Practice at Warp Speed
It’s taken a lot of time, lessons, rehearsals, books, blogs, conversations, and practice sessions to learn effective ways to practice. Lately, I’ve been learning pieces at a faster pace, as I’ve been taking regular lessons each week, which sets a definite deadline for learning things. A deadline is one thing, but knowing how to deliver when that deadline arrives is another.
When I started studying at City Colleges of Chicago in January 2019, my practice methods were all over the place. I mostly relied on either learning through repetition, or very dull metronome practice, gradually speeding things up over the course of a week, month, or year (i.e. repetition). With guidance from my instructors and some research on my own, I learned some very useful ways to approach practice beyond those two methods. I’ve gotten to the place where I’m able to put together pieces to a playable level in about a week. It’s not performance level, but it’s a very solid foundation for more intense work during a second week of practice.
First things first, I need to include some general guidance about practice. Practice regularly, as in every day, and be focused. Gauge your session length by your focus level. If you can’t focus beyond 30 minutes, take a break and come back later. If you can stay focused for 2 hours, awesome. You must set goals, but don’t set expectations. A goal is: “I will work on page 2 of the piece”, an expectation would be “I will play page 2 as fast as Glen Gould.” Goals help you define what you need to do during each session. Practice in the moment and be honest with yourself. You likely won’t be able to master a piece in one practice session, but you will be able to hone in on some aspects of it.
Day 1 – Get you feet wet. This is a big day, so make it worth your time. First, listen to the piece! If the piece is brand new to you, you’re going to sightread it, listening to it first will give you an idea of what it sounds like and what to expect as you read it. Now sightread. Do some analysis after reading through it. Look at the harmonies and scales used. Use your previous knowledge to spot familiar things like arpeggios, intervals, and voice leading. Try playing the basic harmony with your left hand while playing the melody with your right. Reharmonize that melody if you’re adventurous. Improvise over the harmony if you’ve got time.
Day 2 – Book work. Keep your pencil handy. If you’ve spent a day getting familiar with the piece, start working on finger choreography to build the muscle memory needed to move on to slow metronome practice. Write in finger numbers. If you’re learning Bach, your score should look like a math professor’s chalkboard after a lecture about integral calculus. Improve your movements. Isolate any spot where you have to cross over the thumb or cross your thumb under and focus on these. If you have any big position shifts, practice them. If you have any arm crossing, work on that, and if you have any hand over hand stuff (Debussy Preludes book 2 no. 1!), figure out the best way to make that work.
Day 3 – Keep building from day 2. Review what you did the day before and start building speed and memory. Any passage that has eighth notes, 16ths, or fast triplets, should be played in off kilter rhythms. Play in swing (long, short, long, short), then reverse swing (short, long, short, long). Then play in groups of 4 with (long, short, short, short) then (short, short, short, long). Modify those for triplets (long, short, short) and (short, short, long). Play the passage evenly now, then try playing it staccato. Next block anything and everything. Try blocking arpeggios into chords. Block scales by thumb note, then everything else, then thumb note, then everything else. This helps with position shifts. Unblock those, but rush through the non-thumb notes, then hold the thumb note. Play it normal now.
An important aside here. More than likely, you’re right handed. Even if you’re not, most piano music, on the surface, demands greater dexterity of the right hand. Do yourself a favor and make the difficult choice to focus on your left hand playing. Your left hand must be the driver at all times, even if it’s playing whole notes while the right hand is shredding. You’re only as good as your left hand, and you’re right hand playing is worth nothing if you can’t coordinate it with the left.
Some ways to improve your LH. When you play LH passages, notice what gives you trouble. See if you can play the same thing with your RH using the same fingers (i.e. if the passage for LH is 5,4,3,2,1, play 5,4,3,2,1 with your RH). Notice what your right hand does. Is it the way you have your hand turned? Is it because your LH crosses more to the right side? Use that insight to change your LH playing. If you can play the LH part well on its own, then you’re making progress.
Day 4 – If you’ve built up some speed and evenness of rhythm, continue to focus on technique to make your moves efficient and stress free, and work in dynamics. Maybe it’s time for slow metronome practice. Be honest with yourself and set your metronome to a tempo that is easily manageable. The key here is to make things easy. The metronome is used to build evenness of playing and to help you gradually increase your speed. Champion marathoners don’t run their fastest miles every day they train. They save that for the race. Train slow so you can play fast when the time to do some comes. While you’re playing slow, still focus on technique and choreography, but keep in time with the metronome. There are two techniques I like to use when practicing. I try to alternate them, as they serve different purposes.
One is to gradually increase the tempo. I use Soundbrenner’s metronome app on my phone. I set it slow (40 to 60 bpm to start, depending on the passage), then play the passage once correctly and increase the tempo. If I mess up, I have to do it again. Once it’s correct, I increase. This can take a while, so I don’t set me sights on going from 60 to 120 like this. I usually go up 10 clicks a day with this method. If you do that over several days, you can increase your tempo quite a bit in a week. When I stop, I write down the tempo in the margin of my score so I know where to start next time I do metronome practice.
The second technique is 10 steps forward, 5 steps back. I start at a tempo that is easy (70bpm, for example). I play the passage correctly twice, maybe three times, then I move the tempo up 10 clicks (now up to 80bpm). I play it twice correctly, then I drop the tempo by 5 clicks (now down to 75bpm). I do this several times until I either run out of time or focus, reach the performance tempo, exceed it, or run into trouble. If I hit a tempo where I can’t play correctly, I stop there and assess what’s going wrong. It’s probably technique, so I work on technique again. I like this method, as it puts more pressure on you when you jump by 10 clicks, but then gives you a break when you reduce the tempo. It’s much like a runner would train by doing intervals (running fast for a short distance, then running slow, then fast again, then slow). Over time, their fitness level increases. Same idea here.
It’s important to use this second method only after you’ve done the gradual metronome practice and you know you can play faster. The key is to KNOW that you can, not simply to WANT to play it faster. Knowing that you’re ready to play fast comes down to how diligent you were in your earlier choreography and technique practice, and how efficient your moves are. If you can’t play the passage slow, then you can’t play it fast.
Day 5 – Making it fancy. You should always focus on articulation and dynamics, but now that you’ve got more technical facility with the music, you can really hone in on these things. More than likely, the articulation and dynamics will also improve your ability to play the piece. Make your staccatos super short. Shape all your phrases. Focus on spots with dramatic dynamic shifts. Add some expressive rubato when you have a cadence. Listen to the decay of longer notes and try to match that volume when you play the note that follows. Focus on footwork. Use your pedals and follow any indications in the score for them. If you’re going to go down a practice rabbit hole, today is the day to do it.
Day 6 – Memorization. Uploading the score to your brain and building a piano in your head.
Today, give your fingers a short break and do some mental practice. Take your score away from the piano and read through it while listening to a recording. Now try reading through it and playing the music in your head.
Now, let’s get to memorizing. At this point, you’ve probably practiced the piece from the beginning, and somewhere about halfway through (aka the Development), things get tricky, and the ending still might seem like something you’ve barely played before. So your goal today is to learn this piece backwards. Go to the last measure of the piece. Work on one hand at a time. Look at the RH note or chord, then imagine how it sounds. Now look at the note again, imagine the keyboard and imagine playing the key(s) for that measure. Now close your eyes and imagine the measure and the sound. Then imagine playing the notes on the keys and how that sounds. Open your eyes, then do that for the LH. Once you have both parts memorized for the final measure, do the same thing for the measure before that, then the one before that, and so on. See if you can play several measures in a row in your head with your eyes closed. Do this until you get all the way back to the beginning of the piece. It’s difficult to maintain this type of focus for long periods of time, so you may want to break it up into shorter sessions of 30 minutes. If you find yourself losing focus, take a break and come back to the piece later in the day.
We build muscle memory through tactile practice, but we also have to build mental memory through mental practice. This helps you as you start running through a piece so every note is a place you can start, not just the beginning. Can you play the entire piece in your head without the score? If so, you’re ready for day 7.
You can practice, if you’d like, but don’t set out to do a ton of work. Just play for fun today after you’ve worked on memorization.
Day 7 – Off book – If this is a shorter piece, you should be able to finalize memorizing it by this point. If it’s something longer, you may need more days or weeks. As you learn more pieces, the timeline will shorten.
In this last day, do what you did in Day 6, but incorporate the keyboard. First, listen to the piece. Then quiz yourself on your memorization by doing one run through of the piece in your head, visualizing the score, then once visualizing the keyboard. If you’re able to make it to the end without trouble, you’re ready for the next step. If you forgot some parts, work on those in your head, then run the piece one more time from beginning to end in your head.
The final step of memorization will work just like Day 6. This time, though, we don’t use the printed score unless absolutely necessary. We start at the end, and we work hands separately. Think of the last measure of the piece and imagine how it sounds. Now think of it again but imagine how it is played on the keys. Now imagine it again and play it on the piano. Play it two more times, then move on to the measure before it, and work on it the same way. Keep going back measure by measure. Test your memory every four measures or so by playing through four measures at a time. Can you start in the middle of a phrase and play 4 measures? Can you start in the middle of a measure and play to the middle of 4 measures after that? Do this until you get to the beginning of a section or the whole piece, whichever is manageable with your time. It’s difficult to maintain this type of focus for long periods of time, so you may want to break it up into shorter sessions of 30 minutes. If you find yourself losing focus, take a break and come back to the piece later in the day.
That’s one week of diligent practice. Let’s recount what you did in a week. You took a new piece of music, possibly one you’ve never heard before, you played through it for the first time ever, analyzed it, figured out choreography, worked on technique, built up speed and memorized it. Pat yourself on the back because that’s amazing. You spent your time well, and you practiced in a focused way. You could have played video games or taken a nap, or done any number of other things, but, instead you practiced and got better at warp speed. You might not have your piece to performance level yet, but it’s in shape to take it to the next level in a shorter amount of time now.
I hope you find this helpful. I’m hoping to share more posts about specific pieces as I’m learning them this semester.
