Music Video Lesson: How many pieces should you practice at a time?

Hi, and welcome to virtualsheetmusic.com and livingpianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin with a viewer question: how many pieces can you practice at a time? This is a great question that covers a lot of territory we're going to cover today. Well, you know when you're starting out, and you're learning one piece during the week and hopefully you can learn it during the one week, maybe two weeks. Maybe go on to a new piece and then another piece, and you're generally working with one piece at a time. Well, right there already, there's a question. Should you practice your review piece? When you're learning a new piece, should you practice the piece you learned the week before? Well, absolutely because when a piece is freshly learned you might be able to get through it and play it okay, but imagine after you've lived with it for weeks. If you keep practicing it over a period of weeks, you will develop a fluency and ease with the music, more so than the piece you just learned that week.

At a certain point though, you have so many pieces that just being able to play them all and keep them at a high level may prevent you from progressing to new repertoire because it's too time consuming, and you must drop older repertoire as you start new pieces. But it's great to have a body of work that you can sit down and play, so you always have pieces that are at a high level, number one. And number two, just keeping in shape, you can play through whole a lot of music instead of just playing boring exercises, and this will strengthen your fingers as a pianist or your lips on a wind instrument, etc.

Now what about when you get to more advanced levels of study? Well, if you're, for example, playing a musical program, a solo recital, let's say, you obviously have to practice many pieces, and you may have to practice an hour, an hour and a half of music. Perhaps more if you're entering competitions, so it's not a one size fits all. It depends on the level of your playing, as well as the amount of time you have to devote to practicing. Obviously if you can only practice 30 minutes a day or an hour a day even, it's going to be tough to practice four hours of music because just getting through it's going to take longer than that.

So if you're working on a whole program, let's say an hour and a half, you have to have three or four hours to practice on a regular basis or at least a couple of hours just to be able to cover that music and keep it at a high level. At the beginning stages, as I said, even at the very beginning you should practice some review pieces, so you keep growing and have a body of work. I've seen people that've been playing for years, and they always drop their old piece and start a new piece, and they never have anything that's on a really high, polished level because they never live with anything long enough. Don't let that happen to you! Keep some of your review pieces in your repertoire, and you'll be rewarded with a fluency and an ease of performance when the opportunity comes. Thanks so much for the great question. I'm Robert Estrin at virtualsheetmusic.com and livingpianos.com.

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