The short answer is sure; why not? However, you really need to ask yourself what your intentions and expectations are. You should also be aware of the style of music that you would primarily want to play. For example: if you want to play some blues o
If you do this you will undoubtedly spend a lot of time working out that first section. You will probably wonder how you will even get through the whole piece learning so slowly! You will be very tempted to move ahead to the next section before you should. However, if you stay with it, the results will be remarkable.
Continue working slowly on the first section of the piece until it is absolutely perfect and it feels very comfortable. Then begin working up the tempo with the metronome one notch at a time. The good news is that most sections of the piece will not require such intense practice and you will get them on a high level without spending much time at all. However, there will be a few sections that will definitely benefit from this slow practice routine. It comes down to the 80/20 rule:
You should spend 80% of your time on the hardest 20% of the music!
Most pieces are not written with equal difficulty throughout. By taking sections that are difficult and practicing them slowly until they become comfortable (and then increasing the speed), your practice sessions will become much more productive. Slow practice is an incredible tool to advance your piano playing. Just practicing a piece slowly and definitely without incrementally speeding it up will be tremendously beneficial. Try these techniques out and see how it works for you. I would love to hear your comments.
Practicing slowly is essential in order to develop and maintain a high level of piano playing. There are actually several different components I’m going to discuss when it comes to the magic of slow practice. Even pieces that you have polished and
It’s a scary proposition to think that something you’ve spent thousands of dollars on could not be what it appears to be. Believe it or not, this actually happens in today’s piano market all the time and it’s something everyone should be awar
Solfeggio, sometimes called sight-singing, is the ability to read and sing music at sight. This is an incredibly important skill for all musicians. So how do you develop these skills? There are a couple of different systems and each one has different
This question comes from another viewer who asks how to read ahead in music to improve their reading. So how do you achieve this and is it a good technique? Well the truth is, reading ahead is actually not exactly how it works. Instead, it is a matte
To put it in simple terms, in a musical context: Allegro means fast; while Moderato means moderately fast. (Actually, the Italian translation of Allegro is actually “happy” and Moderato means “moderate”). But these two terms c
I have produced a video in the past on How to Memorize Music. If you haven’t watched it yet I highly recommend it as a companion piece to this article. My very first lesson as a child when I studied with my father Morton Estrin was how to memorize music. It’s a crucial skill that every musician should learn.
Taking small sections of music and memorizing each hand separately, then putting them together helps you memorize even the most difficult passages of music. This is a great system to use but how do you account for a piece you almost have memorized? How can you push yourself over the edge and get the whole piece down?
I actually have two methods for you. The first is the band-aid approach to practicing music. This technique is simple but very effective. Play through the piece as far as you can from memory. When you encounter a spot that you can’t go past without looking at the music, you stop. Then take this small section and study it intensely. Use the method I detailed above and learn each hand separately first to get the section memorized securely.
If the band-aid approach doesn’t work for you don’t worry; you have other options. Rather than starting all over again and learning small chunks at a time, expand the amount of music you learn for each section. So where you might have been memorizing 3-4 measures at a time, try and work with 8-10 measures at a time. Make sure you learn the hands separately and then combine them together.
I highly recommend that in the future you start by memorizing your piece as the first step and not the last step. Start by progressing through your music in small chunks and learn each hand separately; then combine them when you’re ready. Ultimately this is a much more efficient way to learn your music.
This might sound like a silly question but sometimes you have a piece you can play with the music in front of you but you haven’t memorized it yet. You might be able to play the whole piece by barely glancing at the music but you still need it in p
This is a term you may or may not be familiar with. The plagal cadence is a IV chord resolving to a I chord at the end of a piece. Why is this significant? Typically the end of a piece has a V – I or V7 – I cadence. So why is the plagal c
Somebody asked me this question the other day and I was very confused – I wondered what they could be talking about. But once he explained the questions I began to understand that it actually made a lot of sense. C is the starting note for most