The Biggest Piano Practice Mistakes You Don't Realize

Today you're going to learn about the biggest piano practice mistakes you don't even realize you're making. You know that most pianists spend years practicing harder and harder and still don't get better. And it's usually because of this one hidden mistake. Virtually all students make this mistake, even intermediate advanced players. Are you making this mistake? Today I'm going to reveal the biggest practice mistake pianists don't even realize they're making and the three hidden ways that sabotage your playing every single day.

What pianists think practice means logging in hours, repeating pieces from beginning to the end, hoping consistency will come with time. But that kind of practice reinforces problems instead of solving them. The biggest mistake pianists make is practicing by repeating instead of problem solving. Does this sound like you? Now why is this damaging? Well, it turns errors into habits.

It reduces your whole awareness of what you're doing by just mindlessly repeating. And it also encourages tension if you're not really thinking about what you're doing. It wastes enormous amounts of your time.

So connecting this to neuroscience, you know, neural pathways don't know the difference between the right and wrong. They only know what you repeat.

So the hidden message here is starting at the beginning every time.

Why you shouldn't do this? You know, the reason why you do it in the first place is it feels comfortable, doesn't it? It's the part you know the best. So it gives you the illusion of progress, being able to play the part that you can play well already over and over again. But it avoids confronting the actual weaknesses that gives the practice value. And the why it never works starting from the beginning, because the beginning gets better, but the middle stays, you know, pretty much the same it was as it was. And the end, it barely improves at all. So if you have a piece, for example, some people will want to learn Ferlis, for example.

Let me get here.

How many times have you heard something like that? Because the beginning, you play over and over again until it's nice and fluid, and you get to the 32nd note passage and it's like, oh, that isn't fun to play, is it? Not when it sounds like that. So you end up avoiding what you actually should be practicing.

So you can get nice smooth start and not deteriorate in the middle.

And you know, your brain falsely rewards familiarity. You know, the first part you like, so you play it well and you think you're accomplishing something. Instead, what is the fix? Number one, work in small sections. Don't just start from the beginning, but focus in on what needs the work. And sometimes you want to practice backwards. Start from the hard part, at least in this piece, start from the 32nd note passage. If you've played the beginning 100 times and the rest of it isn't really getting better, instead of starting your practice at the beginning, start right where it needs to work and work until you really master even as a small section. Now, what is there some other mistakes? Practicing too fast. That section, of course, if you can't play it at that tempo, trying to play that tempo is going to burn in sloppiness in your playing. So why would you do it in the first place? Well, it's exciting, you know, and you're impatient. You want to hear it up to tempo. You know what you want to hear. You just want it now. So instead of taking it at a tempo you can play, you play it over and over fast, hoping it's going to somehow resolve itself.

And so you're working at speed way sooner than you should. Gain the solidity first and then you can develop the speed with consistency.

Don't confuse tempo with mastery. The tempo will come, I promise you, if you can play it slowly with security, you can then increase the speed.

It destroys your progress because you're actually rehearsing tension by playing faster than you're able to play well. And these mistakes, they get burned in. And as a result, it becomes very, very difficult to eradicate. You know, my wife Florence teaches flute and she's taught for many, many years.

And when she gets students from the very beginning, she can develop their sound to be absolutely beautiful and relaxed. But when she gets students from other teachers, it's almost impossible to get that nice, pure sound because they've already learned how to play with tension and trying to eradicate it later is all but impossible. So remember, don't play faster than you're able to do on a regular basis because you will get baked in this sloppy tension inducing playing that's so hard to eradicate once that happens.

Your hands actually memorize incorrect motion patterns, so you don't want to ever let that happen. So if you play a passage too fast, you know, like I showed you, and you think, oh, well, I'll just keep doing it until finally you can know how about you just You can just work on that much small section slowly playing securely. Now at first when you play slowly, it might feel like you can't even play it at all because you don't really know it. You just have these finger patterns that aren't precise. They're not what you want. You must eradicate this in your playing if you want to play cleanly and you'll be so much more satisfied to get the beauty of the sound. So when you play with a nice sound, it's really something else, you know, and then you're back home again. Isn't that more satisfying to work it up and be able to solve that once and for all? So that's the way that you want to be able to play in a relaxed manner.

So the slow practice, simplify the rhythm, you know, you could even do different rhythmic groupings like There are 100 different ways to practice with different groupings of notes that can help you to solidify your technique instead of ignoring the problems, which is the next thing that so easy to do. You play through a piece and the parts that you don't like, you don't even want to think about them. So you just keep playing the parts you can play well and avoiding that, you'll never be able to solve your problems. You have to, it's, you know, it's uncomfortable to isolate your weaknesses, isn't it? That's why, you know, it's harder to practice than practicing the whole piece to actually isolate the parts that need to work. But if you want to accomplish the goal of being able to refine your playing and play on the level you want to, you absolutely must do that.

Now, a lot of people have emotional resistance to this. Your ego wants to play the parts that sound good, doesn't it? And what really happens, your worst measures never improve, your tension builds, and the piece hits a progress wall. So with the difficult leap, for example, you have something that's like the middle of the Chopin G minor ballade, you have anyway, what I want to show you is this part, left hand is going all over the place. So how can you see what I'm doing there? I'm practicing just a little tiny micro sections to practice the leap. And that's the way you gain security with this. So the first thing you have to do to fix a problem is to diagnose exactly what the problem is. A lot of times, the first thing to look for is fingering solution. A lot of times, if you're having problems, look at your fingering, look what it says in your book. Now, if you're following what's in your book and it's still not happening, a great resource is IMSLP. IMSLP is a resource of tons of additions of the same music. And you can find different fingered additions. And you might find a fingering solution that solves a problem you've always been had problems with. And once and for all, the other thing is the emotion that you're using. I'm showing you here practicing just the leaps and stopping before the note that you maybe are missing all the time. Let's say you've been doing this a lot and you don't get that.

Practice that motion. It could do so much good. You'd also practice in rhythms as I discussed before.

Or there's many different things you can do isolating what specific rhythm is going to solve your problems. Experiment until you find one that makes a click. That way you can develop your coordination because if the coordination is off, maybe the hands aren't playing together. So make sure the hands are precisely together wherever they occur.

One of the big problems of piano playing is the balance between the hands. And this is something you can practice by exaggerating.

So if you have a melody against like in a nocturne, instead of playing it, now you might think this is a soft nocturne, so maybe you try to play the left hand even softer.

And some notes are dropping out and you're really not projecting a melody. Don't be afraid to exaggerate the balance between the hands. As long as you use the weight of the arm, you'll get a beautiful sustained tone in the melody.

That's the way to achieve balance. You can always tone it down later if you find any harshness in your playing.

And remember to practice isolated elements for short high-focus bursts of notes. As I showed you in the or no matter what it is in the Mozart's K -45, 545 over there. Suppose you can't play that cleanly. How about just practice in little groups of notes? So and you find what works for you because if you try something and it doesn't solve the problem, don't keep doing the same thing expecting different results. One definition of insanity by the way. Instead, try a different combination of notes.

Notice I was stopping just before the hands play together to make sure the hands are precisely together to get that nice clean sound.

Then when you're practicing these sections, remember to put them back into the context after fixing it because it's not just about our solving problems. You have to always then put them back together again. So the correct approach is problem solving practice.

So the transformation instead of repetition, analysis.

Instead of speed, go for control.

Instead of working on the whole piece, work on small sections.

Instead of avoiding weaknesses, attack them directly. Isolate what needs work and work on them. Even if you feel you're working an inordinate amount of time on a small amount of music, the benefits you'll get in your playing are immeasurable because your solving one part of your piece will directly relate to other sections of the piece. Almost all pieces have repetition and development.

So spending a great deal of time on a small part has tremendous benefits. I can't stress this enough because good practice is not just playing through pieces. Good practice is fixing problems.

So here's a 10 -minute daily routine that you can try today. For the first one or two minutes, warm up. You could start with a scale or something like that.

Keep your shoulders relaxed.

Just fingers, not arms.

Raise rounded fingers, limbering up like a dancer warming up or an athlete stretching.

Avoiding excessive motion.

Notice how the thumb stays tucked under in the left hand.

So it's always ready before it even has to play.

You can go one note to the beat, then two notes to the beat, then four notes to the beat. But not just once through. You could do one note to the beat at least four times.

That way you analyze what you're doing and you get that nice benefit of warming up properly.

Now, for the next three to five minutes, identify one problem spot and isolate it like I showed you earlier.

Maybe just that much and spend your practice session a good chunk on it.

Solve it once and for all so every time you get to it it's not the same sloppiness you've been living with for years. At first this could be difficult if you've set it a piece and you got used to playing not cleanly. Getting rid of that sloppiness is much harder than just studying a new piece, which by the way I recommend in many instances. If you have a piece you've played for years and you've really baked in this tension and sloppiness, maybe a new piece is going to be more conducive to getting your playing on a higher level.

Okay, the next six to eight minutes, fix the difficulties you have using slow practice or rhythmic variations as I showed you earlier. And the next in the nine to ten minutes, you reinforce with clean relaxed play through of just the section you worked on.

So in closing, reinforce the key insights for you. If you stop practicing by repetition and start practicing by intention, your progress will accelerate faster than you can ever thought possible.

So don't try to fix everything. Fix one thing at a time, maybe one thing for the day and your playing will transform. Instead of trying to do everything every day, focus and get something done that will really make a difference in your practicing.

What's a part of your piece that you've been avoiding? You can tell me in the comments here and I'll help you diagnose it and make more videos on specific topics like this.

If you haven't subscribed, you can get a lot of valuable insights in the videos I put out there all the time. Leave comments, I read them and I take them to heart. I hope this is helpful for you. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-biggest-piano-practice-mistakes-you-dont-realize/

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