5 Tips to Practise Piano More Efficiently

Kadri Ottas

14 November 2017

You choose or are given a beautiful piece of music and now you wish to perform this magnificently. Or maybe you just want to enjoy performing the music by your own.

The first step to do, of course, is to practise. But not all practise is good practise and doesn't give a pleasing result.

Practising in correct way means a lot in how quickly and if at all you’ll get to destination. Also, smoothness and speed of your play depends of correct practising.

Here are my suggestions, how to practise piano pieces in the most efficient way.

Practise with active mind

Fully concentrated practising, even 20 minutes per day, is far more better than few hours of „sleepwalking“.

Know exactly what you do - what do you want to achieve and keep your focus on this.

Keep your focus on what you want to achieve

Play slowly, with correct rhythm and articulation

You have to practice piece from the start with correct rhythm and articulation.

First of all, when you stop at every bar to gather yourself, this doesn't sound nice at all.

Secondly, you are going to miss some important details, which are written to sheet - articulation, dynamics, pedalling, etc. When you only practise fast, you are not giving enough time to your brain to cope with all the small nuances in music.

There is no point to play fast and wrong. If you play the piece fast only, you just won’t notice many things that are also very important in music.

There is no point to play fast and wrong

If you continue speeding, unfortunately, you’ll end up with learning bad habits eventually. Those are very hard to fix later and you'll waste a lot of time for nothing.

Practise hands separately

Choose a phrase and play both hands separately until you are very confident and you know what you are doing.

You must be able to play this phrase with correct articulation and fingering.

After that you can play the same phrase hands together. Now both hands are doing their own learned line of work.

Divide piece to smaller parts: phrases or bars

Practise piece in small parts - phrases or bars. Play every part until you can perform this without mistakes.

This is not good to restart always from the beginning. When something goes wrong, start from the part you are practising, not from the beginning of whole piece.

Choose a part which is more difficult for you, part you are struggling with. Practise this part only, until you are good with this. Afterwards link the newly practised phrase with the rest of piece that you know well already.

When something goes wrong, don't start from the beginning of the whole piece again

Finally - practise everything together

Whole piece together also needs to be practised.

This is also a necessary part of learning a piece, but this can only happen when hard work with smaller fragments has been done.

It is important to concentrate and to play the whole piece in one go, from the beginning to the end.

Play the whole piece in one go, from the beginning to the end

That phase of practising process is like giving the final touch to your new house. First you have to put up the frame of your construction and have your windows and doors in place. Only then you can put your final touch to the interior.