This article is part of my guide to Improving our Piano Playing
One of the reasons we get stuck is that we tend to do too much of one type of practice.
Either we simplify endlessly without ever testing ourselves … or we repeatedly try to play things “as written” without actually solving the problem.
The Pareto Principle
I’m sure you’ll be familiar with the idea of the Pareto Principle. When I was taught this at school, the example our teacher used was that if you took all of the sales of a supermarket, then 80% of these would come from 20% of their lines. He even went further and purported that if you then analysed the 20% of their lines, they would make 80% of their sales from 20% of those!
It would appear that this basic principle comes to light extremely frequently.
How can we apply Pareto to Piano Practice
Indeed, I think that it almost certainly applies to Piano Practice in a number of interesting ways.
At a more macro level, as intermediate pianists, I think we should be spending at least 80% of our time on actual music (not ‘technique’ or ‘exercises’). I have gone in much more detail in this article on the Perfect Piano Practice Routine. I’ll also link it again at the bottom for you so you can keep reading here.
In practice, we can think of our time as split into two roles:
- most of it simplifying (80%)
- some of it rebuilding and testing (20%)
The First 80%
Simplifying is the foundation of almost all piano practice advice. Let’s think of the beginner advice. We’re told to work ‘Hands Separately’, ‘Slowly’ and in ‘Sections’. What each of these has in common is that they make the music ‘simpler’. Indeed, for beginner music it would be difficult to work out a way of simplifying beyond these ideas.
For more intermediate music, we need to get a lot more inventive in terms of how we might ‘simplify’ something.
Simplifying Complex Music
There are almost countless ways of Simplifying more complex music. Here are just a few for you and if you’d like more detail on how we apply them you might like my article on the how we layer our practice.
- Rhythms – of all varieties
- Pauses – similar but often more flexible than a rhythm
- Simplifying one hand and leaving the other ‘as written’
- Simplifying both hands
- Add On – can be done either for both hands or selectively adding back bits of one hand to the full hand of the other
- Chaining – creating longer and longer chains of notes (often overlapped)
- Interleaving – breaking things up within a practice session
Naturally, these can often be combine with each other and supplemented by using very short sections.
What each has in common is that we use it to remove a degree of complexity. For example, the standard ‘dotted rhythm’ effectively makes something slower, but only 50% of the notes are actually slow – the remainder are at full speed.
So, for every difficulty within our piece, we define how we will practice it and spend 80% of our time working through them.
Using the Practice Loop until we get to our End Result
This is exactly what sits underneath the Practice Loop:
- we diagnose the problem
- simplify it until it becomes manageable
- then gradually rebuild it
As we keep going through the practice loop, we’ll be adding material to the point that our entire piece becomes within this loop.
The remaining 20%
However, what I think we often neglect is the 20%
The goal here is not improvement—it’s robustness.
Here there are 2 essential elements
Rehearsing
Increasing the difficulty in the Practice Room
Rehearsing is an essential skill. This includes things such as being able to play through wrong notes. It also includes being able to re-start from any random point in a piece.
Increasing the difficulty level
Making things more difficult in the Practice Room is how we develop the majority of our additional ‘security’ in our playing.
Some obvious examples might be:
- Practicing a fast passage 20% faster than we would want to perform it
- Working on jumps by jumping an octave further than written
- Playing with our eyes closed
- Playing in front of an audience
If you’ve been feeling stuck, this is often the missing piece—not more effort, but a better balance between simplifying and challenging.
To see how Pareto Practice can fit into the Perfect Piano Practice Routine, check out this article.
You can find my full guide on suggestions for improving our playing and our practising here.
