This video is about how to practice piano to get results fast.
Are you finding you’re not quite getting the results that you want when you spend time to practice on the piano?
In this video, Jazer shows you how you can maximize the results in your practice time.
1. Put Your Phone Away
Now the first thing you want to do is get rid of your phone. Phones are a huge source of distractions. Once I was practicing one of my pieces and in a span of half an hour, this thing popped up like three times with notifications.
And what I realized after the practice session was that when I was in sort of this concentrated and flow state, every time there was notification, this distracted me and took me out of that really good flow state. And so when I checked my notifications on Facebook or whatever and I come back, I sort of lose that concentration that I had before. I know we all love our phones, but I think piano practice is a really great time for you to just have some off screen time.
Put your phone in another room, in airplane mode if you can, so you can’t even hear the notifications.
With your phone in another room you can have that really relaxing off-screen time on the piano.
2. Set Some Goals
The second thing you want to think about is to be setting some specific goals for your practice.
Now under goals, you want to have short term goals as well as long term goals.
What’s a short term goal? A short term goal is what would you like to achieve today and also in your week. So this is best discussed with your teacher. I recommend you find a teacher that’s probably a little more on the strict side because he or she is going to require you to get more music done in your day or week. And over the long term, this is going to make a huge, huge difference.
So perhaps today you want to get this page done. That could mean maybe you want to get the right hand pretty fluent, left-hand, pretty fluent, or if you’re up to a bit of a challenge, you want to do hands together for that entire page fluently if you can. And by the end of the week, let’s try and perhaps get the entire piece learnt. So all the notes are learned. You can play at hands together, try to do it fluently as well.
So set some really specific goals for your day to day as well as your week. You want to also look at your long term goals. So long term goals is anywhere from three months to perhaps a year. Now, in three months or six months or year, how many pieces do you want to have completed? So you want to have completed learning this really, really challenging song that you’ve always loved listening to on YouTube, right?
So it’s perhaps something that’s like a couple of grades or three grades above and you really love it. It’s really important that you do this step. I see a lot of my students when they practice on the piano, I feel like they’re sort of just kind of fumbling around. They’re more, they kind of sit down and practice for the sake of practicing because I tell them to. As opposed them wanting to achieve, let’s say this amount of music by a certain amount of time.
So Please don’t fall into the mistake of practicing because you know you have to practice.
Actually practice with intention. Practice with intention. That means you know you’re practicing because you want to get this at the end of it. So by the end of that practice session, you want to achieve perhaps that page, right? And when you set yourself that goal, when you’re practicing, you know you’re working towards that goal, you can visualize yourself by the end of that practice session, by the end of that two or three hours getting that goal, you’re much more likely to achieve that goal.
And the last step is a step that is said by all piano teachers.
3. Practice Slowly
It will always be said because it is always underestimated. And that is to practice slowly. Practice very, very slowly. When you’re learning a new piece, you are giving your brain a lot of new information to contain and to make sense of a new piece could have anywhere from 300 to 500 to a 1000 to 2000 notes, right?
That’s a lot of lot of information for your brain to learn and to make sense of. You really want to help your brain understand all this vast amount of information by doing things step by step, little bit by a little bit. So I always recommend practicing hands separately. Don’t jump into hands together straight away. That’s so hard when you’re playing the piano, I say to my students, one plus one equals three.
Or one plus one equals four. So when you know how to play one hand, and you also know how to play the other hand, putting it together is not as easy as I know how to do this. I know how to do this. I automatically know how to do hands together. It’s not that easy.
One plus one equals three actually playing together is another whole level up. So what do you want to really do at the start of learning a pieces is to do them hands separately. Don’t forget this right-hand first, master that, then left-hand master that. Then you can consider putting them together and make some sense of all of that for your brain. Otherwise your brain is just going to find this whole process so overwhelming.
It’s not going to retain really anything from your practice session.
And what you want in the end is for your brain to retain information that you have executed in your practice session. So give it what it needs, which is basic steps right hand first, then left-hand, then together and in little sections as well make sure you mastering perhaps four bars first before you move on to the next four bars before we move on to the next four bars. And there you have it. Those were three really great tips for what you can do in your practice to maximize the results that you deserve.
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