A Day by Day Journey to Mastering a Difficult Piano Piece

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com. We're going to go a day by day journey of mastering a difficult piano piece.

So if there's a piece you've always want to learn or maybe it's one you're struggling with now, this video, by the end of this video, you're going to have a really good idea of the process it takes to master a piece of music that's difficult.

Now the very first thing you want to do in a piece that you're studying is to read through it, get an idea of what it's about. Now if it's a really difficult piece and it's a long piece, maybe you don't want to read through the whole thing, read through the first section, the next day read through the next section, etc. Now once you've read through the whole piece a couple of times, no more than three times, you really should stop just reading it. Why is this? Well I've talked about this a lot.

Reinforcing mistakes that you make along the way, even if it's minor things that seem minor at the time like, oh you didn't notice a staccato here or this fingering should be changed later on or maybe the dynamic is wrong, much less wrong notes, once you get used to the sound You can take a very very small section, something that you can learn very very quickly. But you break it down even further. So I mean I don't know what piece I should take here to show you. Let's say you're learning the Chopin G minor ballade and of course it starts off with...

I wouldn't take any more than that. That's plenty. But I break it down, even though there's the same part in both hands, I would just look over the notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing and expression, in other words everything, because you don't want to learn anything wrong, not a fingering, not a dynamic. Get it right the very first time you play it, go very slowly and just do the right hand. Now since it's a small amount of music, you'll probably be able to learn that pretty quickly. Get that memorized, get it so you can play it easily. Then go to the left hand, do the same thing, get that little phrase, play it exactly as you want to hear it. And sometimes in some of the harder sections later on when you have...

You know, some of these harder sections, you might not be able to get them up to tempo the very first time you learn them. Just get to the point of diminishing returns with each phrase. Get the right hand, get the left hand, memorize each of them, put them together, get that memorized, go on to the next section, connect the phrases as you go. Now what you're going to find is, each time you sit down, you're going to have to refresh the memory of what you learned the previous day. But what you learned two, three days ago is starting to gain more fluency. So you work on each section for what it is and bring the level up. Now in a piece like the Chopin G Minor Ballade and many other pieces, you might want to first zero in on the hardest parts, like that part I just played is a good example, or the Mammoth Coda.

That's a really good place to start because otherwise what's going to happen, you're going to learn the whole piece, you're going to get to the coda, and then you're going to first have to start spending weeks trying to get that solidified and up to tempo. So you might as well start very slowly.

Now, that by the way is one of the best ways to strengthen what you've learned in previous days.

So it's not just a matter of carving out new material, it's a matter of solidifying what you've done in the previous days. And one of the best ways is go very slowly, refreshing your memory with a score.

Memorizing is the first step, going back and reinforcing the memory on a daily basis, playing slowly with no pedal, utilizing the metronome, really getting things solid. And there's a myriad of techniques you can use, but just playing slowly and delineating everything in an exaggerated manner at a slow tempo reinforces the memory and gets that feeling into your hands of all these difficult passages.

Now beyond that, what else can you do? I mentioned that section.

You could do rhythms, you could do different segments of music, you know, accented. I'm throwing out so many things. Like let's say accent.

The reason why that's particularly good in this instance, it shows you exactly where the hands play together, which is one of the most critical aspects of having a clean technique. Making sure the hands strike together precisely wherever they do play together.

You could also do rhythms that way.

Or backwards.

Or different groups of notes.

But once again, the most fundamental thing you can do with a piece of music, and something I always do before a public performance, I get the whole program on a concert level of performance, but then what happens? It can go stale on you. If you don't go back and refresh and reinforce what you've learned, it's not going to maintain that high polished level. And the best way to maintain the polish is slow, deliberate practice without the pedal referencing the score. Now once you get to the point where you can play the music up to tempo or close to concert with no pedal, with the score, or without the score, nailing everything with ease, you know you're ready for that performance. So once again, to refresh, first, read through the piece to get acquainted, but don't keep reading it through. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to ingrain things that are going to be so hard to eradicate later. Then start from the beginning and memorize first. Take a very small section, get the right hand memorized, get the left hand memorized, slowly put them together, get that memorized, go on to the next section the same way, connecting phrases as you go, considering notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression. Then each day refresh what you learned previously. One of the best ways, slow playing without the pedal, use a metronome, look at the score, reinforce your memory. And it's almost like an assembly line. All the different sections, the most recent sections are like smelting the new metal and getting those new notes in your head. And the parts you learned days or weeks ago, they're a finished product that you just want to hone in and polish with the techniques I've shown you. Not just a slow practice, but you can do accents, rhythms, different sections, hands separate you can go back to. There's a myriad ways you can polish your playing, but learn it right from the beginning and it will save you vast amounts of time. I'm Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks so much for joining me.

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