Practice Secrets of the MOST Successful Piano Students - Unlock Their Winning Strategies

- Vibrant. - Vibrant. - Music teaching. - Proven and practical. - Tips. - Strategies and ideas. - For music teachers. - You're listening to the Vibrant Music Teaching Podcast. I'm Nicolakanta, and today's podcast episode is about practice secrets. This episode is directed mostly towards you. So it's a great one for you to pass on to your students or to take these tips maybe for your own practice. What makes for a "successful piano student"? What do successful students have, but many piano students do not? Well, number one, they practice. But they also tend to do these specific things in their practice. Seeker number one of the most successful piano students. I've been a piano teacher for over 20 years, and I'm going to share eight different things that students do in their practice that make them stand out and progress so much faster than students who don't do these things. I've called them secrets, but none of them are really all that secret. They're just like the secret sauce in the recipe that makes for great progress in piano studies. And all of them are accessible to everyone. Number one, the most successful piano students plan their practice time. They plan not just two practice, but when they're going to practice exactly and how they're going to manage to fit that in. Now, when we're talking about students who were, let's say, under age 10, maybe even age 12, I'm really talking about the parents planning their practice time, but if we're talking about older students, they plan their own practice time. And this just means sitting down and looking at your actual realistic week. Not the ideal dream week, but the realistic one. Where you wake up at the time that you actually genuinely get out of bed, not the time you aspirationally get out of bed. So not the original alarm clock time for many people, but the snooze time. And you do the normal things that happen in the week, including some slight curve balls that come your way in one of those normal weeks. When are you going to practice? When exactly? Make a plan. And then if it doesn't work, revise it, revisit it, and fix it, so that you have a realistic time frame for fitting in practice. Most days of most weeks. Because that is the foundation of everything. Secret number two is that most successful piano students don't start at the beginning of most pieces. Now there are some cases where it is ideal to start at the beginning of a piece. In most cases though, that is not true. It's just not true. Unless the start is the most challenging part, I can see very few arguments we're starting at the beginning of the piece from the beginning of your studying it. Now you want to start at the beginning and go all the way through if you're like almost ready to perform it somewhere or almost completed and you're testing it out or you're doing a run through all of those things are exceptions that prove the rule. That most of the time you shouldn't start at the start. Many, many students, the end of their piece is the weakest. And it happens again and again and we see it, I see it in my own teaching, but I also see it like student performances and when you see students performing things for exams or in concerts or anywhere, they know the start so well. Then it just kind of dissolves and at the end we're left with this oh well well done anyway feeling for them. When we should have been let going wow! But by the time they get to the end of the piece we barely remember the beginning. So that's why the end is the most important part. But should you always start at the end then? Well sometimes not always. Sometimes you can start at the end and sometimes you can start at the trickiest part and sometimes you can randomize where you're starting. Now one of the things that is very true is that this is not such a big deal for beginners. It's not such a big deal for beginners because mostly their pieces should be fairly easy and very short. And so if you're playing a beginner piece and it's like 12 bars, 8 bars some of them are and you always start at the beginning and play all the way through well that's kind of okay. But as you get into longer and longer pieces that's not going to work anymore because we have our most attention and focus when we start playing something so that the beginning gets the most attention and you go through and your mind kind of wanders or you know, things happen. But also we often start at the beginning, come across a mistake, stop and go back to the beginning and that is the worst that you can do because it doesn't fix the problem. You can't go back to the beginning and tell yourself, well yeah but this time I'm going to use finger three there. So I'll just start again. Sure that might work sometimes but it's not very efficient. So try to mix up at the very least where you start in a piece and ideally have a plan for reason why you're starting, why you're starting. The next one, secret three might be controversial in a weird way for some of my piano teacher colleagues and we can find out in the comments that's fine. But I believe that the most successful piano students try their new pieces, hands together. First, and only play hands separately if they need to, if it's necessary. I believe this is how you build a habit and a skill of being able to coordinate both hands consistently. Now sometimes we need to break things down and we need to try one hand at a time and that's fine. But it should be our default mode I would argue to play things hands together and then if we're stuck or something needs working on we have to figure out a fingering that's when we play it hand separate. But we don't do what I did for my first several years of study with my first teacher which is go home, practice it hand separate in my case I didn't practice it hand separate. Come back, fail the test of being able to play it hand separate for several weeks in my case again and then finally put it hands together. Hand separate playing doesn't actually prepare you in the way that you expect it to for playing hands together. So just because you can play it perfectly hand separate doesn't mean you'll necessarily be able to play hands together. And you're not training your brain to think in these two separate lines at the same time, right? We're not training our brain to just work with the grandstaff as it actually is. We're letting it think that it only has to deal with one state at a time and that's not reality. Now again, there are cases where I would play things hand separate and there are cases where my students will too. But the default mode should be hands together and the backup plan should be hand separate and it should be done for a minimum amount of time. The smallest amount of time we can get away with honestly before putting it back hands together the way it's actually going to be. Secret number four, this is a big one that I don't think many students realize or really think through the best piano students. The ones who make the best progress that is listen to their music and they listen to it so much that they can hear it in their head. So think about a piece you learned that you knew exactly what it sounded like because you were just familiar with it anyway. It could be a pop song, it could be a famous classical piece like when I did the first movement of the pathotheques, Beethoven's pianos and ade. I did the first movement of that for my grenade or my diploma, I don't remember, but one or the other and I knew every detail of how that piece is supposed to sound. I mean my ideal version of it in my head because I had listened to it over and over and over again while studying in school. And so there was no question in my mind. If I played around note, I had to find the source of it, but I knew it was wrong. If I played the rhythm wrong, I knew it was wrong. It couldn't always make my hands immediately comply because it's a challenging piece. But I knew when I was wrong and right and what I wanted it to sound like. And if you have that, you have so much. Now, I know some teachers again will argue with me because some teachers are afraid that students will learn everything by ear and they won't learn to read effectively. And that's a very real fear and I get it, but I found the more common issue is students don't. Like they don't listen to their own playing while they're playing. They don't listen to music outside of lessons and they don't know what their piece is supposed to sound like. And many adult students will then default to saying, "I only want to play pieces I already know I'm familiar with." And that's fine to a certain extent, but I think at the same time you need to be expanding what you're familiar with. So you only want to learn pieces, work on pieces that you've already heard before, that you already like. That's great, that's fine. But you need to have enough pieces that you already like. They don't have to be classical pieces. They can be songs, but they need to at least be songs that translate well to piano. And that's not every song, right? So if you only listen to, I don't know, heavy metal or dance music, it's probably not going to translate most of it very well to piano. If you only listen to podcasts and never listen to music, you don't have a good frame of reference. I think some people in this day and age have gotten out of the habit actually of listening to music as much as they used to. I think there's a lot of background music in our lives, but I know many people. They just default and I found myself doing this sometimes too. They default to listening to word instead of music, to listening to podcasts about things. And that's great too. I love that. Let's also listen to and enjoy the music that we want to play because otherwise, I mean, otherwise what are we doing? Secret number five. The students that make the most progress, the quickest in piano are the ones that have a goal in mind every time they play a piece or a phrase or a section. They have in mind what they want to do with it. They have a goal. And this kind of goes back to the previous point because if you don't know what you want it to sound like, it's very hard for you to have a clear goal of what you're doing. I mean, you don't know where you're headed. How can you come up with this individual step? It's tough to do. So, have a goal before you play something and try, try if you want bonus points stating it out loud. Try it out. See how it feels. You might be surprised what a difference it makes to just say, "This time I want to be able to play that part, that scale evenly. I want to use the correct fingering. I want to play it at the full tempo. Whatever choice you make, have an intention. And then call your shot. Out loud. Say what you want to do. Don't make a huge difference. Secret number six. Doesn't go for every single student, but I do think it's a commonality. They learn to scribble on their music. They write their own notes on their music. We've all had teachers, I said, and you have, who will like circle violently things on our music. And I understand why they're doing it. And I know it's partially restrained sometimes, at least with my teachers. But it's so much more adventures for the student themselves to make their own notes on the music. And for some of my students, they love having color all over it and stuff like that. And for some of my students, that's super distracting. So it's much more helpful if they make the note themselves. And if that means circling something and writing, "Hey, I'm a G!" Underneath it, that's fine by me. I don't want them to write in the note names for every note, because that won't help anyone. But if there's like an error like that that comes up, fine. If that means drawing a picture of a trampoline, as I've often done, I had to write students about staccato, that's good too. If it means just verbatim writing what they want to remember to do, and they'll read it before they play it, that's good too. Learn to scribble on your music yourself. Don't wait for your teacher to do it, or don't think that you have to keep your score super pristine. I promise you, the best pianists have very messy scores with all sorts of writing on them, or scribbles or drawings, or notations, that mean something to them, but probably nothing to someone else. Secret number seven also doesn't go for every single person, because it does depend on personality types. But I've found that most of my really successful piano students fit in little practices during the day. It's not always about that one big practice session. That's great, but a lot of us are busy, and we may not always have time to fit in those big practice sessions. And even if we do, we can really benefit from little micro practice sessions. So when I was a teenager, I used to practice just a tiny bit in the morning, often, or especially in the summer, like I would wake up, you know, kind of later, was a teenager. And then whenever I'd had my breakfast or was waiting for it to cook or whatever was happening, I would fit in just a few minutes of practice. And I often came back to the piano later in the day, but because I had those few minutes to narrow in on something, I built that habit, and I tended to then come back for more micro practice sessions all day long, if I was at home. And I think you can get an enormous amount of done in those micro practice sessions, and you're naturally then building in spaced repetition. So the best way to start this, if you're not used to it, is to pick one thing that's kind of bugging you. So like you have a few bars, a few measures in a piece that you just can't get right, or you have a scale that, like, it's just annoying you, you're not getting it, or some small thing like that, something very small and manageable. Just every time you pass your piano, or maybe once an hour, if you work from home as an adult student, you get up, go to the piano, play that thing. Maybe once, maybe twice, and go away again. I used to, when I was, again, when I was a teenager, and I was studying for my final school exams, I drank a lot of tea at that time. I don't really drink regular builders tea anymore, but I did at the time, and every time the kettle was boiling, that was my rule, that I went to play piano, because I was fitting it in between all this school study, and that was how I fitted in. And it worked so well to just get little bits done, and then maybe on the weekends, do longer practice sessions. But I think the best students often do this, at least a lot of my students who make really great progress, they have some element of micro little practice sessions, instead of thinking it's one big chunk, or nothing. Finally, secret number eight, the most successful piano students take breaks. And I mean that in two ways. The most successful piano students, when they're doing their longer practice sessions, get up, take a break, look at the window, get some water, and continue their practice session. They don't try to do it all in one go, with no let up. The most successful piano students in my studio anyway, also take longer term breaks. You know, they have some of their time out from lessons, when they hardly practice it all, or don't practice at all. And that's good, that's refreshing. We don't have to be in go go go mode all the time. Sometimes we have little troughs in our motivation, even while we're in lessons. And we need to take a period of time to just let things go a bit slower. And if you chat to your teacher about that, normally they'll be on board with you, most teachers will be. You say, look, this is a really busy season, or I'm having tough time with practice right now. I'm going to give myself a little bit of grace for a few weeks. And we just take it easy in lessons, but stay in lessons if you're in them. As long as you're upfront with it, most teachers, I know there are exceptions, won't be bothered by that. You need to give yourself some grace and some breaks, because the thing about learning a musical instrument, that you know, but you also don't really take in, is that it takes so long. It takes years. So that individual week, that one practice session where you had to stop in the middle and go, you know, make yourself some tea. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you keep going and keep all these other tips in mind. And that most of the time you practice, well, with a plan, with a strategy. And you also give yourself some grace when you need it. One of the awesome benefits for vibrant music teaching members is that they get an exclusive member magazine every month. This magazine brings together a block of articles in a way that is digestible and super actionable. If you want to become a member and get the magazine as well as all the other benefits, you can go to vmt.nature to sign up.