Everything Piano

Three Major Reasons Why You Should Practice Bar-By-Bar Segments

Ever Feel This Intimidated With Difficult Passages?

My apologies for not updating in quite some time, my computer had a complete virus meltdown and had to be stripped clean of everything and re-formatted.

Everyone gets frustrated with piano practice. In a perfect world, a piano player would be able to sit down at their piano and play a piece flawlessly. If life was like that, playing the piano would not be special. For me, personally, playing the piano is special because of the challenges brought on by it; the challenge of reading music, making sense of those black dots and squiggles, analyzing them with my brain, and transforming them into art with my hands. It takes discipline, motivation, and persistence to make time for yourself and sit down to practice your pieces on a regular basis.

Since most piano players know exactly what I’m talking about, I’d like to point out three very distinct reasons WHY bar-by-bar practicing is so effective.

Practicing the most difficult notes most often results in optimized practice. When practicing difficult passages, there are usually only a few note combinations that obstruct your playing. For example, if you have 10 bars that include 8 notes each, there may only be 4 difficult notes to play in that entire passage of 10 bars. Just by practicing those four notes, you will succeed in playing all 10 bars, which greatly reduces your practice time. Depending on your personal skill and the nature of the piece, the most difficult notes may include a key change, a large jump upward or downward on the keys, an awkward fingering position, a trill, an arpeggio, and so on. Focus on these areas, and you will greatly cut down your practice time.
Practicing short segments allows you to practice them dozens, or even hundreds of times in a matter of minutes. Using quick and successive repetitious practice methods is the most effective way to teach your hands new motions. In contrast, if you decided to practice a long passage that included difficult notes, the longer interval between your successive playing and the playing of the difficult notes will lead to confusion of the hands, resulting in much slower and less optimal learning. Moreover, piano players who are more adept to playing by memory and less by sight reading have an advantage when it comes to practicing short segments. Short segments are easier to remember, and as you practice them, you are instantly putting them to memory, thus killing two birds with one stone.
The shorter the segment, the faster you can practice it. If you’ve read my other posts, specifically on the topics of slow practice, you should be well aware that trying to play a segment fast that your technical skills allow you is detrimental. This may seem like a catch 22, BUT, shorten those segments, and you will effectively learn very quickly to practice those short segments very fast. Typically, the most common short segments you should choose are one bar or even less; perhaps something as simple as just two notes. When you start off this small, you can literally bring any difficult note combination right up to speed within minutes. This saves loads practice time, and as mentioned, helps put the piece’s segments to memory as well.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Stayed tuned for some great stuff I’ve been planning. Christmas is just around the corner and I’m getting ready to break out the Christmas music. Also, my performance of Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag is almost up to par, and should be up on YouTube hopefully sometime this month, if nothing gets too busy to prevent me from filming it.

A Few Tips For Getting Up To Speed With Fast Pieces Yesterday, I touched on the topic of practicing by breaking...
The Three W’s of Memorizing Music Learn who can memorize, what you should memorize, and when...
Slow Piano Practice One bad habit of many piano players is their excitement...
Problem Areas In Piano Practice I'm back from vacation, and I've decided that it's time...
Music and Your Memory Memorization is an essential part of playing the piano. I'll...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags: Bar-By-Bar, Methods, Piano Pracitce, Practicing, Segments, Technique