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New Year’s Resolutions

Elise — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:54:50 +0000

How Much Piano Will You Practice In 2010?

The new year (or new decade , rather) is only a couple of days away. Do you have your New Year’s resolutions set and ready to go?

Sometimes I think it’s kind of funny how most people mark January 1^st as the beginning of a “new and better year.” You don’t really need a new year to achieve any certain goals, but I guess it gives a lot of people a clean-and-fresh-start type of feeling.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that people make ridiculously huge goals to achieve, but don’t make any real plan or mini goals to get there. Quitting smoking, getting into shape, and improving school grades are great goals, but they also take a lot of work and lot of time. Most end up falling off the wagon and never getting back up again.

I’ve done this. Since I stopped musical conservatory training, I’ve been not-so-great with making time for piano practice. After all, playing the piano is really just a hobby I do now. My worst habit is learning one or two pages of a piece without learning the rest. I probably have 10-15 pieces that I could play without their ending because I never stuck around to learn the rest. I always get bored and move onto another piece or get side-tracked and distracted by something else that reduces my practice time.

It’s time to set things straight. Here a few guidelines that you and I can both take to make it a better year for piano practice.

Make time to practice. There are only 24 hours in a day and almost everyone struggles to get everything done before the day is over. You don’t have to spend hours practicing the piano. In fact, you don’t even have to spend one hour, or half an hour. Spaced repetition is the best practice method. Long periods of practice are unproductive because the brain starts to tire and get bored after a while, thus resulting in less effective practicing. Try spending at least 15 – 20 minutes a day practicing. Maybe break that down into 5-minute sections of three or four pieces that you are working on.

Start off small. So, you want to tackle a piece that is 27 pages long? You’ll get there, passage by passage. Don’t rush it. Make it your goal to play one entire line within one week. Make a second goal to learn one an entire page by the end of the month. Mini goals like this will make the task seem less daunting.

Play it 10 times repeatedly. As Chopin once said, “Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” Take one bar or one passage, and play it 10 to 15 times. Repetition forces your hands and fingers to get used to the positioning and forces your brain to memorize the passage. By the 10^th repetition, you’ll probably notice that you can play the passage faster and more easily. Yes, it can be tedious, but it is necessary.

Use the metronome. Ah yes, the dreaded metronome. We all love that terrible little device that sends a piercing clicking noise through our ears and literally forces us to know the truth about our playing in conjunction with timing. Don’t avoid it. Use it. Lucky for you, practicing with a metronome for long periods of time messes up your personal sense of timing, so remember to keep metronome practice short. Read my post about how to effectively practice with a metronome here.

YouTube It. If you want to learn a specific piece, do a search on YouTube and you can listen to various interpretations. There are even thousands of tutorials that people make to help you learn. You can watch a person play and study the hand and finger movements as often as you want. Listening to a certain piece repeatedly is very helpful when you practice because your brain automatically develops a framework for what the finished piece should sound like, and then you can add your own artistic components to make the performance your very own.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

2010 is going to be a big year for everyone. I know how hard it is to force yourself to sit down and groan through the repetitive and tedious movements of a certain passage, but it must be done to achieve what you want. Take these tips with a grain of salt and remember how good it feels once you’ve completed and mastered a piece.

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How To Relax When Playing Piano

Elise — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:45:29 +0000

Relax!

As you build up your speed in your piano playing, it becomes more and more important to learn how to relax at the same time. Generally, this means that you should only be using the muscles that are needed to play. You can achieve relaxation much easier by practicing your pieces hands separately. Here are a couple pieces of advice that I follow during my practice routines:

It is better not to practice at all than it is to practice with even the slightest bit of tension. It’s much more efficient to relax and play a single note, and then advance carefully; only playing those easy materials that can be played relaxed.

Do not forget to relax all areas of the body, including breathing and periodic swallowing. You thought hands and arms and fingers were the only parts of the body needing relaxation? Well, think again. Some students will stop breathing when they find themselves playing very demanding pieces because the muscles are anchored at the chest. If you’re throat is dry after playing, it means that you also stopped swallowing. My piano teacher told me a horror story of her younger years when she had been playing for an audience at a recital, when all of a sudden she started choking on her own breath right in the middle of her playing.

To fully relax, you must find the proper energy and momentum balance as well as arm, hand, and finger positions and motions that allow you to play with the right amount of energy. This may seem complicated, and it can be. Relaxing can require a lot of experimentation. If you have been concentrating on relaxing on a regular basis during your practice routines, then you should be able to quickly execute this. For those who haven’t been practicing their relaxation, you can try practicing an easy piece until you build up stress, and then try to relax. For this, you’ll need to find different motions and positions of the arms, wrists, and body. When you find them, you’ll feel the stress gradually drain away from you.

The most important element of relaxation is energy conservation. There are at least two different ways to conserve energy. Firstly, do not use unnecessary muscles, and secondly, turn off those muscles as soon as their jobs are done. Again, this is easier said than done. You can experiment with this using the gravity drop, During a gravity drop, you allow gravity to pull the arm down, but at the end of the key drop, you need to add tension to the finger for a moment to stop the hand. Then you need to quickly relax all of your muscles, but do not lift the hand. Just rest it comfortably on the piano with just enough force to support the weight of your arm. This is a lot harder than you would assume, because the elbow is practically floating in mid air. You can test whether or not you are pressing down by taking the arm off the keys and resting your forearm on your legs, completely relaxed. Then you can carry over that same feeling to the end of your gravity drop.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Without relaxation, neither music nor technique could be possible. Technique comes from the brain. Non-musical playing actually violates so many aspects of nature that it interferes with the human brain’s natural processes for controlling the mechanisms of playing. Basically, if you spend your practice sessions doing mindless repetitions, you will find yourself going through a long, roundabout way of learning piano.

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The Importance of Rhythm in Piano

Elise — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:27:30 +0000

What is Rhythm?

By definition, rhythm is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds. In plain English, that means the framework of repetitive timing in music.

Many piano players who struggle with rhythm believe that only gifted musicians can truly master the aspect of rhythm in music. In reality, establishing the correct rhythm in music is merely dependent on accurate counting and reading music.

Rhythm can be difficult to master because it’s indications are not shown throughout the entire piece, such as the time signature, which is only shown at the beginning of the piece or passage. Another indication would be the difference between a sonata and a prelude.

And so, music is created by manipulating these rhythmic attributes, making rhythm one of the most important and essential elements in music.

I, personally, have struggled with rhythm for my entire musical life. Difficulties in achieving rhythm are directly related to reading music wrong. For me and many others, this is often the case when I begin reading and playing the music with both hands. There is simply too much information to process, too much hand-eye coordination, too many notes to figure out, and rhythm gets left behind.

I experienced this problem mostly with sight reading. When I had to play a passage on command, my rhythm was a disaster. I was too preoccupied with getting the notes right and coordinating my right and left hands.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

If you find yourself struggling with rhythm in your pieces, I would advise you to purchase a metronome. A metronome is a ticking pendulum that leads you through the exact tempo of a music piece. Just set the ticking speed of the metronome to the speed indicated on the sheet music, or if there is no indication, just find a speed that you feel comfortable with. Personally, I recommend the Korg MA-30 Ultra Compact Digital Metronome. I have this one, and it works great. It’s easy to use, stands up on a little stand, and you can even plug headphones into it. It’s definitely worth the investment if you want to improve your rhythm skills for your favourite pieces. You’ll sound just like a pro.

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Discussing Piano Technique

Elise — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:57:45 +0000

I’ll admit that I’ve hated piano technique ever since I started taking piano lessons at the age of 8. But I’ll also admit that I know technique is important to develop effective practice methods and improvements overall.

Most people think that technique is directly related to an ability to develop finger dexterity. This is not true. In fact, the natural dexterity between famous and talented pianists and ordinary people are not very different. Translation: Anyone can learn to play the piano well.

So, rid your mind of the notion that technique equals dexterity. The truth is that technique is mainly a developmental process of the brain and nerve system, as opposed to the very well-known myth that technique is a developmental process of finger and muscle movement.

With effective technical training, a pianist will be able to execute hundreds upon thousands of piano passages. In short, technique gives us the ability to learn a number of skills. Most people think that practicing piano technique takes years to learn; another myth. If the correct and effective learning procedures are used, piano skills can actually be learned in quite a short period of time.

Basically, these piano skills can be learned in two stages. The first is concerned with discovering exactly how the body parts should be moved, such as the hands, wrists, arms, and so on. The second stage is concerned with discovering how to condition the muscles and nerves in order to execute the correct body movements easily and controlled.

Ever heard the expression “learning music makes you smarter”? Well, it’s true. And you can give all the credit to technique. When you learn the technical know-how of music, you are going through the process of developing faster connections between nerves and creating more brain cells for effective movements and memory factors. These science-related functions prove that the correct approach to learning piano technique will benefit you in everyday life situations. Noticing memory improvement is quite common in people who begin learning to play the piano. This is because memorization is a function of technical acquisition.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Unfortunately, several private and talented piano teachers aren’t aware of optimal methods for technique, and therefore they do not pass it on to their students. In opposition, some of the greatest pianists of all time have written books on the topic of technique that are discussed at such a highly advanced level mostly concerned with composing music, and without discussing how to acquire the basics of technique. While having an experienced piano teacher is beneficial, you can also teach yourself to acquire technique. For this, I recommend the book You Can Teach Yourself Piano Chords by Per Danielsson. If you’re new to chord structure, this book will teach you the technique needed to excel at piano. This book has gotten great reviews, and I would really advise you to check it out as well.

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Advice for Aspiring Pianists

Elise — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:47:35 +0000

So you’ve decided to take up a new hobby? That’s great. Music? Even better. Feeling overwhelmed and don’t know where to start? It’s not uncommon to realize this.

Quite surprisingly, you don’t have to be especially gifted in music to be able to play the piano well. I could hear your sigh of relief as you read that.

Although you typically need to be musically gifted in order to compose music, your ability needed to move the fingers and wrists is actually not very dependent on the musical brain.

Don’t understand? Here’s a similar example. When you’re typing on the computer keyboard, are you processing and thinking about every single letter you’re pressing? Every different movement of your finger? Every finger that belongs to each key? No.

Playing the piano is very much the same. When you practice, and you practice enough, your hands and fingers become so used to the movements that it becomes natural. I’m not even kidding.

Another example is video games. When you play a game, you get used to the controls and buttons and it starts to feel natural to you as you improve throughout the game. The same concept applies to learning to play the piano or any other musical instrument

In reality, most people are actually more musical than we give ourselves credit for. A lack of technical know-how gives us limits to our musical expression.

Most people have had the pleasure of listening to different famous pianists and are able recognize that they are a different in comparison. This is in fact more than enough musical sensitivity that you could ever need to learn how to play the piano.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Don’t expect to be practicing for hours on end. This is actually counterproductive, and I will get into more detailed discussion on the topic of spaced repetition in another post. You can make great progress by just practicing for an hour at a time, three or four times a week. Some very well-known pianists have even recommended less than an hour of practice at a time. So remember, less is more! As long as you commit to practicing often, there’s no need to sit there plunking away at the keys for long periods of time.

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