Let’s face it: practicing can be fun, but it’s not the most glamorous aspect of playing an instrument. There is a wide world out there to explore, and you aren’t engaging with it when you are locked away in a room, practicing. One goal of practicing should be to practice more efficiently, so you can spend less time in the practice room.
Learning to practice is a skill that takes a lifetime to refine. This post explores strategies that will help you improve the quality of your practice time, enabling you to get the most out of every minute at the piano and giving you more time to go out and live in the world.
Further reading: How Much Should You Practice the Piano Every Day?
1. Turn off your phone.
The phone can be the single biggest deterrent to a focused, high-quality practice session. Having the phone in the practice room is like trying to practice or study in a room filled with 10,000 screaming people. It is simply not possible to accomplish much at all when your attention is constantly being hijacked by your phone.
Scientific studies have shown that even having the phone on and in the same room decreases the quality of your work. If you use your phone for other things (such as a timer or metronome), put it on airplane mode and turn off notifications.
2. Choose your fingering early and be consistent.
Early in the learning process, decide on your fingering. Have a pencil handy and write your fingering in as you work it out. Err on the side of writing in more, rather than less.
Once you have decided on your fingering, be consistent. It’s okay to try something out for a while and then change it. If you change your fingering, take the time to erase it and put in the revised fingering.
3. Restrict your practice time.
According to Parkinson’s Law, a task expands to fill the amount of time we have to spend on it. If we have an undefined amount of time to practice over the course of the day, we will use all of that time. But often, by restricting the time available you can force yourself to be more focused and accomplish more in less time.
Decide ahead of time how much time you have to practice and use that time to get your work done. If, at the end of the day, you determine that you were highly focused but still didn’t get everything done that you needed to, schedule a little more time the following day until the balance of scheduled time matches what you need to accomplish.
4. Take breaks – but don’t socialize during the break.
It can be helpful to practice according to timed sprints, at whatever interval works for you (for example, practice 25 minutes, rest 5 minutes).
During each 25-minute “sprint,” you should be laser-focused. Don’t try to multitask; simply work on the thing you are trying to practice that day.
When you take a break, use it to refresh yourself. Take a drink. Walk around or do some jumping jacks. Read a few pages of a book.
But avoid social activities like checking your email or social media, making a quick phone call, surfing the internet, or chatting with a friend or family member. Try to stay in your own bubble of concentration.
5. Set weekly goals.
Each piece you are working on should have a weekly goal attached to it. Often this will be a goal set by your teacher in your last lesson.
Goal-setting is important, so you know what you are working toward. Otherwise it is too easy to just practice hour after hour and not know what the point is.
6. Set daily goals.
If you have clear weekly goals, this will enable you to set daily goals. The purpose of a daily goal is to know what you want to accomplish before you start practicing, which is sort of like having a practice to-do list.
For example, if you want to memorize a section of a piece by the end of the week, you can break it down into seven smaller daily goals and work on memorizing one of those sections each day.
7. Don’t start all your music at once.
Having different pieces in different stages of readiness allows your practice time to consist of many different kinds of activities. Moving back and forth between different pieces over the course of a practice session allows you to use different parts of your brain.
There are several different phases of learning a piece:
- the beginning phase, when you are starting to learn the notes
- the refining and problem-solving phase, when you are solving technical problems
- the polishing phase, when you are doing run-throughs and working out bugs
- the performance preparation phase, when you are practicing the elements around performing
Practicing will be much more tedious if you only have a stack of brand new music you are trying to learn the notes for. Or, it may become a little boring for you if you are only working on pieces you know really well.
8. Avoid mindless repetitions.
When you study for a test or read new material you want to retain, you need to be alert and concentrate well. (If you have ever had the experience of staring at a page and reading the same sentence over and over, you know what I mean!) Practicing an instrument is exactly the same: to make progress, you need to stay focused.
If you tend to lose focus and revert to mindless practice, try adding a three-second pause between every repetition, and answer the question “Why am I repeating this?”
Don’t space out or go on autopilot. If you have difficulty concentrating, that is a signal to give yourself a mental break or try a more specific practice strategy that will engage your brain.
9. Don’t make mistakes more than once.
If you make frequent mistakes, you are either practicing too fast or you are practicing too complex of an idea.
Train yourself to become alert to mistakes, and address these by practicing more slowly, practicing hands separately, or working on a smaller snippet of the passage.
Further reading: Are You Making Too Many Mistakes in Your Practice?
10. Record yourself.
Recording yourself and playing back is the single most time-saving practice method I can recommend. I am always surprised at how few students record themselves.
All you need to record yourself is your phone. Set it up in the room a few paces from your piano, and record yourself doing a play-through of the piece you are working on. Then, listen back to the play-through with headphones and take notes.
11. Ask good questions.
Don’t just do what your teacher told you to do this week in practice. Ask yourself questions as you practice.
Examples include “What is the character/mood of the music in this passage?” or “What can I change to make this sound more like the way I want it to sound?”
Further reading: How to Ask Better Questions When You Practice Three Questions to Ask the Next Time You Practice
12. Show up every day.
Not every day will be easy. You will be tempted to skip days for all kinds of reasons. Our brain is great at making excuses:
- The weather is so nice out!
- I don’t have a performance coming up.
- I don’t know what to work on.
- I’m tired/bored.
- I’m too busy!
If you show up at the instrument every day and create a habit out of practicing, a lot of that resistance will evaporate. You will no longer have to “decide” whether to practice – it will become something you just do as part of your routine.
Showing up every day allows space in your creative process for inspiration to strike. You will start to see measurable and consistent progress.
13. Cultivate ease.
Cultivate a spirit of playfulness and ease in your practicing. If you find yourself struggling, examine what it is that is causing it. Maybe your repertoire is too hard, or maybe you are overly worried about an upcoming performance.
Spending time practicing at your instrument is like having a conversation with yourself. You are the teacher AND the student. Your role as teacher is to listen carefully to yourself and come up with ideas for next actions to take. Your role as student is to be receptive to your own insights and stay present to what you hear coming out of the instrument.
Conclusion
Hopefully these practice suggestions will help you freshen up your practice routine. There are many strategies I didn’t touch on today: what suggestions do you have for getting the most out of your practice time? Leave them in the comments below!
I do use a lot of these ideas, but it helps to hear them again and again to reinforce good habits–and avoid bad ones, so thanks for the message! I find that setting a timer for each practice session and staying on one section of a piece really helps with focus and a sense of accomplishment.