Practicing the Piano

Viewers of my YouTube videos occasionally ask for advice on learning to play the piano. This page summarizes what I've told them and adds some other suggestions and references. I will expand it as things occur to me.


Don't Go It Alone

My first piece of advice has always been "Get a teacher"— and it still is. If you can't afford regular lessons, find a teacher who is willing to give you one lesson just to get you pointed in the right direction. If you can't afford that, find somebody who is taking lessons, and ask if you can sit in (and if they won't do that, ask them what kinds of things their teacher tells them, and ask them for advice). If you know somebody who teaches music, ask them for advice (even if they don't teach piano). Music instruction is not "one size fits all"—you need a teacher who can see where you are, musically, and give you help at the right level.

If you know musicians, hang out with them, and ask questions.


Start Now

"Ars Longa, Vita Brevis" (art is long, life is short) is very true. If you put off practicing the piano, you are practicing how to put it off, which is not what you want to learn. You want to learn how to stick with it, so at the very least, start practicing that. Staying with it can be the hardest part, especially when you've just started, so be prepared for that, and plan to keep doing it for the rest of your life, regardless of how you feel about it at any particular point. Imagine yourself at my age (about 60), being able to play beautifully, and getting more pleasure from it than anything else you do (except maybe eating or sex). Keep in mind that what you are doing now is what will get you there.

"But I don't know how to start." Don't worry; that's not critical. Just start, write down questions as they come up, and try to find answers to them. Any practice that you do will build neural connections that are related to playing the piano; if you learn some stuff that's useless, those connections will be much quicker at learning to do the right thing (once you figure out what that is) than the connections you would have developed otherwise (and that were suited to watching television or surfing the web).

There are other reasons to start sooner rather than later. It's easier to learn a new skill when you're younger. It's easier to find time to practice when you're younger. And perhaps most important, things you learn often take years to have their full effect. Even if you don't get really good immediately, you want to lay the foundation for getting good later. In twenty years, you want to be saying "I'm really glad I started twenty years ago; I only wish I had started earlier" and not "this is sure hard." I often find myself saying "If I had known, back then, how good I was going to get, I would have practiced more."


Q: What kind of piano should I get?

A: The best you can. A grand piano is better than an upright, which is better than a spinet, which is better than a digital instrument with weighted keys, which is better than a digital instrument without weighted keys, which is better than nothing. If you live with people who don't want to hear you practicing, that's a good reason to consider a digital instrument (so that you can play it with headphones and not bother them). The better the instrument, the easier it is to control it, and the wider the range of expression that's possible with it; as a result, it's more gratifying to learn on a better instrument, and easier to stay motivated.


Talent?

Don't worry about it. I'm not saying there are no differences between people, but hard work, sustained effort, good teachers, and a good sense of direction make a much bigger difference. When I was young, I knew many people my age (or younger) who were much better musicians than I was; if you'd compared us, you would have said that I didn't have much talent. But I just kept at it, and in the end, I was a decent musician. There are lots of reasonable excuses for not trying or not sticking with it (like "I don't feel like it," or "I'm more interested in other things") but "I don't have talent" is not one of them.


Learn Some Theory, Practice the Basics

If you've watched my videos, you know that music is made up of patterns. The categorization and naming of those patterns is called "music theory." Learning music a note at a time is much too difficult, just like reading a book a letter at a time would be. You need to learn about the common patterns in music, and be able to manipulate them easily (like, if someone said "make up a sentence about a dog," you would be able to do it, instantly, without having to think).

Start with major and minor keys (key signatures) and scales; learn to play them with both hands. Then major and minor chords. Look at sheet music, and identify what scales and chords are being used. Get sheet music for pieces you're interested in (IMSLP is a good place for classical music), follow along in the score while listening to recordings on YouTube, and identify scales, chords, arpeggios, etc.


Learn to Play by Ear

Even if you plan to just play music from notation, learn to play by ear, too. Start out by learning how to play every melody you know well enough to sing. Learn to play melodies with either hand. Then figure out what chords go with the melodies. Play the melody with one hand and the chords with the other (with either hand being the melody). Figure out a bass line that sounds good with a melody (so that a two-note rendition, melody plus bass, sounds good). Learn to play melody and chords with one hand (so that the melody is the top note of the chord), and bass in the other hand. Do all these things with every key for every piece.

Second, start improvising.


Write Down Music Yourself

As part of playing by ear, write down the melodies and other things that you've learned to play. If you know other musicians, ask them to play through what you've written down; if it comes out differently than you intended, figure out why (did they play it wrong? did you write it wrong? would there be a clearer way to write it? etc.).


Record Yourself

Record yourself, listen to the recording, and take notes. Then, use these notes to guide your practice. This is a very valuable technique, and James Boyk has written a book about it, which I recommend.


Watch Other Pianists

YouTube is a tremendous resource. Watch pianists, and pay close attention to how they hold and move their hands. Imagine that you are them, and feel what they are feeling.


Problem Solving

There are lots of problems to be solved in playing any musical instrument, and this is especially true with the keyboard instruments, because you are doing many things at the same time, and it is very complicated. Be aware that you have problems; describe them as well as you can; write them down. And when you practice, focus on the problems. If you have a three-minute piece with three five-second passages that you can't play right, spend your time solving those problems (as opposed to playing the piece from beginning to end and stumbling through those passages).

There are probably as many ways to solve problems as there are problems to be solved, but here's one that can be used in a lot of situations which might be described as vary the length of the "running start" (and follow-through"). For example, if a chord at the start of a measure is giving you trouble, first play the chord by itself, then play the chord over and over, closing your hand in between times. Then play the transition between the end of the previous measure and that chord. Then practice the whole previous measure and the whole measure that the chord is in. And so on. What you'll find is that you have to pay attention to different things, depending on the context, and that you have to prepare yourself different amounts of time ahead of time, depending on what the music is like; be aware of this. The ultimate goal of practice is to have all the "mechanical" things happen automatically, so that you can focus on the "musical" things; but before you can make something automatic, you need to be conscious of it.


Push the Envelope

In practicing, it's easy to get into the rut of just playing a passage over and over, waiting for it to get easier, or sound better, or be more reliable. That might be okay for weight-training, but for music (and for most mental skills), it's one of the least effective kinds of practice. To get the most out of your practice, you need to push the limits, not just do the same thing over and over. There are lots of ways to do this; here are a few:

Practice music that's too hard. For example, if you're working on one of the Bach two-part inventions (and it's more or less at The right level for you), also work on one of the hard fugues from his Well-Tempered Clavier. You'll find that this forces you to address, in a very direct manner, difficulties that you'd been ignoring in a simpler context (but which still needed work).

Practice music that's too easy. It's easy to think "that piece is too simple for me; I'm not going to bother with it," but it's a mistake; every piece has something to teach you. Take the simplest piece you know, turn on the recorder, play it as perfectly as you can, and then listen to the result. You will hear that there are things that could be better. (If you think it's perfect, post your recording to YouTube and ask for criticism.) What you learn by learning to play easy music perfectly will help you play more difficult music more beautifully, too.

Play a piece much faster or slower than usual. The benefit of learning to play faster than normal is obvious (it's like running with weights: it is more demanding). Playing slower then usual can be helpful in several ways. One is that you can focus more on expression, and make the expressive effects bigger. A more subtle one can be to reveal that a technical problem is not what you thought it was: you might think that what you're doing is difficult because it's so fast, but when you slow it down, you find that it is still problematic.

Practice a piece in a different key than it's written. The easiest way to do this is to play a piece in in the keys with the same note name but different accidental (G-flat, G, G-sharp); then you can read the music as-is, and just change the accidentals in your mind.


Sequencing

A lot of musical ability could be characterized as a "mind game." Learning musical skills means learning how to get from one state of mind to another in a very controlled way—that is, learning how to control the sequence of thoughts you have. There are ways to practice this on its own, and that practice is valuable in many contexts (not just music). One way to practice mental sequencing is with the dual n-back game. There are many forms of this; here are versions for iPad/iPhone/iPod and Mac/Windows.