OK, so you have a piece you’d like to play but there are some tricky bits and it’s several pages long (or several minutes, if you’re learning by ear). What’s the most efficient way to not just learn it but master it?
Read on… but first, here’s a few general tips.
Practice Space
I believe that, whatever your practice space, be it a room or just a nook, when you enter that space all other thoughts should be left outside. If you need to finish practising at an exact time, set an alarm so you’re not constantly thinking of missing your appointment.
The enemy of successful practice is distraction. For children, that’s likely some fun activity they want to do. For adults, it’s often due to pressing concerns from the world outside practice. Either way, all distraction is best left outside your practice space.
What You Need
For learning from notated music, you will need:
- a stand so you can see the music at playing height
- a soft pencil (2B or 4B)
- a rubber (an eraser)
If you have trouble playing at a steady tempo, you may also need a metronome.
If you learn by ear you will need:
- a stand or flat surface
- a music player (such as your phone)
- either a pencil, rubber and a sheet of paper or a note taking app
Using Pencil And Rubber
- For notated music, use the pencil to circle a difficult passage that needs further practice or a note that you’re inclined to misread.
- At your next practice, the circle reminds you of a problem, which you can practice briefly before playing through the section you’re working on.
- Once you’ve got the circled section up to the standard of the surrounding bars you can erase the circle so only relevant circles are visible at any one time.
Using A Music Player
If you prefer to learn by ear, you’ll need a way to break the piece up into manageable segments for learning, unless you’ve listened to the piece enough times to be familiar with the notes and timing.
- Note down the start time of each phrase and treat each phrase as a segment. As you learn the segments, you can indicate your progress by checking off their start times.
- Mark the start time of a difficult passage that needs further practice.
- As above, at your next practice, the mark acts as a reminder of the problem section.
- Cue the music player to the marked time so you can listen to the passage and practice it.
- Once you’ve got the marked section up to the standard of the surrounding bars you can erase or delete the mark so only relevant marks are visible at any one time.
Ideally you want a music player that gives control over playback speed without altering the pitch (some phone-based music players work like this)… or a patient friend who knows how to play it and can slow it down for you…
If your music player doesn’t provide that option, one workaround is to play the track at half speed for learning. It will play back an octave lower so as you play along, all the notes you play will still fit the music.
Before You Start
Make sure your instrument is optimised for playing. If it’s a new instrument, make sure it is set up correctly.
For older instruments, replace any worn parts such as dull or rusty strings, cracked reeds, worn pads etc. if you can. Give your instrument some love! You want your instrument to work well so you can enjoy playing it and hear the reward of your progress.
If your instrument is tuneable, make sure it’s in tune. This may seem obvious but playing an instrument that’s in tune is like a free power-up. An out-of-tune instrument immediately depreciates your practice- you will have less positive feedback from the instrument as you play. When your instrument is in tune, it’s much easier to hear how well you’re playing and much more rewarding when you get it right.
The 10 Top Tips for how to practise a piece
1 Practise Regularly
The single most important tip for successful learning is to practise regularly, ideally at the same time each day, 5 to 6 days per week. Your mind and body will adapt to this schedule and you’ll both learn quicker and play better.
During your practice, pace yourself. Take regular short breaks. It’s hard to maintain intense concentration for very long before starting to lose focus.
2 Warm Up
Before trying something tricky, warm up on a few easy notes. Forget about the piece, just relax into something simple or something you’re really familiar with as you settle in to playing and become one with your instrument.
3 Play A Scale
Play the scale of the key of the piece. If you play chords rather than melodies, play the main chords of the piece.
For bonus points, play in a rhythm related to the piece, in the same time signature. By the time you start practising the piece you will already be attuned to the root note, tonality and rhythmic character of the piece. Another free power-up!
4 Little Wins
Set yourself achievable goals. You want to have success almost every practice.
Don’t expect to get through all of a long or difficult piece first time. Break it up into smaller segments that can be joined together. In a fast or difficult piece, that might only be a bar or two at a time.
I say almost because everyone can have an off day. My recommendation for an off day is to just play through something easy or a section you have already learnt. That might draw you in to practice mode. If not, just finish up for now. Coasting through a few easy bits or even skipping a practice altogether is preferable to a negative practice! After all, you can always come back to it later…
5 Start Slow
The first time you read (or listen to) each segment, it’s all about making sure you have interpreted the instructions correctly. You don’t want to discover, a week later, that the notes you have so diligently learned are not all the right ones.
Make sure you learn all the instructions from the outset, including timing, dynamics and articulation.
- Slow the tempo down. If it’s tricky, slow it down a lot. An easy way to do that is to count the next note value down as a beat. In simple time such as 3/4 or 4/4 (and in compound time) this means counting quavers as beats.
- Don’t change tempo while playing! Whichever tempo you choose, you must stick to it for the whole segment. If it’s too fast to play the whole segment, slow the tempo even further and start again. Also resist the temptation to speed up for the easy bits. If necessary, use a metronome to make sure you play the entire segment at a consistent tempo.
- Initially it’s all about percentages. Wait until you’re well over 50% success rate before you increase the tempo. I personally believe that something is only ready for the next stage when you can play it 3 times in a row without mistakes.
6 Gradually Build Up The Tempo
As you become more confident that you’re playing the right notes in their correct timing, increase the tempo of the segment little by little. Beats are most easy to feel in the range of 60-120 bpm (1-2 beats per second).
For example, in simple time,
- If you’re counting quavers at 60 bpm when first reading it, keep counting quavers while you gradually increase the tempo until you have reached about 120 bpm.
- Now play at the same tempo but count half as often (crotchet = 60). This way you can switch to counting crotchets without having to change how fast you play.
- Continue gradually increasing the tempo until you are playing the segment at or near its final tempo.
The method in Top Tips 5 & 6 is demonstrated clearly in 20. How To Read Rhythms 1.
Note: For pieces in compound time, we have to switch from quaver beats to dotted crotchet beats, so we should increase the tempo a bit further before switching. For example, quaver beats at 150 bpm result in dotted crotchet beats at 50 bpm.
7 Layers Of Practice
The mind needs diversity of focus and intensity. You can’t practise the same bar over and over for more than a few minutes without losing clarity. After a while, it starts getting worse rather than better and you risk having a negative practice.
It’s much better to have a few different types of practice in the same practice session. Once the first segment, say bars 1 & 2, starts to become a little familiar, even while still at a fairly slow tempo, you can introduce the next segment, bars 3 & 4, reading it slowly and carefully.
The next day, bars 1 & 2 are starting to speed up a little, bars 3 & 4 are becoming solid at the slow tempo and you introduce bars 5 & 6. We practise most efficiently when our practice occurs at several different levels: beginning one segment, building up another and consolidating a third.
8 Practice The Joins
Once you have a couple of segments up to a fast enough tempo to feel the character of the music, practise joining them together. For longer segments, practise the transition from the last bar or so of the first segment to the first bar or so of the second. As you learn more segments, add them to those you’ve learnt.
This now becomes the consolidation part – developing a sense of how the segments flow as an entity, as a piece of music, even if they’re not quite at the final tempo.
9 Continuity Practice
At some point, even if it’s not perfect, you have to assume that you’ve learnt the piece. There may be some fluffs and glitches to iron out, but you’re now ready for the last stage, continuity practice. Here’s how:
- Play at a tempo that you know you can manage. Unless it’s a slow piece, this should be in the proper time signature at 60 bpm or more.
- If you make a mistake, stop, go back to the nearest convenient point before the mistake and take another run at it. If it still doesn’t work, that section or join needs separate practice next time. You can circle the area on the part in pencil so that you know where to find it next practice.
- Whatever you do, don’t slow down or speed up. A piece should always be practised at a steady tempo (unless the tempo variation is part of the piece). If you feel you have to slow down in order to play the right notes, you’ve chosen a tempo that’s too fast. Find out how slow you need to go, then start the whole piece again at that slower tempo. If that feels too slow, practise the offending segment or join separately to get the tempo up a bit and come back to the whole piece later.
- Make sure you stick to the tempo. Don’t hesitate or pause between segments unless it is written into the part, such as a fermata or comma. If you do find yourself pausing, practise from before the pause to after it.
10 The Finishing Touches
Once you can play the whole piece at or near its final tempo with only the occasional slip-up, it’s reward time. Try to enjoy the piece while playing, even if there are a few precarious moments (but never slow down for a tricky bit! At this stage, any dodgy bits should be practised separately until they fit the tempo of the rest of the piece).
Now you can apply what I think of as the cheap tricks: polishing the expression and dynamics: flair and pizzaz. When I say cheap, I mean cheap in cost: high value for relatively low effort. These finishing touches take the music to a whole new level!
This part is the most fun. You get to decide how much you want to push the accented notes, how sharply you cut off that staccato note, how boldly you want to swell and fade with the phrases and much more. Expression is like acting: visualise yourself as one of the greats playing to an arena of fans.
The rewards of expression are instantaneous- the playing immediately sounds more impressive. And it’s fun!
If you found this post helpful, please feel welcome to like, share or leave a comment. If you have any questions, leave them as a comment and I’ll respond as soon as I can. To stay up to date wth new posts, please subscribe.
A big thank you to Jo Haythornthwaite design42@iinet.net.au for creating the illustrations for this post.