Even if you have not reached the stage where you are plaything with hands together, you should still practice the separate left and right hand slowly. Before switching, ALWAYS end your left or right hand practice with a slow run-through practice.

You may not know it, but this is such an important rule in piano practice because it has such an incredibly large effect on your technical improvement. However, musicians still have trouble figuring out why it actually works. All we know is that it DOES work.

As a hypothesis, many believe that slow piano practice is so beneficial because the piano player has the ability to completely relax. Additionally, it’s easier to pick up more bad piano habits when you play at a faster pace. With slow piano practice, you can virtually erase these bad habits.

Even though you may be at the beginning stage of learning your piece, playing slowly is a great way to test whether you have actually learned the piece.

But how SLOW should you practice? What may be slow to you may actually be medium speed to me.

Ultimately, this is your judgment call. It depends on the individual, their skills, and their learning capabilities. You will begin to realize that when you play slower than a certain speed, it will begin to lose its effect over you.

It’s very important to keep in mind that when you are practicing piano slowly that you maintain the same hand and finger motions that you will use when you play faster. If you play below your optimal slow speed, this will seem impossible.

Ideally, you want to choose a slow speed you can play as accurately as you want, around ½ to ¾ speed. As an added bonus, playing at your optimal slow speed will also help you memorize your piano pieces. As you technique improves, your slow speed can be increased.

Want to hear a fun fact? Some very famous pianists have actually been known to practice ridiculously slowly. That’s right, the genius composers that we all know and worship today over our pianos actually took their time with practice. Some were documented to practice at one note per second, which seems completely insane.

As a final note, it’s important to think ahead of the music when you are practicing slowly. If you practice too fast, it’s easy to mentally fall behind the music, which can easily be adapted as a bad piano habit. Why is it bad? Because you lose control. You need to think ahead and try to maintain that distance as you get back up to speed. When you think ahead, you can actually foresee what is awaiting for you, which can prevent flubs or blank-outs so you will know what to do when you get to that measure.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

As you sit down to your piano for a practice session, try practicing everything at a fast pace, and see what happens the next day you sit down to practice. After that, try practicing a certain measure or passage fast only, and another measure or passage (of the same difficulty) slowly. Compare your improvements the next day when you try to play them. Since this effect is cumulative, after several days of using the fast practicing as well as the slow practicing, you will begin to notice a huge difference in your improvements. Since this is a time consuming experiment, practicing slowly is all you really need. Patience, my friend, patience is all that you need!

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But why? Why is memorization so important in piano when we can have everything right in front of us on the music sheets, in our piano books, or developed from the practice routines of technique?

Memorizing gives us a way of learning new pieces faster. You actually learn pieces that involve more technical skills a lot quicker when you memorize them, as opposed reading them straight from the sheets.

When you memorize a piece, you’re able to start playing from any section of the piece, you’re less likely to have a brain fart and mess up, and if you do, it’s more likely that you’ll be able to recover from memorization instead of identifying what sheet you’re on and which bar or notes to find.

Additionally, memorizing your pieces allows you to focus 100% of your concentration on the music. In other words, what the piece is supposed to sound like. In my last post about rhythm, I talked about the brain experiencing so much information to process during sight reading. This includes attributes like the notes, time signature, coordination of both hands, and no room left for the brain to think about what the piece should sound like when it exits the piano.

Memorization allows you to listen more carefully so you can touch the keys correctly and move your fingers, wrists, and whole body the right way for the piano the emit the right sound.

Advanced pianists must play their pieces from memory due to the high level of technical skills involved. For most pianists no matter what level, the most difficult passages are played by memory.

This is known as “hand memory.” And while some pianists might still need their sheet music in front of them to support them in a psychological manner, they still mainly play out of memory. In fact, memorization in music is an actual scientific procedure that is essential to learn and advance in playing the piano.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Here is some advice from my own piano practice routines. When I need to learn a difficult passage, I first identify all the technical skills needed to play it, such as finger placement, holds, ornaments, rests, notes, and so on. I then try to play it. If I’ve never played it before at all, I will always begin by playing each hand separately to avoid bad technique. I will play one bar at a time, over and over and over and over and over again. Start out very slowly, and after playing it a few hundred times or so (I’m kidding, of course), you’ll notice that you’ll be able to pick up speed and play it faster. You’re starting to memorize the piece. In short, the more you play it, the more you’ll submit it to memory. First identify the technical skills required to play it, then practice, practice, practice. Memorization usually comes pretty naturally to the musical mind.

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Well, most bad habits usually appear out of stress or impatience when practicing a piece that’s too difficult. Here is my top 5 ranking of bad piano practice habits. Read through them and see if you can diagnose yourself with any.

1. Always practicing piano with hands together. This is number one where bad habits develop. The best method is to practice the left hand and right hand components separately a few times before practicing them together. You’ll familiarize yourself more with the notes and timing for each hand.
2. Overusing the damper or soft pedal. In my personal experience, I’ve used the damper pedal a lot to avoid holding down my notes. This was a big no-no, and my teacher caught me every time. To fix this bad habit, I had to practice the entire piece without using the pedal at all. Only when I made sure I was holding all the notes could I start using the damper pedal again.
3. Stuttering. This occurs when a piano player realizes they’ve made a mistake, stops, and goes back to fix it by repeating the passage. In other words, this is known as stop-and-go practice. Most of the time, it feels natural to go back and fix what you just played. During professional piano examinations, marks will be deducted if you play with the stuttering habit.
4. Banging away at the piano. As piano players learning a new piece, we sometimes get so preoccupied with figuring out the notes and the timing and fitting together of both hand finger movements. When this happens, we forget to actually listen to the sound coming out of the piano. This can be difficult because we often put all of our energy into playing, leaving nothing left for actually listening to ourselves play.
5. Weak fingers. Most common among beginners, piano players often experience trouble stretching their hands to their desired keys and putting enough force on them when pressing against them. A lot of beginners have trouble using fingers four and five, and depending on whether you’re right- or left-handed, the stronger hand will likely perform more easily than the weaker one.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

It’s often difficult to diagnose yourself which bad habits you have. My piano teacher picked out all of my bad habits and forced me to fix them, but now that I don’t take piano lessons anymore, I don’t have someone there to tell me what to improve on. I would recommend recording yourself playing the piano and listening to it carefully. You’ll notice how different it sounds because you’ll be focusing all your energy on listening opposed to playing. This makes it much easier to pick out what sounds wrong. Too much pedal? Weak notes? Poor dynamics? You can go back and fix these problems and record yourself as many times as you want until your piece sounds the way you want. I use this method all the time and it works great. It will work for you too.

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