What is the Most Productive Practice Routine?

This is LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin asking the question: What is the most productive practice routine? I’m sure this is important to many of you. If you spend a lot of time during the week practicing the piano, you want to get as much accomplished as possible. People often ask me, “How much time should I spend on this or that? Should I be doing exercises?” People sometimes feel lost deciding what to practice. They don’t know if they’re spending the appropriate amount of time on each discipline. I’m going to give you things you should be doing in your practice daily, or almost every day. Certainly, the ones at the beginning of this list are going to be things you should do every day, and towards the end of the list are things you should do every week. I’m listing them in order of importance of how much time you should spend on the following tasks:

As a pianist, learning music is of paramount importance.

You should spend the vast majority of your time memorizing music, or if you’re a collaborative player, learning scores of accompaniments or chamber music. This is the hardest part of practicing, and you have to spend the majority of your practice time doing it. There’s no shortcut to this. I wish there was some way the works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Ravel, Debussy, Chopin, Liszt, and others could be embedded in my head and in yours! But there isn’t. You have to just painstakingly practice bit by bit assimilating music. That is the primary thing you should be doing in your piano practice on a daily basis.

Refine the music you have learned on previous days.

Whatever you’ve learned the day before isn’t solidified yet. As a matter of fact, when you first sit down to practice, you might think, “Did I even learn this yesterday?” It may seem quite foreign. Mostly, you’ll find that when you’re reading through the music, it will come back to you quickly. But a lot of times it doesn’t. You’re not alone! There’s nothing wrong with you. If you have to relearn the music you just learned the day before, welcome to the club! It happens. But don’t fret, because when you just go through the same steps of relearning, it comes back much more quickly than the first time you learned it. Just go through the memorization steps again, and the second time you learn it, you will retain it much better.

Review your pieces.

What else is there besides memorizing new material and reviewing the music you learned days before? Well, there’s always review pieces you should work on. If you don’t work on review pieces, you’ll never have the familiarity of something that you’ve lived with and played many times. Reviewing your pieces keeps them at a high level. Then, at any time, you’re ready to play at least two or three pieces on a high level because you play them nearly every day. From time to time, you should take out the score. Take your foot off the pedal. Look at the score carefully, and play slowly. Use the metronome, reinforcing your memory. But at the very least, you should play through a few pieces every day. It’s of tremendous value keeping your music in shape and simply moving your fingers. It provides good exercise for you as well, which seamlessly leads us to the next topic:

Play through exercises regularly.

What exercises should you do? Primarily scales and arpeggios. If you’re not up to scales and arpeggios yet, you can do simple Hanon exercises just to strengthen your fingers. When playing exercises, slow practice is vitally important. You actually get more physiological benefit from slow practice than you do from fast playing. Plus, it trains your fingers. You will feel which fingers are down and which fingers are up by exaggerating the finger motion. You get clean releases of the notes so you avoid muddiness in your playing. You should use the metronome when practicing Hanon exercises, as well as scales and arpeggios. Always practice slowly with raised fingers first. Then playing two notes to the beat, and finally four notes to the beat staying close to the keys, and playing lighter. Play at four notes to the beat many times so that you’re used to playing a lot of notes quickly and evenly. It’s a godsend for your technique!

There’s also wrist exercises. At the beginning, I like to teach simple exercises in thirds. Once again, use the metronome. Make sure you identify your wrists separate from your arms. You don’t want to move your arms up and down when working on wrist technique. You want your arms to place your hands exactly in the right position over the keys. Why? Because slow practice is preparation for being able to play faster for articulated staccatos and such. Eventually, you’ll be working on octave technique which also comes from the wrist. I have a little octave exercise you can reference. You can even work on scales in octaves! You can work on fingers all day long, but If you don’t work on wrist exercises, you’re not going to develop your wrist technique which is essential for piano playing.

Sight reading should be a part of your daily work as well.

It can be fun exploring new music or playing different styles of music that you like but don’t ordinarily play. Just pick up the sheet music and read through it! Find music on your reading level. It’s not going to be the same level of pieces you’re studying. Pieces you’re breaking down bit by bit, hands separately, then putting them together, and working through methodically, are going to be far more complex than pieces you can simply read accurately after playing them through maybe two or three times. If you can’t play the music you’re sight reading perfectly after two or three times slowly, then it’s not the appropriate level for you to sight read. Your reading level will grow if you do it every day. Better yet, find people to play with. When you’re forced to keep going, that is the best way to develop your reading abilities.

Improvisation is awesome!

If you’re not fluent with improvisation, just do anything, even if it’s just abstract chords. You can experiment with various styles of improvised music, whether it’s blues, jazz, or new age. Just come up with anything. Have fun with it! You’ll be developing your ears while you’re doing this. It provides great value. You don’t necessarily have to do this every day, but it can’t hurt. Experiment with it. It not only helps you to improvise better, but it’s a lifesaver when you develop a connection between the keys you play, and what you hear. If you ever have a memory slip in performance, you can feel your way back because if you have improvised a great deal, you will know what sounds are going to be created from the keys you play. You develop a connection with the keyboard. So do a little improvisation. Even just a few minutes a day can help your piano playing tremendously.

Take some time for theory.

What are you going to do with theory? Well, your teacher might guide you, and you can also simply study your music. If you have a piece, you can take time to study the score and figure out what it’s all about. For example, you can figure out what the harmonies are doing. Or if you’re doing a sonata, you know it changes keys in the second subject since all sonatas do. Determine where it changes key. Look at the accidentals to be able to figure out where the piece is going to the dominant (the key starting on the fifth note of the key of the piece). Study your scores. It will help you to learn them better and avoid taking wrong turns in performance.

Are those all the things you can do in practice?

No. Make practice an exciting journey! You can sing. You can improvise while singing. That’s an excellent test to know if you are hearing what you’re playing. If you can sing what you’re playing, then you know you’re hearing it. That is really key to being able to solidify memory in your classical playing. This is just the tip of the iceberg. These are fundamental things you should be achieving in your daily work. Remember, learning new music is number one. Refining what you did the day before is number two. Number three is playing review pieces. Enjoy them! There’s time for scales, arpeggios, octaves, wrist exercise, things of that nature as well. Then reward yourself with some sight reading for fun and just make some music up with improvisation. Then delve into some music theory. Study the music that you’re learning or music you want to learn. These are all great things you can do on a regular basis to keep your practicing productive, rewarding, and engaging, which is the most important part!

Whatever you do, make sure you’re not just going through the motions.

Be sure you’re actually involved in the process. After all, practicing is a mental activity. If you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, it really isn’t practicing no matter how long you sit at the bench. Make sure you’re getting something done with your time. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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