Is it normal to get "rusty" at the piano?

 

Many people will say, if they've been away from the piano and from practicing for a while, that they are "rusty." It is assumed they mean that some of their skills or fluency have slipped backwards a bit. They could mean their physical agility (technique), or mental abilities (such as memory), or both. 

Is this normal? Should we assume this will happen to everyone who doesn't get to practice for a week, a month, a year?

If you have an injury, say a broken leg, and you don't use the leg for several months, the muscles will atrophy somewhat, and you will have to build them back up again. So you could be "rusty" at walking or running. The same would be true of your arms or hands. But short of muscle atrophy, it's hard to think of a scenario where your hands would get rusty, because we use them for so much and in so many ways. Yes, the piano uses them in different ways than other activities, but the muscles are still there. So what is really happening when you feel rusty?

First, we have to consider how long you've been playing the piano. If you're a beginner, and you lay off practicing for a month, you may slip backwards a noticeable amount. This has nothing to do with your actual muscles, but rather with the neural pathways in your motor cortex. The neural pathways, or "wiring," as I like to call it, have not been very well established, so they disappear. Everything that happens -- every skill you develop -- is happening in the brain. See my post titled "It's All (Neuro)Logical." When a new motor skill is performed with some degree of repetition, the pathway for that becomes more solid, more permanent. If you're a beginner, you just haven't had enough time to lay down a lot of wiring yet, so it's not surprising that it seems to disappear. 

If you've been at the piano for a number of years, certain skills or techniques, the ones you've used over and over again, should be pretty well established. So if you were able to play a scale fluently, for example, you shouldn't be losing that skill or getting rusty. 

Pianists who've been playing their whole lives -- decades, that is -- should not really get rusty at all. Our memory of a certain piece may slip if we don't play it often, but the wiring is still there; it just needs to be "woken up." 

There is one big caveat here. If your technique is faulty, that is, you've learned to play in a way which is not natural for the hands and arms, you will get rusty more easily. If you ask your hands to do something which is awkward and causes strain, they will manage to do it, but they won't retain that skill as readily. This may include playing with excess strain and tension, lifting the fingers too high, and many other movements that rely on muscle strength rather than coordination. That is why you'd have to keep practicing that skill over and over, even when you thought you'd mastered it. But unfortunately, if that skill falls off and you have no other skill to replace it, you are left with nothing. 

Many students learn their pieces at a very superficial level. They think if they have developed the muscle memory for the piece, that they "know" it. But to really know the music at a deeper level requires knowing it at the auditory level, meaning you just really know how it sounds. You may think "of course I know how it sounds!" But try transposing it, or even just a snippet of it, or even just the melody, and you will see that your ear doesn't really know it. Constantly working on the ear, through transposing and other means, will enable you to know your music at a much deeper level. Muscle memory is the first "memory" to be acquired, and the first to be lost. Ear memory can last forever.

And last, but certainly not least, you must always play with emotional involvement. Many studies have shown that we learn faster (any subject, not just music) and remember longer when we are emotionally engaged with the material. Having your emotions involved sort of super-charges the brain. If you play mechanically, thinking you just need to "learn the notes," you will find the learning is at a superficial level, and you will not retain it. 

If you find yourself using the excuse that you haven't practiced in a while and are "rusty," you may need to re-evaluate some, or all, your methods of learning.