Practicing piano well is a far cry from just playing through our pieces. To learn effectively, our practice really needs to be systematic. Here are a few rules for effective piano practice.
Focus
Learning music requires our full attention. Practice while your concentration is at its peak. A...
My music teacher colleague Diego Cardini was kind enough to write this post for Key-Notes readers. Rhythm is something most piano learners struggle with, and percussionists are experts at rhythm, so who better to ask for exercises to help piano students develop their rhythmic skills?
Intro
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How do you prepare for rehearsals with fellow musicians? When playing chamber music or concertos, it’s essential to know everyone else’s part well enough to come in on cue and play together. Pianists play from a full score (or at least a piano reduction in the case of concertos),...
What do Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Bernstein have in common? All were not only composers, they were also pianists and conductors. In our time many famous conductors started their careers as pianists, including André Previn, Daniel Barenboim and Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Why should pianists...
Question: Hello Albert,
I read something you wrote under the heading Piano Practice and subheading Accuracy and quote, “we systematically learn our pieces phrase by phrase….”
This is something I have been pondering on for a long time and now question, how long is a phrase,...
Question: Hello Albert,
I often read about practicing on your website, and you write a lot about how to practice efficiently, and how you get the best results. But if someone (like me) tries to focus on all the things you tell us on your website, it can be kind of hard to keep everything in...
Learning a piece of music successfully requires avoiding mistakes in practice. How we practice is how we learn, and how we learn is how we perform. If we make mistakes in practice, we teach ourselves to make mistakes in performance. It’s a simple equation.
What exactly is a mistake?...
Question: What is your advice for playing polyrhythms? For example, simple polyrhythms like triplets against duplets or quadruplets and odd ones (Chopin’s favorite) like 4 notes against 35 or 13 notes.
My approach is lots of practice hands separately with the metronome but the odd ones...
With their multiplicity of interweaving, interdependent voices perpetually reacting to one another, deceptively appearing in backwards guise, upside-down, rhythmically lengthened or shortened, migrating amongst unstable keys yet all the while forming a coherent harmonic unity, fugues are far and...
Question: Is it essential to play or to require my students to play all indicated fingerings in early advanced pieces, i.e., Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu Op. 66, or Mozart’s Fantasia in D Minor? Although I can play and also teach pupils all of the indicated fingerings, I don’t...
Question: I’ve been a guitarist for 30+ years and have always watched my left hand, and rarely my right. And now that I am learning/practicing the major and relative minor scales on piano, I find it easier to watch my left hand when playing the scales with both hands in unison. When I try...
Question: Hello dear teacher,
I had some problems and sickness and I couldn’t practice at all! I want to start again but my hands are too cold to play after about 3 months, so I try to warm them with Hanon. What’s your idea?
Best regards,
– Sarah
Albert’s reply:...
