more time for trouble spots. Some even say to only do spot work. I like to emphasize the "wholeness" of the piece, rather than have it end up feeling like a patchwork of "spots." Places that were "spots" yesterday may be better today and no longer need special attention (probably because you worked on them yesterday and made progress!). Playing through first will tell you what needs work today. However, if it's a longer and/or more challenging piece, you could decide to start with spot work, but then still end by playing through.

For longer pieces, you will probably need to break them up into sections. Sometimes I like to start my practice session with the last section of the piece, then work backwards by section. Otherwise, the earlier sections tend to get more practice, so this method makes sure you get to everything more or less equally. In fact, it's a good idea to start at random places in the piece and work from there. If you find you have trouble doing that, it means you don't know the piece as well as you could. 

What if you have trouble getting yourself to the piano to practice? Even if you love it, you may be a procrastinator and put off your practice time. In that case, find a piece, maybe a short one, that you really love, and play that first. Then once you're sitting there, you'll probably be motivated to continue practicing. If you like to improvise, do that first. Improvising is a great "warm up" because there is (ideally) no stress about "wrong notes" and such. If you are playing some popular music or other non-classical that is less demanding, you could do that first to ease yourself into the practice session.

Remember, you are studying piano because you love music and love the experience of creating music. You know the saying, "if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong." Don't let practice time become a task. Find ways to keep the practicing playful and fun. See my various posts on how to keep it creative. Avoid any advice or methods that smack of rigidity.

The Measure

 

The measure. All the stuff in between those vertical lines on the staff. If you read music, you've seen the measure in everything you've read, but probably don't give it much thought. Why do we have it? Is it necessary? If we took the measure lines (bar lines) away, would the music sound the same? Do they have some kind of meaning?

Our music (in the Western world) is metric, meaning measured. The easiest way to think of "measured" is  that the sounds you hear are grouped in some perceivable and predictable way.  The sounds of traffic outside are random, thus, not measured. Even most sounds in nature are not measured (one notable exception being birdsong). But music, being a human creation, must, by its very nature, be graspable and understandable by human brains. Apparently, we are not good at making sense of a long string of sounds without some kind of grouping of those sounds.

(Perhaps I should mention that very early music, e.g. from the Middle Ages, was not metric. It took the form of chants which were based on the words. It was more like free-form "talking," with tones, than it is like our modern music. When it first began to be written down, there was no notation to indicate the grouping or the rhythm. The chants were learned by listening to others, and the words helped indicate the "rhythm," such as it was.)

In fact, this grouping is called "chunking." In the early days of the telephone, it was found that people had trouble remembering a string of numbers, say, seven numbers. But if you divide the numbers into a group of three and a group of four, they are much easier to remember. This is how our modern phone numbers came to be as they are. 

Let's say you had a piece of music that was just a steady beat or pulse, with no variation (all quarter notes, say). Even after a short amount of time, your brain would not make any sense of the music, even if, for arguement's sake, the pitches themselves were pleasant. It would just be rambling and the brain would lose interest. If, however, the steady pulse were to be grouped in fours, it would make sense; it could even be a march, for example, something you could walk to. How would this grouping happen, if the notes were steady with no variation? There would have to be a slight emphasis, or accent, on the first note of each group of four. Our brains could then identify the beginning of each new group.

Most music, of course, is more complex and is not just a steady drone of quarter notes. All the other variations of sounds -- sounds that occur in time -- form other patterns, other groupings, which is what we call rhythm. All these other rhythmic patterns do not remove the grouping, they exist within it. You could even say they form groups within groups. 

Whether you are composing, and plan to write down your composition, or improvising it on the spot, your brain, if you have some degree of experience and sensitivity to music, will naturally group things without even thinking about it consciously. If you are new to improvising and notice that your improv is somewhat rambling-sounding, there are several reasons, but primarily that there are either no groupings or inconsistent groupings.

Remember, the ideas and inspiration for the music came first, and notation came later. Musical ideas and themes are conceived with their tones and rhythm being inextricably married. It is completely unimaginable that a composer came up with the tones of the melody and somehow added the rhythm later! After the "birth" of the theme(s), the composer would develop them, spinning them into compositions of varying complexity and length. The grouping of the tones of the themes would be built into the fiber of the composition, therefore, not added as an afterthought. 

Regarding the person playing the music, the grouping must be subtle. The forward momentum and "flow" of the music is paramount; you wouldn't want to hear it chopped up by exaggerating the first tone(s) of the groups. In fact, the grouping is so "built in" by the composer, there is nothing you need to do. The hallmark of a beginner would be the "choppy" sound that would result from over-accenting the first beats of the measure (group).

When it comes to notating the composition, it could be said that the groupings are obvious and no futher notation is necessary. However, after the Middle Ages, as mentioned above, especially when music began to break away from words, adding the measure lines, to explicitly show the groupings, was a great aid to those wanting to read the music. It also meant that, should the composer decide to change the groupings in one section of the composition, it could be shown easily, without confusion.

And so the measure was born. Theoretically, you could remove the bar lines, and the music would be played, and would sound, exactly the same. The compoer Erik Satie did just that in a few of his compositions, but you can still hear it group itself into groups of four. 

But there is an inherent problem, potentially, with the bar lines. With beginning students, I've noticed it seems to make their eyes stop at the line. The music is meant to proceed, unhampered by the bar lines, but for some it creates a subtle barrier to the next measure. The bar line itself has no time value and the listener would not be aware of where there were bar lines in the music. It is incumbent upon the teacher to notice when this is happening with the student and train the student to look ahead to the next measure, and to have a solid rhythmic training.

In a future post I will discuss the deeper meaning and purpose of the measure, how it embodies "going away and coming home" and propels the music forward.

Desirable Difficulties

 

I recently read a very good book about music and the brain where the author used the term "desirable difficulties." It seems to encapsulate the concept of many of the techniques I use, and have my students use, that improve one's command of the music one is working on.

As you've heard me say before, nothing happens in the hand, fingers, arms, etc. without first happening in the brain. Not so long ago, people believed "muscle memory" was actually in the muscles themselves; now we know it is primarily in the motor cortex of the brain. See my post "It's All (neuro)logical". We are creating and strengthening the neurons and the neural pathways that enable us to perform the movements required by the music in a somewhat automatic fashion, that is, without literally "thinking" about them.

You might think, as many people do, that the way to develop the "wiring" in the brain, as I like to call it, would be to just play the piece, or the passage, over and over again. Virtually everyone who teaches or talks or writes about learning to play the piano will tell you that copious amounts of repetition are necessary. As it turns out, recent scientific experiments with musicians' brains, as well as people from other disciplines, tell a different story. The brain seeks novelty. After a certain amount of repetition, there are diminishing returns regarding how many more neurons and/or pathways are created. 

To get the brain really working again, you need to create some new challenges or difficulties for it. It will then create new wiring that will strengthen and supplement what you already have. You may be thinking, "It's already hard enough! Why make it harder?" But that is, in fact, what is necessary. If it's hard, you probably will benefit from doing it. (Remember, when I say "hard" I mean mentally. There should never be any physical pain with any of this. Never play through pain.)

Maybe you can eventually get to where you have a solid command of the music with just the ordinary repetition, but creating desirable difficulties will get you there faster. And hopefully it will also be more fun and interesting.

Here are some of my top ways of creating desirable difficulties:

1. Tranpose. Transposing the piece, or even parts of the piece, to different keys, by ear, will challenge your ear more than you ever thought possible. And, as I always say, the ear really runs the show, so it's the first thing to work on. (Again, when I speak of the ear I mean the auditory cortex of the brain.)

2. Play with eyes closed. See my post on this topic.

3. Play with hands crossed. Again, see my post on this topic. 

4. Play the left hand's part doubled with the right, meaning they are both playing the same thing. Of course you can go slowly and possibly skip any large leaps or things you just can't reach. Then do the reverse. This way, your dominant hand helps "teach" the other hand. Ironically, the non-dominant hand also helps the dominant hand, probably because it just feels so awkward and foreign to the brain that is had to work really hard at it.

5. Play one hand's part while singing the other hand's part. This would work well for a two-voice piece such as a Bach Invention. 

There are other means of creating desirable difficulties, Experiment and see if you can come up with some of your own.

Should You Visualize the Score when Playing by Memory?

 

I've heard people say that they try to visualize the written score when playing by memory. And I've heard people advise doing that. I've also heard people say that you should even write out the piece, by memory, to help with visualization (Wow, that would be terribly time-consuming.) I don't believe that this will help with memory in the long term.

It seems like people who have photographic memories would have zero problems with memory slips when performing. I know someone who has a photographic memory, but he still has memory slips just due to nerves. It's possible to lose your place in the score while just visualizing it, and the fear of this causes the slips. More importantly, his playing is not very musical. I suspect that the involvement of the visual cortex of the brain to such a great degree detracts from the auditory and the emotional parts of the brain. 

I would imagine that trying to visualize just parts of the score, versus all of it, would be even worse, because you'd have to remember to jump to doing the visual in just those parts, and if you forgot to do that, you might have no back-up plan. I say I "imagine" because I never ever visualize the score. By the time I'm ready to play in performance, I have been playing by memory for months, and how the actual score looks is long forgotten.

Remember, the score is just a visual representation of the music, not the music itself! Before the composers set the music down in writing, they heard it all in their minds. Music notation is a wonderful thing, giving access to a whole world of music. But the goal should be to go past the notation and fully internalize the music. So how do you do that?

As you've heard me say in previous posts, the development of the ear is the number one job for the musician. The best musicians are the ones with the best ears. Even if you already have a good, or even great ear, there are ways to improve it. I've had students ask me if they should go to the internet for programs which, for example, play intervals and have you identify them. You can do that yourself, at the piano, just by playing two notes (one in each hand, so you can't feel the interval) with your eyes closed. That would just be for beginners who want to improve their ear. For the more advanced player, transposing the pieces you are working on, or simpler pieces if necessary, is the most powerful tool for making your ear work harder and thus get stronger. Transposing means you are moving the music to another place (another key), but keeping all the relationships the same. That is the essense of hearing and knowing a piece, to be able to hear all the relationships.

Remember, the transposing needs to be by ear, not by eye, which would mean just calculating each note's distance from the original one.

Another often-overlooked way to improve your ear is to sight-sing. Choirs often require that their members be able to sight sing. If you can see an interval and sing it, that means your ear knows it. To practice this, you'd need to take music with which you are not familiar, otherwise you'd already just sing it from memory.

Even if you try to visualize the score and are successful at it, you'd have to start again from scratch on every new piece. But if you develop your ear, it is there for you at all times, in everything you play.

So many people just focus on "learning the notes" of what they are playing, and perhaps mastering the physical techniques as well. But if you want to play by memory (which I hope you do), then you need to get the piece into the deep levels of the "wiring" in your brain. This means really knowing how it sounds. You may think, "of course I know how it sounds," but if you can't transpose it to another key, then you don't really know it. I believe ear and memory are essentially the same thing.