Music Video Lesson: Assembly Line Practicing

Welcome to livingpianos.com. Robert Estrin here with an incredible practicing tip that will turbocharge the work you do at the piano: assembly line practicing. What is this all about? I'm going to tell you all about it and how it relates to your piano playing.

First of all, if you go way back early in the 20th century, Henry Ford revolutionized automobile manufacturing by making the assembly line. You could see at the beginning of the line metals being smelted, chassis being built a little further in the line, on and on, engines, people working on all stages of development simultaneously, at the end, the finished car rolling off the line.

Now another great example of this is post-World War II, there was a housing boom. I grew up on Long Island and right adjacent to Levittown, where potato fields were transformed into whole neighborhoods, seemingly in an instant. And how was this done?

Well, previously houses were built from the beginning to the end, and then when the house is finished, move on to the next house and on and on. Well, a much more efficient way, if you've ever been through a neighborhood being built, is you start at the beginning or the end, depending on how you look at it, and you might just see tractors digging dirt. Go a little further, you see foundations being laid. Further still, you see frames of houses. Then the walls and such are in and the interior, electrical and plumbing are being put in other houses along this. You get to the very end of this whole neighborhood and there's the model home. And yet all the work is being done in all these multiple stages of development simultaneously so it's incredibly productive way of building neighborhoods. Just like the car factory, the assembly line was much more efficient in mass producing cars.

So how does this relate to your piano practice? Well, any of you who have watched my videos probably are aware that the way I practice and the way I teach my students is rather than practicing, practicing, practicing a whole piece and eventually trying to memorize it, you flip it. Read through the piece a couple of times and get right down to work and start memorizing a little chunk at a time.

However, this type of practice is incredibly mentally challenging for everyone. Everyone thinks that it's hard just for them, but it's hard for everyone if you're doing it right.

So the first day, let's say you're learning a new piece and you learn as much as you can, and then your head is filled with notes. It's enough. Well, the next day you can refine what you've done the previous day, but you forge forward, digging fresh dirt, getting in the pipeline, more music to work on. Eventually, you'll have music at many different stages of development. The very first part of the piece, let's say you're learning a long sonata. Maybe the first section is the performance level like that model home or the finished car coming off the assembly line. Later on, maybe after the double bar in the development section, it needs further polishing and you work to refine that maybe doing metronome speeds, getting things up to tempo. And further along than that, from the stuff you did the day before, you're just trying to refine it and just to solidify your memory. And yet you carve out new material, always memorizing new material to add to the pipeline for the next day.

So your practice becomes exponentially more productive because you do some memorization, but you can't just memorize an entire practice session. You kind of go nuts. It's at a point of diminishing returns of effectiveness of how much you can absorb at a time.

So you memorize what you can and then refine what you did the previous day and the previous days before that and, of course, the first sections of a piece, maybe in performance level, especially a multi-movement work. You might have the first movement on absolute performance level, the second movement is coming along.

So this is what I mean by assembly line practice. It's so effective if you can work on different stages of development all at the same time. Instead of just working on a whole piece and trying to get it up to a high level and then going to the next piece, you work on all different stages of development within the work. You can even be working on the second and third movements while the first moment you're doing a final polishing, like that model home we talked about.

I hope this is helpful for you. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. This is livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks so much for joining me. Ringing the bell with the thumbs up helps the algorithms so more people can enjoy these videos. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/assembly-line-practicing/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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