Piano Video Lesson: What To Do When You Make a Mistake in Your Piano Practice

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. The question today is what do you do when you make a mistake in your piano practice? You know there are basically three essential go -to techniques that you can rely upon in your practice. Anytime you make a mistake, this is what you should do, one of these three things.

So, let's say you're playing something and like oh the Bach fifth French Suite is a fast movement and it's sloppy like that. You want to clean it up. So what can you do? Well, or maybe you're playing through it and it's going fine in a certain section, something goes wrong right in the middle and you wonder what can you do to fix it? You could just go back and try it again, maybe it'll come out, but suppose it just doesn't feel quite right and you wonder what can you do? I'm going to give you three practice techniques that are absolutely indispensable and should be your go -to routines anytime there's any problems in your piano playing when you're practicing.

Number one, go slower.

You could also do that with the metronome by the way.

Metronome is a great tool for slow practice. What else can you do? Obviously, you could just do the right hand alone.

So, those are two techniques. Slow down, do hands separately and lastly and just as important is take smaller sections. So maybe you're working on the whole first section.

And you're having problems along the way. You could take half that section, a quarter of that section, you could take two measures.

The most important thing is to identify the amount of music that you can master at a time. If you go through a whole section and you mess up in one place and you kind of patch it up a little bit and you go through and you mess it up again, try just taking the four measures where you're having the problems and really cement it. Then you can expand upon that with larger sections.

So to recap, when you have a mistake on the piano, one of three things must happen. What you want to avoid is repeating that mistake. If you make a mistake once, maybe you try it again and you think you can get it, then you hit the wrong notes or the same mistake or another mistake the second time, alarm bells should go off. Then you must do something different. Why is this so imperative? Well, I always talk about you must get something at least three times in a row perfectly before you move on. Why? Because three times in a row cements things. It begins to really come in together in your hands and your head.

Well, the same thing is true of mistakes. If you miss something twice and then you just flippantly go and play it again hoping you'll get it without making any changes, if you get it that third time wrong, now you've really cemented that error and it's going to be harder to dig out of that because your hands have gotten used to it, your ears have gotten used to the mistake. So once again, either slow down, do hands separately or take a smaller section. Embrace these three techniques anytime you miss something once or twice in a row and I guarantee that the productivity of your practice will skyrocket.

Once again, I'm Robert Estrin, you're watching LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks again for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/what-to-do-when-you-make-a-mistake-in-your-piano-practice/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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