7 Elements of Effective Piano Practice

July 17, 2020 Jennifer Boster

When you are learning how to play the piano, consistent practice is super important. But what should that daily practice time consist of? Here are 7 Elements of Effective Piano Practice. These are things that should be a part of your daily practice routine to help you become a well-rounded pianist with a good understanding of music. (And stay tuned after the 7 things for a free download!)

#1: Warm-Up

Technical work is an important aspect of piano practice and is a great way to warm up. Here are some suggestions of things you can do to improve your technique and to warm-up each day: scales, arpeggios, chords, Muscle Builders, Hanon exercises, etudes and other technical studies. Your piano teacher can help teach you proper technique, including curved fingers, firm fingertips, flexible wrists and more. Always remember that all technical work should have a musical purpose!

#2: Sight Read

To sight read is the ability to sit down and play a piece of music that you have never seen or played before. This is something that many people would love to be able to do, and the end goal of many piano students! So how do you learn how to sight read? By sight reading….a lot! Sight reading something every single day is the best way to get good at sight reading. You should do a little sight reading during each practice session.

What should you sight read? Find piano books or other music that is a little bit below your current ability level. Your piano teacher can help you find good sight reading material to use. I also highly recommend Piano Safari Sight Reading Cards, as well as the Note Quest app which has an excellent sight reading section called NoteFit.

#3: At-Level Music

If you are taking piano lessons you probably have some sort of method book that you are working through. It is important to work on repertoire that is not too easy and not too hard. These are pieces that you can learn fairly quickly and that will help you progress and learn.

#4: Challenge Pieces

You should always be working on what I call a “challenge piece.” A challenge piece is a piece which is harder than your method book pieces – something that will stretch your abilities and help you to improve. Your teacher will be able to find some great challenge pieces for you. Challenge pieces can be really fun, exciting and motivating, and they can really pull you up to the next level. Sometimes your challenge piece may be a difficult recital piece you are working on. Or it may be something that you are working on memorizing.

#5: Creative Skills

As you learn to read music and play the piano well, you should be sure to not neglect this important area of music learning: the creative skills! When was the last time you sat down and tried to figure out a piece of music by ear? Or composed your own piece? Or just goofed around on the piano and improvised some music? Piano should be not just something where you only learn to replicate the works of others, but it should also be a creative outlet. Playing lead sheets or fakebooks is another great creative skill – learning all of the chords and creating your own accompaniment to a well-known tune just by following the chord names. Composing, transposing, transcribing, arranging…all of these things will put your piano knowledge to the test and will help you create something that is all yours. Try to work on your creative piano skills a little bit each day.

#6: Theory

Music theory is the study of how music works. Understanding keys, chords, scales and more is paramount to becoming a well-rounded musician. You should find ways to learn about music theory and to consistently work on it. Maybe your teacher will assign you a theory book or other theory worksheets to fill out. There are also a lot of music theory apps that you can get that will teach you music theory in a fun way. Understanding music theory will help you understand the pieces you are playing and will be really important when you try to memorize a piece.

#7: Listening

Something that you may not think of when you think of piano practice is LISTENING. As you work to learn piano and become a musician, listening to great music is more important than ever. You should make sure that you listen to great music at least each week. Learn about composers, learn about different instruments and musical styles. The more you listen the more you will learn, and the more you will grow to love and appreciate great music. As you listen you will learn which composers and which pieces are your favorites. You will find pieces that you just HAVE to learn. If you are serious about learning the piano you do not want to leave this element out of your piano study!

Here are some resources you can go to to find great music to listen to and to learn about composers: listen to your local classical music radio station. Find YouTube videos of pieces you are learning or would like to learn. Learn about great pianists and find their performances on YouTube. Listen to classical music podcasts and read books about composers. Open up your favorite music streaming service and start exploring famous composers, piano music, orchestral music and any other kind of music you would like to learn about. Try out my Shades of Sound listening and coloring books, which teach you about the great composers and then allow you to color while listening to their music. Always be listening to great music!

Download my free Piano Practice Routine Tracker to help you keep track of each of these important areas of piano learning. You can download and print it out and use it as a reference as you practice each day. Or, you may want your teacher to write your weekly assignments in the white spaces of each section. Or you can laminate the tracker and use a clothespin to keep track of which step you are on!

Happy practicing!

Piano Practice Trick: Highlight the Thumb Notes

June 2, 2020 Jennifer Boster

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Today I want to share a great piano practice trick that I like to use when learning a piece with a lot of fast notes.

First I must mention the importance of choosing a good fingering, and playing the section with the SAME FINGERING EACH TIME. As we learn a piece of music we should be using several different learning modes to really engage with the piece and learn it well (this is especially true when memorizing a piece of music). The easiest type of learning is through muscle memory – when you play a passage enough times in a row, your fingers just sort of automatically learn where to go next. This can be really helpful, but it’s important to remember to not ONLY rely on this type of learning. When you use the same fingering every time, it allows your fingers to learn the passage more quickly and more accurately.

I like to write in my fingerings, especially on tricky sections – it ensures I use the same fingers every time and helps me to engage and learn the section using some analytical thinking, or the “read and write” learning mode.

But I like to go one step further. On especially thorny passages I will take a colored pencil or highlighter and highlight every single note that will be played by my thumb. This adds a really helpful visual cue to my learning and helps me to nail those fingerings. If I can get my thumb landing on the correct notes each time, everything else seems to fall into place. The thumb is the pivot point on your hand as you play scales and arpeggios, and so landing your thumb at the right time makes a world of difference as you navigate a tricky passage.

Here is a section of Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata in which I have highlighted all of the thumb notes. Once I did this, this passage went SO much smoother!

I encourage you to try this practice technique with your piano students and with your own practicing. I also encourage you to find ways to use several different modes of learning and several different practice tricks on the same passages in your music. Using kinesthetic (muscle memory), aural, visual and analytical memory (not just muscle memory alone) will really help you engage with the music and learn your pieces faster.

Happy practicing!

Interested in more practice tricks? Check out my Practice Tricks Pack and my Memory Tricks Pack for tons of ideas and resources!

Efficient Practicing for Busy Parents

August 11, 2014 Jennifer Boster

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I’m gonna be totally honest here. I am not very good at practicing. Hold on though, let me rephrase that. I am a great practicer, I know how to practice well, I love practicing, actually, and love to learn new pieces. The part I am not good at is finding the time in my busy mommy schedule to actually sit down and do it. So it doesn’t happen very often. Please tell me I am not alone??

This is how practicing looks like at my house. Adorable – yes. Buuuut – not so conducive to learning new pieces. (Who can name that piece?)

I’ve covered this topic before, but just humor me, alright? Typing it out again helps to remind me that I can still make time for practice, and I can use the little time I do have more wisely to still be the pianist I want to be. Thanks! And hopefully some of you will find some kind of motivation in this post as well, and we can practice better together!

Gone are the days of quiet, uninterrupted hours of practicing. I think maybe I should have appreciated those more when I had them. Oh well, moving on. I absolutely adore being a mom. My three kids are wonderful and are so important to me. But I still want to play the piano. It’s important! It’s important to me that my kids hear me play, and hear me practice. My husband plays too, and we love to play together and hear each other play.

I also have the words of my former teacher, Bonnie Winterton, in my head a lot. She is a great example to me of lifelong learning and piano practice. She always told me that I should always be working on: 1) a Bach prelude and fugue, and 2) a Beethoven sonata. I would love to do this. I need to be more disciplined at getting this done. But see, here’s my problem:

Practicing these days consists of me sitting down at the piano to play, and after about 2 minutes somebody comes and climbs onto my lap to play with me. So I continue with one hand, perhaps up an octave since some of the keys I need are taken by little fingers. Then there is the inevitable screaming and sibling rivalry going on in the other room. Or somebody needs my attention. You get the picture.

I think there is a way, though! Obviously, when you are a busy parent or busy teaching a whole lot you are not going to have as much time to practice as you used to. But there are a few important principles and techniques that help me, and if used consistently (even in 20-minute or 10-minute sessions) I do think that improvement will be made.

1. Practice in small sections

Like, really small. I like to sit down and say to myself, “Self, just learn these 2 measures.” Progress is progress, even in small amounts. Take it hands alone in these small sections, then put them together. You can make amazing progress (on this small little section) even in just a few minutes. Rather than try and play through a huge chunk of the piece, then get interrupted and feel like you didn’t make any progress at all, you can use good practice techniques on this small section and have it all learned and even memorized.

2. Write down your fingerings

This is always the first thing I do as I learn my little section. I find the fingering I like the best and write it in. You are never going to remember your fingerings from one short practice session to another, with lots of parental duties and life in-between. Write it in! I also love to do certain things to help make it easier to learn, such as circling all of the notes played by my thumb. This helps amazingly on fast arpeggiated passages.

Circling the notes played by the thumb is a nice visual cue to prepare to cross under!

3. Apply memorization techniques as you go

Be really focused, analyze and memorize major chord progressions. Find small patterns to remember, such as the movement of the bass note, or the movement of your right hand thumb. Just find some pattern to memorize and use as a landmark. Memorize different “starting places” as you learn each little section, so you can start the piece anywhere.

Whatever chords will help you to learn a piece, write them in!

A sticky little section that somehow got easier when I memorized the movement of my right hand thumb. Write in or circle whatever will help you!

4. See the overall picture

It’s easy to stay focused on tiny little sections when that is all you have time to work on. So don’t forget to get the big picture: listen to recordings by different pianists. Hear the overall dynamic phrases and structure, find the climax and the overall direction of the piece. Get out some colored pencils and mark/analyze the overall structure and form of the piece. Find and mark all of the thematic sections and recaps. In a fugue mark each reiteration of the theme. Decide what story you are trying to tell, or what scene you want to picture as you play, or what mood you want to evoke through the piece. If the overall piece makes more sense to you, you will learn it better, and learn it right the first time.

5. Record yourself

Don’t forget to record yourself at the end of a quick session to see how that little section really is sounding! You are your toughest critic. Listen with an objective ear and decide what needs to be fixed next time.

You can do it. Even with a baby on your lap and a toddler sitting next to you, you can work on a little section with one hand. This is the ultimate test in piano practicing focus! If you can do this you can do anything! You are a super hero. Seriously though, throughout your day, during nap times or after the kids are in bed, or even with them sitting next to you, you can continue to develop your talents. And what a blessing that example will be to them when they start taking lessons and developing talents themselves.

And while I am mostly talking to myself, YOU can do it too! My goal is to get at least some quality practice time in each day, even if it is short. What’s your practicing goal?

Recommended: Play It Again, Sam!

August 20, 2013 Jennifer Boster

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I just read a really fabulous book that I think any piano teacher will enjoy and be able to utilize in their studio and in their own learning and performing. It is by Marienne Uszler and is called Play It Again, Sam… What, Why, and When to Repeat.

I absolutely loved this book that delves into questions about repetition in piano-playing and teaching. It encourages teachers and students to stay actively engaged in the learning process and to develop an awareness and an inner feedback that will ensure thoughtful and helpful repetitions.

It differentiates between kinesthetic and conceptual learning and gives many helpful, practical tips to help your students learn better and develop better technique. It’s all about differentiating between what type of skill is needed for different musical tasks – is it physical, visual, mental, auditory, or a synthesis of multiple skills? – and then knowing which skills require what type of repetition.

The author discusses how to teach your students to practice thoughtfully. I also loved the discussion on facts vs. “big ideas” and concept “chunking” – or the idea that small facts and basic concepts apply in larger examples and concepts and so on and so on until a student has a really sound understanding of advanced musical concepts and forms.

I was pleasantly surprised at the depth at which this topic was discussed, and kind of blown away by it! I had so many “a-hah” moments in reading this short book. I think it is an amazing resource for any teacher looking to improve their effectiveness.

I actually couldn’t put this book down. I can’t wait to apply these awesome concepts in my teaching and performing!

Find this book and more under my I Recommend page!

Principles of Efficient Practicing

May 2, 2011 Jennifer Boster

2 Comments