This is the second post in my series on Mental Practice at the piano. To read my first post, click here!
In my first post in this series, I gave an overview of what mental practice is and is not. In this post I will discuss who uses mental practice, why it works, and how to get started with it.
When I talk about mental practice with my students, a lot of them tell me they don’t know if they are doing mental practice “right.” First and foremost, I want to emphasize that there are many different ways to do mental practice. There is no one right way. Visualizing something in your mind is a pretty intuitive process – you already do it all the time, whenever you imagine an outcome before something happens, such as looking forward to a trip or anticipating an experience.
You can usually tell if you are doing it “wrong” if you see absolutely no results. But because the approach you will take is personalized to your own learning and thinking style, mental practice actually turns out to be not that difficult, once you get the hang of it.
Who Uses Mental Practice
Let’s start by recognizing that many, many people in many fields use mental practice and mental imaging to more accurately perform their work.
For example, surgeons use mental practice to improve their technical performance.
In his book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Colonel Chris Hadfield describes the hours and hours of rigorous mental practice he and his team did before each spacewalk.
Athletes mentally rehearse their performances in great detail before competing. For example, this study shows that golfers who mentally rehearsed their swings did significantly better than golfers who did not use mental practice.
And, for us pianists, here is a study comparing physical practice with mental practice, finding that mental practice leads to successful music learning, and also that “Pitch imagery and structural analysis were associated with better post-MP performance” – in other words, mental practice IMPROVED the brain’s ability to anticipate sounds and understand the structure of the music.
Why Mental Practice Works
Why is mental practice so effective? It turns out that the same areas of our brain light up whether we are physically making a motion or when we are only imagining making a physical motion. Our brain reacts very similarly to when something happens using your muscles or if you only use your brain to imagine using your muscles. If you imagine something vividly enough, down to the way it feels inside your body and with a mental picture of what you are seeing, your brain will effectively learn the same way as if you were actually doing the action physically.
This has tremendous implications. Once you know how to apply mental practice, you can practice even if you need to take time off from being injured, or even if you’re just physically tired. You can also intersperse mental practice throughout your physical practice, while sitting at your instrument.
Or, you can practice even when you don’t have a piano available to practice on. Maybe you only have 10 minutes between classes or appointments to fill. Maybe you are stuck in traffic, or waiting in line. There are many opportunities to use mental practice to help supplement and support the work you are doing at the instrument.
Crucially, mental practice bridges the gap between your muscles and your ears. Because playing the piano is such a complex task, we pianists tend to over-focus on the physical component of our practice. We spend a lot of time in lessons and in practice thinking about technique, and how to get around the instrument. We drill passages over and over so they are “in our fingers.”
Removing the physical component and doing mental practice engages the mind and the ear in a way that can free you from your physical limitations and help you bring your playing to the next level.
Getting Started with Mental Practice
Here is an exercise I use with my students who want to get started with mental practice.
- Choose a piece of music you are working on. It should be a piece that you already know the notes for and can play through, but is not necessarily memorized yet.
- Play through a section of the piece. It can be the first few lines, or the first page, or the first phrase. Typically with my students I will have them play a segment about 24 measures long.
- After you play that section, play it again silently with your hands over the keys, “ghosting” the notes. This means that you will touch the keys and “play” the notes as written, but not press the keys down. If you have never played this particular passage silently, you will likely find that you need to play it more slowly in order to hear the notes in your head as you “play” them, and that you may have to “fix” any errors you make doing this silent practice.
- Next, put your hands in your lap and mentally read through the same section, and only hear the notes in your head as you look at the music with your eyes. If you get to a place where you are fuzzy in your mind, and can’t remember how it goes, feel free to reorient yourself by “checking” those notes (and only those notes) by playing them out loud. Then, put your hands back in your lap and continue imagining the rest of the passage.
- Then, close your eyes. Mentally go through this same section and imagine each note. Try to see the notes on the page in your mind’s eye. Imagine the way your hands feel on the keyboard as you “play” each note. As before, if you get to a place that isn’t clear in your mind, you can open your eyes and check the music and/or play those few notes before continuing.
- Finally, open your eyes, and play that segment out loud on the keys as normal. What do you notice? Does it feel any different?
My students report to me that this exercise makes the passage seem “easier” and smoother in their hands. Also, students notice more awareness of sound quality, phrasing and dynamics as a result of this exercise. If you repeat this exercise daily with the same section, your mental imaging “muscle” will get stronger and it will become increasingly easier.
Try it out! And let me know what you notice, in the comments.
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