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Beware of these Five Bad Habits when Playing the Piano

July 26th, 2009

I’m definitely a victim of bad habits when it comes to practicing piano and I’ve known this for years. So why does it happen?

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.