Why It Feels Like Nothing Is Improving (Even When It Is)
1. Expectation
It seems logical that if we spend time working on improving our ability to play an instrument, then we should be able to see how we are getting better. To some degree, you might be able to see some improvements as you notice how a particular piece of music becomes easier and easier to play. But why is it that when you start a new piece of music, it can feel like those improvements haven’t transferred over and it feels like you are starting all over again?
To some extent, learning an instrument is a little bit slippery. You aren’t always directly learning the exact notes that you are going to play in future pieces, but rather the methodology for attacking those problems. You might spend a lot of time fixing a problem in one piece, but never see that exact problem with those exact notes ever again. However, what you are learning is that type of problem.
Let’s say you have a piece of music that requires you to play some fast octaves in your left hand. The likelihood is that you are not going to see that exact run of fast octaves in another piece that you learn, but you might see fast octaves show up in other ways. This makes progress a little bit deceptive, because in this scenario you are learning in two different ways at the same time. You are learning those exact notes, and you are also learning that type of movement. The first of these isn’t directly transferable, but the second one (although less noticeable) is.
2. Reality
So what does this mean for your playing?
Well, general improvement isn’t the same as improvement within a single piece of music. Your overall ability to play the piano relies on many meta-skills.
Meta-skills are “higher-order abilities that allow you to learn, combine and apply other skills more effectively.” In the context of piano playing, this means you are essentially learning how to learn - and this is much less easy to recognise from piece to piece. However, it does accumulate over time as you repeatedly encounter and solve different types of musical problems.
You might notice that:
you fix mistakes faster than before
you need fewer repetitions to understand something
you recover from errors more quickly
you can isolate problems more easily
These are the types of skills that we tend to take for granted, but they are also precisely the skills that make up being a great player.
Even at an elite level, players still need to go through the process of learning a new piece of music and spending time identifying and solving problems. However, they become incredibly efficient at it because they have seen these types of problems many times before.
These improvements are much harder to track because you may not even notice them. It’s also difficult to measure this kind of progress because it happens from piece to piece rather than bar to bar. On top of that, our expectations of ourselves often change by the time we improve, so we aren’t surprised by our own progress.
3. Recognition
There are, however, some ways to measure these kinds of improvements.
Firstly, how long does it take you to solve a specific problem? We can broadly categorise problems into two types: technical and musical. From there, you can break it down further; is it a left hand jump, a fast right hand scale passage, an ornament (like a trill), etc.? Once you identify the type of problem, you can compare it to previous examples of similar problems. You will likely find that your approach is much more efficient and that it takes you a fraction of the time to solve.
Secondly, how many errors are you making per phrase? As you improve, there will always be errors to fix, but if you are playing music at a similar level, you will likely find that there are fewer errors within each phrase. The difficulty is that pieces tend to become more challenging as you improve, and your expectations increase, which makes it feel like you haven’t improved much at all.
Thirdly, learning speed. The amount of time it takes you to learn a piece of music will decrease as you become more efficient. However, this is also influenced by the difficulty of the piece, so it’s often more useful to compare different sections within the same piece. For example, it will likely take you longer to learn the first four bars than bars 50–54 later in the piece.
Finally, one of the best ways to see improvement is by recording yourself. It’s very difficult to notice day-to-day changes in your playing, but recordings give you distance and allow you to hear progress more objectively, especially if you revisit recordings after some time has passed.
The reality is that you may not notice your improvements on the piano as much as you would like, because it is the meta-skill of learning how to learn that is quietly improving in the background. However, if you are fixing things faster, learning quicker and making fewer repeated mistakes…then you are improving.
Matt
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