Piano Video Lesson: How Do You Know When to Move on in Your Piano Practice?

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin. You're watching LivingPianos.com. The question today is how to know when to move on in your piano practice. This is one of the most important aspects of working at the piano productively. After all, you don't want to shortchange yourself and give up before you've solved the problem. Yet, you don't want to bang your head against the wall and spend hours on something that isn't coming and you walk away from the piano frustrated, and you don't even want to touch the piano anymore. So, what is the balance? Well, in a nutshell, it's realizing where you have reached the point of diminishing returns. I remember the first time I ever heard that phrase, and I had no idea what it meant. I was a young child, and I asked my father and he described it this way, which I think is a really good description.

Imagine there's a building going up in Manhattan in New York City, a very valuable piece of real estate. Well, obviously, building a house on that property would never make sense, because the land is worth millions of dollars, and there's no way a house is ever going to be worth that much. Well, maybe a 10-story building. Not even. So, at a certain point, it gets more expensive to build higher and higher. You get to 50 stories. Maybe, to 50 stories, you have a certain amount of costs involved per story, but anything above 50 stories starts to get extremely expensive. Eventually, you get to a height where it's absolutely the point of diminishing returns. There's no way you could rent out or sell condos on both that many floors to overcome the tremendous costs of building a structure so tall. That's an example of the point of diminishing returns.

Well, how this relates to your piano practice is really essential to understand. What makes it tough is knowing when you're giving up, when you shouldn't and when you should keep plowing ahead, compared to when you should leave it for the next day. So, I think you want to give things a good shot. For example, if you're working on a difficult passage and it just isn't coming, you try hand separate and hands separately for a while. You put them back together, and it didn't quite do it. Is the time to give up one? Not necessarily. You might try going very slowly with the metron,ome and doing progressive metronome speeds, and you get to a certain point you can't get any faster than the metronome. Do you give up yet? Well, maybe not. Maybe you try to squeeze out a few more notches.

Sometimes, you get to a point where you think you've taken the metronome as far as you can, then you lighten up your touch or something and boom, you've got a bunch more metronome notches, and you get it faster. But, then you get to a point where you're spending so much time to squeeze out one more notch, maybe that's the time to leave it for the day. Here's the thing. Oftentimes, when you learn something, particularly when you're just learning music, a piece of music, that new phrase or phrases that you are assimilating into your memory, into your hands, however, you're learning it, whether you're using the score or memorizing it, it becomes really difficult to get it beyond a certain point of refinement. You might get it really refined once or twice. Maybe you get it even three times in a row way under tempo, and that's all you can do with it. You know what? Well, try to squeeze out a little bit more out of that.

If you got it perfectly at least a few times in a row, even if it's way under tempo, it's very likely that the next day, when you refresh your memory on it, you'll be able to play it faster, right from the get-go, just sleeping on it. So, knowing when to move on. So, the key is, don't give up right away. Try a couple of different techniques, slowing down. Try hands separately. Try using the metronome. Try stopping at strategic points. You can also try playing very strong or very light. You can also accenting different notes in a passage, or you could even alter the rhythm. If they're straight eighths, you could make them into a dotted rhythm, then reverse the dotted rhythm. So, there are so many, for example, if you have a scale that's a dotted rhythm. The opposite of that one, or accent it the other way.

So, there are many, many different techniques to try before abandoning something altogether. However, you don't want to get stuck and spend so much time on so little music that at the end of a week, you have very little to show for it, because sometimes just plowing through something, getting it perfectly two or three times in a row under tempo allows you to learn more music, because the next day you could take all of that music up to a higher level and push even forward in the score. So, you have this part for the day before that's starting to come along. The part from two days ago is really good. The part from before that is already a performance level and you're working on all these different sections.

So, try to push to the point of diminishing returns in your practice by trying different techniques before giving up, but don't feel that giving up as necessarily a bad thing. It allows you to move forward and amass more music in your daily practice. I'm wondering how this all works for you. Try it out and let me know here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Once again, I'm Robert Estrin. This is your online piano resource. Thanks for subscribing. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-do-you-know-when-to-move-on-in-your-piano-practice/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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