Trying Out Different Practicing Methods

Franz Liszt claimed that, for many years, he was sure he had never practiced the piano for less than 10 hours every day. As superhuman as that sounds, it does make sense that Liszt would spend most of his waking life playing the piano. After all, his “Transcendental Etudes” were so difficult when he first composed them that he realized that he was the only one who could possibly play them. He wrote simpler versions of them, and the simpler versions are still among the most difficult piano pieces ever composed.

Most of us aren’t Franz Liszt. Most of us couldn’t compose a set of some of the most difficult etudes of all time at the age of 15 (being 14 years old now, I suddenly feel as if all my time on Earth so far has been wasted). And most of us don’t have ten free hours during the day to practice the piano. In fact, I’m probably lucky that I have the opportunity to practice several times a week, for (I think) a little over an hour each time. But then, I enjoy playing the piano. I don’t procrastinate playing the piano and choose to do something fun: for me, playing the piano IS something fun.

I think that’s the main reason that I’m so relatively good at playing the piano: it’s because I have fun doing it. Of course, my skills are not completely unsurpassed. In fact, I might be in the top ten percent of the piano-playing population as far as practical playing goes, which may sound good, but there are a LOT of people in the world who play the piano. I always get a bit jealous when I hear about child prodigies who were able to, like, memorize entire concertos by Rachmaninoff at the age of six. How is it even physically possible for a six-year-old child to play a concerto by Rachmaninoff? Rachmaninoff’s hands were huge, he composed music with chords that were about 9 whole steps wide (that’s about from a C to the next E on a piano). There’s no way a six-year-old could have fingers long enough to play that.

But enough of my immature complaining about people who are better than be at something. My practice methods, to put it simply, are wrong, but I’m trying to make them better, one step at a time. For one, they say it’s not a good idea to practice every single day. Like weight training, you should take a day to let your mind rest. My current schedule is practicing Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. I have my piano lessons on Tuesday, but we basically just cover musical theory during those classes, since they’re only about half an hour long and the total time duration of the pieces I’m learning totals to over an hour.

Although a lot of people don’t like having to practice the piano all the time (I didn’t always like it either) I’m now at a skill level at which it’s easy, and I can progress fairly quickly. It took me years to get to this skill level, and I still have a lot to learn, but now that I enjoy learning new pieces and composing music, the rest of the journey (if there’s even an end to it, which I know there isn’t) should be much easier and much more fun.

My typical practice session consists of playing the few songs I’m trying to learn all the way through from beginning to end. They say, though, that one shouldn’t just practice a piano piece all the way through, and that they should learn the most difficult parts first. I haven’t actually tried this method: I usually just play a piano piece from beginning to end over and over again until I memorize it at the right speed with the right notes and the right dynamics. But hey, this new system of learning the difficult parts first might be worth a shot.

Another thing to try out is piano exercises. One could just do scale and arpeggio exercises, or one could by a book of piano exercises on sheet music. Me, I think most of those books are too cutesie, so I’m trying to learn Chopin’s Etudes (second in difficulty only to Liszt’s). How am I doing so far, you ask? Not great, but I am trying to get into the habit of reading and following the fingering mentioned in the book. Chopin knows best, I say.

So, that’s what I’m trying out. I’m not saying anything is right or wrong, but you should try out different practicing methods and see what works best for you. I will make a mental note to write about practicing methods in more detail in the future.