I'll start with the simple stuff that we've all heard a million times: it's very important to make sure that you practice at least once a day. If I had to distill learning piano down to a single concept, this would be it. Practice. Every. Single. Day.

Daily Practice is Real Practice

Practicing is about sustained power, not speed, and this goes double for the complex physical skills that piano playing involves. It's been confirmed for many years that bite-sized daily practice beats out intermittent marathon sessions. The scientific research on this subject goes back to the 1940s. In a landmark study, Grace Rubin-Rabson wanted to measure the amount of material that professional pianists could remember after equal amounts of practice. The twist was that the participants were divided into three groups: some did the whole session in one day, others did it in two smaller sessions in one day, and the last group spaced out the two sessions over two days. Result? The pianists that spaced their practice out over two days remembered the best. 

Why should this be? The answer probably has to do with a good night's sleep. Sleep is the secret sauce for forming strong memories, especially the "motor sequence" memories used in piano playing. A study in 2004 confirmed this by testing two groups as they practiced tapping out finger patterns. Think: thumb, pointer, thumb, pinky; just the kind of movements that form the foundation of piano playing. The performance of the groups was rated by their speed and fluidity as they moved through these patterns. Next, one group slept for a night and the other simply rested for eight hours. Then both groups were retested.

Participants who had 8 hours of sleep before their second test showed significant improvement, particularly in the sections that had been especially challenging the day before. That is, they didn't only improve overall, but improved more in the tougher parts. The researchers concluded that late-night REM sleep helps consolidate motor memories into stable "chunks". This effect has also been measured in studies on foreign language acquisition.

The takeaway: your learning process doesn't end when you get up from the instrument; your brain continues to refine and strengthen the connections from one day to the next. Progress can be like a glacier: its movement is nearly imperceptible, but its power is monumental. If 7 hours of practice is broken up over a week, with good sleep in between each session, the results with be much stronger than 7 hours in one go. And that means fewer minutes actually spent at the keyboard to make the same progress.

Making Minutes Count

What if you don't have all week, and you need to do those 7 hours today? Well, if we go back to Rubin-Rabson's study from the 40s, we can see there's a little more to it: although the pianists who practiced twice the same day did not remember as much as the overnighters, they did have an advantage over the crammers. This gives us some important clues about how to distribute a single day's practice, and how to actually get results from multiple hours of practice.

Many beginning players don't take advantage of well-timed breaks to refresh their focus. It seems like an obvious and easy trick, but sometimes stereotypical ideas of "discipline" and "focus" can trip us up and trap us in an unproductive grind. Those principles are important, but not at the cost of misery and frustration. After a certain point, a continuous practice session will inevitably deliver diminishing returns. Attention starts to drift and the playing becomes less vivid. Your mind wanders to other things and improvement becomes marginal – or worse, mistakes can creep in while you are fatigued. Massive repetition doesn't do much to cultivate accurate playing. A handful of deliberate and mindful repetitions is all it takes. So leave out mindless grinding. Taking a break and returning the same passage lets you approach it with fresh ears and hands.

Another advantage to short sessions that I've noticed over the years: sometimes students get the impression that they "don't have enough time to practice" because they are waiting for that pristine uninterrupted hour. Don't wait! Just start now and get in a good 10 minutes while you wait for the coffee to brew. It'll be a better 10 minutes than the tail end of an hour-long slog, and infinitely better than no practice at all. Short sessions can much more easily woven into a packed schedule.

In fact, this is how professionals practice when they are chopping out 8 hours a day. It is never all at once on a single passage or piece. It's a constantly flowing cycle of learning, review, improvisation, listening, reflection, and a lot of breaks for everyday things. There is certainly a high level of intensity and discipline in play, but the best practicers know how to be flexible and work with their own bodies and minds. 

To recap: Practice daily, in multiple short sessions if you can. Pace yourself, take breaks, stay positive, and rest assured that a lot of progress is taking place, so as long as you show up every day and do the work.

Happy Practicing!

Plenty! It turns out that there is a long tradition of learning music and developing musical skill away from the instrument. Many concert pianists, most famously Glenn Gould, were known to do silent "mental practice" with the score. Gould claimed it helped him develop a clear and complete understanding of the piece, before he started hacking away at the keyboard.

But Gould was a once-in-a-century musical genius; surely mere mortals can't follow his example, right? Actually, research shows that mental rehearsal improves performance almost as well as physical practice, even for beginners. When combined with just a little bit of physical practice, the gap between mental and physical practice narrows even further.

There are also a lot of possibilities that lie in between practice on the instrument and silent mental practice. These include physical and vocal exercises such as singing, chanting, hand drumming, and finger tapping. Many musical cultures, especially those rooted in oral traditions, start out new pieces with vocal and gestural practice. Tabla students in the Hindustani traditions, for example, learn to recite the padhant of a piece by heart – a sort of rhythmic do-re-mi – before they pick up the drums at all. And the Western system of solfeggio brings out musical shapes and sharpens melodic memories.

So, with these options in mind, how do we get started learning pieces on the beach?

Finger Exercises

Most beginning and intermediate pieces stay in a five-finger position for extended periods of time. That means that the majority of physical motion in the piece comes down to moving your fingers in a specific sequence. In more advanced pieces, tricky finger crossings can be practiced in the same way.

Fingering sequences can be practiced anywhere there is a flat surface: just place your hands in a comfortable, relaxed posture and rehearse the finger motions. Take care to press firmly – this actually makes a neurological difference and forms a stronger memory. Use your imagination to visualize the keyboard and feel the sensation of the keys against the sides of your fingers. Do this with a recording or silently imagine the sound of the music. Even better, you can sing along!

Tapping and Chanting Exercises

If you are already comfortable counting meter while you tap rhythms, this is a no-brainer. Any time you're waiting for the train or standing on line (i.e. any time you would look at your phone), you can mentally count the meter and tap the rhythm of a phrase. If you have the sheet music on your phone or an audio recording, so much the better. Just like practice at the instrument, you should go slow enough that you can be perfectly accurate.

For more challenging rhythms, it can be easier to tap in between the notes. That is, chanting the rhythm with "ta" and tapping on the rests or after the held notes. This works really well for pop songs, especially when they are syncopated.

For a detailed breakdown of how this works, check out my post on it.

Singing Exercises

It's much easier to play a piece when we know the melody by heart. Keeping your attention on the sound of the melody instead of specific finger movements improves performance. 

When one of my students is learning a new part, we learn to sing or hum the melody right away. It doesn't have to be a polished vocal performance or even particularly on-key. Just getting a sense of the rise and fall of the musical line can help, and the cycle of breath gives great clues about natural phrasing. Furthermore, singing all the way through is a quick way to get a bird's-eye view of all the parts of the piece before we get into the microscopic detail of learning each note.

Solfeggio is a powerful tool for memorizing melodies, especially when there aren't existing lyrics to piece. You're probably already familiar with solfeggio from "The Sound of Music". It assigns a singable syllable (do re mi fa sol la ti) that relates to each note. This process is called "solmization".  With the guidance of a teacher, it's pretty easy to learn the melody of a piece in solfeggio. The different syllables give additional memory support and make repeated patterns in the melody obvious. 

Singing, humming, and tapping can all be combined to bring the elements of rhythm and melody together in a single exercise. If you can reel off the whole melody in solfeggio with decisive and confident rhythm, fitting the fingers to the proper keys becomes a minor detail. Your memory of the sound of the piece will provide a rock solid foundation for all the technical exertions to come.

Starting from Scratch

So now we come back to Gould's method, which unites all of these skills (solmization, rhythm practice, finger tapping) to actually start learning a piece away from the instrument.

Start small. A short piece from a beginning method book or a phrase from an easy piece will be fine. 

1. Look over the whole piece and take note of the major characteristics: What is the time signature? What is the key signature? What is the texture? Block chords, arpeggiated, Alberti, contrapuntal? What is the range of the piece? What is the predominant rhythmic pulse? Quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth?
2. Take note of any outlying details, like hand shifts, key changes, unusual rhythms, drastic range changes. Mark them for special attention.
3. I prefer to start reading the rhythm first – it's easier to do accurately at the start, and it is usually what falls by the wayside once melody comes into the picture. Tap out the rhythm in whatever way you can to be fluent and precise. Sooner than you think you should, put the hands together and tap out the combined rhythm.
4. Write in complete fingerings for the entire piece. You don't have to write a number for every note, but your intended fingering should be clear to you. Mostly practice hands together, slowly, pressing firmly, observing staccatos, legatos, and dynamics. Visualize the keyboard and imagine the patterns you are following on the keys.
5. Learn the solfeggio for the melody – I have beginners write in the solmization beneath the notes. If you haven't done much sight-singing, chanting the syllables is enough, but if you can sing and hear the pitches so much the better. If you're a sight-singing beginner, try learning the syllables and then singing along with a recording. Sooner than you think you can, start singing the melody while you tap the rhythm in both hands. Go slow!
6. Do the same as 5. in the bass line.

This is a strict approach that mostly assumes you do not have a recording to refer to. I think that up to a point, following these steps with a recording can be very helpful, especially when learning to sing the melody and bass line. 

As you can see, practicing away from the piano introduces some constraints that encourage very thorough and engaged practicing. Without the instrument to create the sound for us, we're forced to understand the piece more musically, creating more detailed and vivid musical memories. It also allows us to avoid some of the easy mistakes that can crop up in mindless drills at the keyboard, where technical issues dominate the attention, and weaknesses in memory can be glossed over. Finally, we can more easily see the shape of the piece as a whole work and understand the context of the musical details.

Mental practice doesn't stand alone; the same practice techniques employed with a physical instrument will result in more progress. However, I think removing the instrument from the equation allows us to deepen our understanding of the music and the process of practicing. 

Many students have trouble with keeping accurate rhythm, and I even get some adult learners who say: I could never keep a beat, so don't even bother trying to teach me rhythm! This is of course completely untrue, since anyone who can walk down the street without falling on their face can keep basic time. But there is a disconnect somewhere along the line when it comes to understanding the physical nature of rhythm when we're at the piano.

Mind the Gap

Most of the troubles start when students have to count a syncopation. Syncopation in general is not a challenge – usually the student plays a syncopation, just the wrong one. Then the teacher says "Hey, play it like this" (plays the correct syncopation). The student says "OK" and plays exactly the same incorrect syncopation. Then the lesson goes off the rails into counting meter and a bunch of detail that obscures the main issue: feeling the precise location of the syncopation. 

Ok, I'm already tired of saying "syncopation". What is syncopation anyway? We commonly speak of syncopation as something "funky" or "off-beat" or "turning the beat around". That's all correct, but I'm going to go straight to the source: ancient Greek. The root of syncopation is συγκοπή (sunkopé), which means "leaving out". In literature, syncope means leaving out syllables from a word to fit a poetic meter. In rhythmic terms, syncopation is leaving beats out of the rhythm.

There's a theory that the "toe-tapping" sensation we get from syncopated music is caused by these left out beats. As the music moves along, we subtly feel the "pulse" of the music; when the pulse is interrupted by a syncopation, our body "fills in the gap" with the nod of a head or the tap of a toe. The spaces created by syncopation clarify the pulse and give the listener room to actively interact with the piece.

I think the main obstacle to good syncopation arises when the player doesn't move or acknowledge the gap in the pulse in any physical way. Some students understand that you should leave something out, but can't tell how much to leave out. So this is where I like to start teaching a challenging syncopation – not mathematically by counting meters, but physically, by filling those interruptions in the pulse with movement and sound. That means clapping in between the notes, not on them.

You've Got to Move

Official Promo Video for Radiohead's "Karma Police".

Let's try it on Radiohead's "Karma Police". A simple melody that a lot of people know but a pretty tricky rhythm once you get both hands together. It's highly syncopated. Here's the first verse:

Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a de-tuned radio

Here it is with claps/taps "$" in the syncopations:

$ Kar $ ma $ Po $ lice

$ $ $ $ 'rest this $ man

$ he $ talks $ in $ maths

$ $ $ he buzz's like a fridge

$ he's $ like $ a $ de-

$ -tuned $ ra $ di $ o 

Give it a few tries, slowly and deliberately chanting the lyrics and clapping, and keep every pulse equal. Notice each line has 8 pulses in total. Try it with a metronome or along with the video. (Tip: You can set Youtube videos to slower speeds by clicking on the gear in the lower right of the video).

Did you notice a difference in how you imagined the rhythm before and after practicing it? Do you have a clearer idea of the exact moment that the beat "turns around" and when it comes back? 

I find this to be a really useful tool for getting students "grounded" in their rhythm sense, without the distraction of numbers and counting. The rhythmic phrases fall into natural groups but are executed with precision. It works just as well for simple songs in 3/4 as it does for advanced pieces. And it works great for practicing rests as well, which are often given short shrift by beginners.

Putting it into Practice

How do you figure out the syncopation pattern on your own?

To get a feel for the method, try this out on a piece that you already know very well first. Start by clapping or tapping along with the piece at the smallest subdivision (that is, the shortest note in the phrase, usually an 8th note, a quarter note for very simple pieces). Practice doing this for a little while – for best results, practice clapping along for a few days before trying to work out the rhythm.

After you are comfortable marking the pulse with claps or taps, count how many subdivisions fall in between the start of each note and the start of the next. Don't count any taps that line up with a note. If you have a score, mark out the claps with x's in between the notes. If there are lyrics, write them out like I did in the example above. If you do it correctly, every pulse will have a word, syllable, or clap in it. No spaces left.

Try it on a simple piece like "Mary Had a Little Lamb" or "Jingle Bells" and see how it strengthens your feel. Leave a comment and let me know how it went; if you have a complex syncopation you can't work out, leave a link to the song in the comments and I'll try and work it out for you!

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I think that most people (including me) start out with a very thin, stereotypical idea of practicing, which basically boils down to "play just what you played in the lesson, except over and over again for an hour". Aimless but obligated, you burn through an hour grinding a few measures, playing in a rush, mostly thinking about what's for dinner, until the sweet relief of the timer comes. 

I've encountered a few students with great musical sense and talent to spare, who just can't get the sound or speed that they want so badly. It's not for lack of time or lack of playing skill, but because they don't practice skillfully. 

In this series of blog posts, I'm going to cover a few simple strategies that form the core of good, productive, efficient, satisfying practice. 

You Can Slow Down?

I practiced unskillfully for a long time, most of my teenage years really. I managed to learn some major pieces, but it was always "two steps forward, one step back" and the final results were pretty shaky. My practice strategy, if I had ever written it out, would've looked like this:

1. Play a piece at tempo as soon as you get a rough idea of the notes
2. Make the same mistakes 9 out of 10 times
3. ???
4. Total mastery!

Of course, I never made it to step 4.

I'll never forget the first time I got a clue about what practicing really was. I had dropped in on a classmate in a practice room to chat a little. We got to talking about her piece, and she said she was working through it with "slow practice".

I didn't get it. I said, You're not a beginner, what's the point of slowing down a little bit if you need to play it fast? 

No, she said, she wasn't just slowing down just a little bit, she was playing the section as slowly as she possibly could and as loud as possible. Like her fingers were hard of hearing and a little slow to catch on. Slow enough, she said, that it was more difficult to play and you had to really think about it. She claimed that it was the foundation of her daily practice. Don't you practice that way?

I was dumbfounded. It had genuinely never occurred to me, at age 16, that practicing was anything other than playing as fast as you could all the time. I remember very clearly being a little mad that no one had ever told me about this! (They probably did, but I wasn't listening)

Practice Makes Permanent

So, what is slow practice and how does it work? 

As Dr. Noa Kagayama so aptly puts in his excellent article on Bulletproof Musician, slow practice is really "slow-motion" practice. The motion of the fingers, hands and arms is slowed down to a point where all the sounds and movements are magnified, so the practicer is fully aware of everything that's happening in her hands, her ears and her mind. This magnification creates plenty of room to play with intention and perfect accuracy.

To figure out why this is important, we need to delve a little into how the brain actually controls complex movements. Think for a moment about what it's like to tie your shoes. When you were five years old, the first ten times you tied your shoes, you had to plan it out, visualize it, talk your way through it, and really concentrate. Then you figured out the steps, but it still took you a good minute to get them tied and they came undone a lot. 

But now you do it in seconds, without thinking, maybe without even noticing you are doing it at all. Quick test: Can you explain in detail how to tie your shoes? I know I can't! So what happened? How come I can tie my shoes without "knowing" how to do it? Should I go buy some velcro sneakers?

Well, when you repeat a complex motion, it gets learned by a region of your brain called the cerebellum. The cerebellum is only about 10% of the volume of the brain, but it contains as many neurons as the rest of the brain put together. It controls the complex and precise movements we do every day, without thinking: climbing stairs, riding a bike, catching a ball, cutting up vegetables, writing a note, playing video games.

If you can think back, there was a time in your life that all of those things required a lot of conscious, sustained effort. Now you don't have to worry about them, because your cerebellum learned how to do it for you. And the cherry on top is that your cerebellum completely outdoes the "thinking, planning" parts of your brain when it comes pulling off smooth moves in style. It adds precision, speed and fluidity you can't get from conscious effort.

The password for the cerebellum is "repetition": anything you do more than once, the cerebellum says "Hey! I better get that down!" And I mean anything. The blessing and curse of the cerebellum is that it is completely non-judgmental. The judgmental parts of your brain are a mile away, and by the time they say "Wait a minute now, that was supposed to be a B-flat!" the cerebellum has taken E-flat to heart. It can't wait to impress you with how well it knows how to play the wrong note. So, we have to be very, very careful about what we repeat around the cerebellum.

And this shows us why slow practice works so well and mindless, sloppy repetition works so badly. Practice as we know it is the process of taking patterns of motion from the conscious mind and handing them over to the cerebellum. If you practice slowly, you can make sure that you are playing only the right notes, with the best fingering, and a stable, relaxed form. Everything that your cerebellum is overhearing is solid gold.

And the cerebellum is such a sponge, it actually takes many fewer repetitions than you would think to start to feel very comfortable. You'll notice a change when the music starts to "play itself". That's the cerebellum learning its new trick! And you'll find that there are a lot fewer stubborn mistakes to grind away if you never repeat those mistakes in the first place. And that means less repetition overall. Sure, mistakes will still pop up, but you only have to listen to what those mistakes are telling you: slow down here, and pay attention.

Slow, engaged, intentional playing from the very start is the bedrock of skillful practice. There's a reason it's a deep-running tradition in the world of professional musicians. It turns your practice into a well-tuned machine that cranks out sturdy and confident performances. It's something I wish I had known about a lot sooner: go slow to go fast!

Next week – Practicing Away from the Piano

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