One thing about returning to piano after a very long break, is that suddenly learning does feel much more difficult. As a teenager, I could pick most things up relatively quickly. However, what happens when we’ve left a skill to one side for a very long time. My experience has been that it certainly feels much harder work now I’m in my fifties than it did all those years ago.
Therefore, getting more effective at piano practice is a topic close to my heart. It is also a topic that I fear is often not enough considered. One only needs to read the ubiquitous advice of ‘slow it right down and use a metronome’ to realize that many people’s ideas of how to practice are often very limited.
Expanding the Practice Tool of Sections
I have long been a firm believer in the idea of practising in ‘sections’. This is especially true for things I find tricky to play. At the same time, I have equally always felt that something was missing from this approach. I often discovered that even though I could manage individual sections, I often had trouble trying to put everything together. However, I think I have found a four step process that works a treat.
In a nutshell:
- We first Discover the piece we’re about to learn – forming a ‘top down’ view of it, trying to work out how we will eventually wish to play it end to end
- Secondly, we Divide – by splitting things into a set of sections and sub-sections and much smaller fragments.
- Next, we Conquer – by working on the very smallest of our divisions in as many different ways as possible.
- Finally, we Integrate – by reassembling our smallest blocks progressively into the finished article.
Step One – Discover
This is a very important step and, whilst often it need not take too long, it is something I have often neglected.
I have fallen into the trap far too often of launching into ‘learning’ something without first having got a good view of where I want to take it. I’ll likely have heard it before. It’s often when I come across something on YouTube or Facebook (or, indeed, a friend suggests it) that I decide to learn something. However, rarely would I study it first away from the piano. Rarely would I listen to it performed whilst at the same time studying the score. Rarely would I really listen to a great pianist and actually analyse what they are doing.
The issue with missing this step is how do we really know what to practice if we don’t already know how we want it to sound! I think the approach of ‘trying to get the notes under control and then worrying about the rest later’ ultimately caused me to waste a disproportionate amount of time.
Therefore, I’ll try to form my top down view first. I’ll look for things like the pulse, the climax, the way different elements fit together. I’ll think about what kind of tempo I want to achieve, how I want to map the dynamics. I’ll think about rubato and pedal. Basically, all the things that are going to dictate how I want the piece to sound. As the expression goes, we shouldn’t be afraid to steal ideas from other artists in this process!
Step Two – Divide
To help me explain my idea here, allow me to digress for a second. Hopefully this will help things become clearer. When I first started creating YouTube videos, I started watching videos on film-making. Whilst doing this, I came across the framework by which everything from blockbuster movies to simple TV shows are created.
The Hierarchy
- Movies/programmes are divided into a number of ‘scenes’
- Scenes are further split into a number of ‘sequences’
- Sequences are further sub-divided into a number of ‘shots’.
The Hierarchy as a Cooking Show
So, let’s think of a simple cooking show. This show might be demonstrate a number of different recipes. Let’s call each one of these a Scene. Then each individual Scene would have various Sequences such as a tour of the ingredients, chopping ingredients, sautéing said ingredients, plating up the dish. Finally, each of these Sequences is then split into Shots.
These shots are the very smallest building block and may be only a second or two long! Sticking with our Tour of the Ingredients Sequence, a shot might be a close up of a tomato! You might think, well, that can’t be all that involved surely. However, what is truly fascinating is the attention to detail that is present at the level of each individual shot. Even just to do a close up of our tomato, someone has thought about the lighting, the position of said tomato, the background, how much of it might be in focus, whether there would be any camera movement and, if so, in what direction. I could go on, but I’m sure you get my point.
A Piano Learning Hierarchy?
Now, let’s get back to learning a piece on the piano. It one day occurred to me that we could actually think of a piece of music in a similar way filmmakers think of a programme or film. Most music lends itself fairly well to being split into a nested hierarchy similar to the one I described that filmmakers use.
The hierarchy I arrived at I called ‘Sections’ (the equivalent of a Scene), ‘Segments’ (the equivalent of a Sequence) and ‘Snippets’ (the equivalent of a Shot). What I then seek to do is to break the music down according to this hierarchy.
To demonstrate, let’s use a well known example of Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag. I released a YouTube Video on this piece (you can watch it here later) which gives lots of detail on how I went about breaking down the first 50 measures.
Sections
In terms of the ‘Sections’, if we let ourselves be guided by the way Joplin wrote this Rag, then we can say there are 3 neat little sections in these 50 measures. In this case, the first and the third are extremely similar so that should save us some work!
Segments
Taking measures 1 to 17 as our first section, let’s think about how we could further break it down. We might consider that this has two ‘Segments’. Based on the musical material, I’d use the following measures:
- 1-8 as a first segment
- 9 to 16 as a second Segment
Snippets
Now, we’re ready to do our final breakdown into ‘Snippets’. I like to think of the Snippet as being the smallest number of notes that makes logical sense as my practice starting point. You might think of them as ‘building blocks’. I think it’s also perfectly fine to let them overlap.
So, in this case based on the harmonies, I’d use two measures as a snippet for the entire piece.
In the interests of time, I won’t go over the rest as I’m sure you get the idea from this example. You can always check out the YouTube video or download my free practice notes to see what I did.
You might be wondering why I sometimes use something as short as only 2 measures as a Snippet. Equally, why split into two Segments – there are after all only 17 measures here. The reason is that I’ve learned that ‘less is more’ here. Keeping Snippets, Segments and Sections perhaps somewhat smaller than we might initially think, pays dividends as we move forward.
Once we’ve done this exercise for the entire piece, we’re now ready for Step Three.
Step 3 – Conquer
For this particular step, we work on individual Snippets. However, just like a film-maker, we think in detail about what we want for each one. This is where the work we did in Step One – Discover – comes into play. First, I work through the musical side of things. I’ll think about phrasing, pedal, dynamics, rubato and the like. If it is something that repeats, we might want to think of several ways we might ultimately want to perform it. I’ll also think through the technical side of things, considering elements like fingering, articulation, movement and so forth.
Once we know precisely what we want (which, of course, might change over time), we can then think about how we will set about practising the snippet. What I have come to realise , is that the more awkward I am likely to find something to play, the more ways I will need to find to practice it. In the case of something relatively simple – then simply working on it slowly a few times might be more than enough to get it how I want it.
How many ways can we practice this – I’ve called my Practice Variants
However, as the difficulty level rises, for me, simply working slowly no longer suffices. This is where adding more practice techniques comes to our rescue.
Some high level examples are:
- Staccato – practising a passage that I ultimately want legato with a staccato articulation
- Rhythms – dotted rhythms are the most obvious but there are a myriad of possibilities here
- Dynamics – practising a pianissimo passage forte and vice versa
- Pauses – placing pre-defined pauses at different points
- Simplified – omitting certain notes for example to make something simpler to practice
- Blocking – particularly useful with arpeggiated passages where we play them as blocked chords instead
- Exercises – developing little exercises out of the notes in the snippet (you’ll find fantastic examples of this in the Cortot edition of the Chopin Etudes)
- Add On – starting with a sub-set of the notes and gradually adding to that.
For want of a better expression, I call each of these different techniques my Practice Variants. The Practice Variants that are likely to work really depend on the nature of the music we’re trying to work through. Certain practice techniques will lend themselves better than others to some problems.
However, ultimately, we need to practice until each Practice Variant starts to feel easy or comfortable for each of the Snippets. Additionally, we need to end up at a Practice Variant that corresponds to our intended end result. This I have called my Performance Variant.
Practice Variants Applied
Sticking with the example of the Maple Leaf Rag, for a piece like this I’d use Dotted Rhythms. I’d also use the Simplify technique (mainly in the right hand) so that I can focus more brain power initially to the left. Finally, the technique of ‘add on’ works well. I go over them in detail in the video I mentioned earlier.
However, there is an important trick here. The object of the exercise is to get things to feel comfortable. We want no hesitations, no muddled fingers. Everything needs to feel ‘under control’. Whilst things still feel awkward at this micro level, if we start trying to move forward to the next step, we’ll come unstuck. When we’re still using a relatively limited number of notes, it’s easier to spot and correct problems!
Working out Practice Variants, however, is probably the most difficult thing to do. It’s certainly too complex for a short article. My go to resource has always been Graham Fitch’s eBook Series (available on Amazon) on Practising the Piano. You’ll find worked examples of all of the above ideas plus literally hundreds of others that you’ll be able to adapt to whatever music you are trying to learn.
As an aside, I’d recommend taking a look at a subscription to the Practising the Piano Online Academy which gives access to this series of ebooks plus lots and lots more.
Working through each individual snippet carefully and mindfully allows us to lay very firm foundations before we start on the final step – that of Integrating our work.
Step Four – Integrate
I settled on the word ‘Integrate’ after drawing a parallel to my background in Software Engineering. Accepted best practice these days is actually to engineer things in very small components that can be coded and tested independently. Once we’re satisfied with a set of components, we start to integrate them.
So, as we start to get our individual snippets ready, we can start to progressively integrate them with each other until we can eventually end up with an entire Segment that we’re happy with.
However, here is another parallel I made with software engineering. Although individual components (so, our snippets) might work fine on their own, as we start to put them together, they don’t always necessarily give us the result we were expecting. We might find we need to tweak things to get them to fit together properly. This is why I think we need to start this gradual integration as early as possible in the learning process.
Integrating Practice Variants
To help with early integration, I have found, for example, that if I have lots of different Practice Variants for a set of snippets, some of them will start to feel comfortable long before the others. For example, we might find that playing our snippets individually in dotted rhythms works perfectly fine. In this case, we can start integrating the dotted rhythms Practice Variant.
However, and this applies no matter what the difficulty level, I have found that the integration process must be done carefully. Let’s say for example we have a Segment composed of 4 different snippets. First, we can integrate just two at a time. Initially we can work on Snippets one and two, then three and four. However, we can also work on two and three independently too.
Next we might extend our integration to groups of 3 Snippets. So, initially, one, two and three, followed by three, four and five.
If we had more than 4 Snippets, sticking with this theme, we could then extend to groups of four Snippets and so forth.
Is it worth the effort?
I know this might seem like over-kill, however, I can assure you that for me it has paid dividends to take the time to do this. Previously, I had a tendency to just stick everything together and then wonder to myself why it simply wasn’t working. I also found that things I should have easily been able to learn, took a disproportionate amount of time.
This progressive approach helps us to spot all potential problems much earlier. As we’re still working on reasonably small groups of notes with which we’ve a good familiarity, quickly fixing things becomes much easier.
As we start to get other Practice Variants to the point we’re comfortable with them, then again, we integrate these in exactly the same way.
Our ultimate goal of course is to integrate our Performance Variant (the finished version that represents how we’d like to perform it). However, integrating our intermediate stages means that by the time we’re ready for this final one, everything is so much more reliable.
A Worked Example
For a worked example of this, I’d invite you to check out the video below.
I have found this works particularly well for we returning pieces. I don’t know about you, but I certainly find things much harder to learn than when I was in my teens.
Let me know how you get on.
