Piano Video Lesson: Piano Practice Secrets: The 2 Most Effective Techniques for Rapid Impr...

What are the two most important parts of your piano practice? Expanding your repertoire and refining your music.

So, let's break it down for you. Expanding your repertoire. If you really want to grow your piano playing, you must constantly be learning more music. And I'm going to tell you the secret to that is taking very tiny chunks of music and digesting them and building upon that. I have videos on this subject in the description for the process that explains how you take a very small phrase, much smaller than you ever thought you need to take. Because there's so many details in a single phrase of music, then you try to take too much at a time, it's overwhelming and you can't quantify what you're learning. But if you take a tiny phrase, right hand, learn all the details to get it memorized, and do the same thing with the left hand, and then put them together and connect phrases as you go, you can have an incredibly productive practice time.

And you should always be learning new music. My father was still learning new music into his 80s. And this is the truth.

Ruth Slemczynska still learning music into her 90s. And this is how you keep vibrant on the piano and it will affect all the pieces you play.

Every time you learn a new piece, it adds to the horizons and your toolkit of techniques and musical possibilities.

And the second thing, of course, of equal importance is refining your music. So, what do you do after you've learned a piece of music? How do you refine it? In a nutshell, the most important thing, number one, is revisiting the score, playing slowly and no pedal. You can hear what's there, you can reinforce your memory constantly, because no matter how well you learn something, you have to go back and look at the score again and again and again, absorbing all the details. And even if you got them all perfect, they have to be reinforced otherwise, like the game of telephone where things change slightly every time. You can end up with a whole new piece eventually.

So, to keep things on that high level, revisit the score. Why no pedal? Because you can really hear what you're doing. The pedal kind of makes everything sound good, but you don't know if you're really playing honestly.

So, that's it in a nutshell. Always be learning new music and refine your music with those simple principles. And you will find that is the greatest growth pattern, along with the ancillary things like working on pure technique with scales or arpeggios and wrist work, and reading new material and things of that nature. But these are the two fundamental pillars of your piano practice. Thanks again for joining me. I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/piano-practice-secrets-the-2-most-effective-techniques-for-rapid-improvement/

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