Master Any Song Faster With These Tips
1. Run Throughs
Having taught the piano for the past 15 years, I’ve noticed the same common pitfalls repeatedly appear in many players’ practice. Sometimes when we are learning the piano we have to fight against our brains natural urge to take the easy option or to do the thing that requires the least mental resistance.
This is why many players fall into the habit of regular playing full run-throughs of a piece that they are working on. You get to play the parts of the music you can play well and you can ignore the mistakes under the pretence of; “I will fix that later”, or even worse; “it will fix itself if I play through it enough”.
While playing through a piece of music you are working on isn’t always a bad thing, it isn’t an efficient method of learning. In fact, it slows down progress significantly.
So when should you run through a piece of music?
Well, there are 4 situations in which it is good to run through the piece of music:
- If you are performing the piece of music.
- If you are playing for fun without the aim of improving, rather than practicing.
- If you are trying to find problems and mistakes to then practice.
- If you are consolidating or checking that you can play the mistakes that you’ve just practiced back in context.
This means that if you want to improve quickly, the vast majority of practice should be spent on specific problems in the music or actively trying to do something that you couldn’t do before.
2. Methodology
So if you aren’t playing through the piece of music to improve. What should you do?
As you get better and better you will develop a strong sense of what is the correct approach depending on the problem you are trying to fix. For example, if a section of your music has a long series of fast notes, this will require a different method than fixing a problem with the dynamics.
The first thing to identify is exactly what the problem is and where it is in the piece of music. Problems can be one of two things; a technical problem or a musical problem.
Technical problems are physical problems, such as; playing fast notes, jumps on the piano, hitting the correct notes etc.
Musical problems are problems with expression, such as; missing dynamics, shaping the music, articulation (e.g. staccato) etc.
If you need to play the music through at the start of a practice session to identify problems, then this is a great time to do that. For the most part, many players will already have an idea as to what is stopping them from being performance ready.
Once the problems are identified, then you need to come up with the method you are going to use to fix that issue. There are 3 ways to fix a problem (depending on the problem).
- Actively remembering. Sometimes it’s enough to isolate the section of the music and just actively remember to implement the missing thing. This is often the case with dynamics for example.
- Slow it down. Slowing the section of music down is great for practicing most technical issues. For example, tricky finger patterns, finding big chords etc.
- Isolate. For any problem, you will usually need to isolate the problem so that you can focus on it. However, you can isolate the section to varying degrees. This is often best done for musical problems. For example if you need to practice the transition between two dynamics or you need to practice a change in articulation. You can begin with isolating it to just a few notes and then add more and more context as you become comfortable.
As I have mentioned in several of my Youtube videos. This is actually exactly what I did using my practice book during my years studying at Music Conservatory. If you want to use the exact practice planner I used then it is available for free here (PRACTICE PLANNER).
3. A Productive Practice
So how might you structure learning a piece to be most effective?
STEP 1: Play through the piece of needed to identify the problems.
STEP 2: Write down all of the problems and the bar numbers along with the method you might use to fix it.
STEP 3: Work through each of the problems following the method you suggested. You may not get through all of the problems and you may need multiple practice sessions for some of them too - which is perfectly normal!
STEP 4: Play through the piece at the end of the session to see if you managed to fix the problem in context or if you need to continue practicing it.
For many players a large amount of their practice time is taken up playing things that they can already play. By adding just a little bit of methodology to your practice sessions, you can speed up your rate of progress drastically.
Matthew Cawood
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