This post is to go with my YouTube Video comparing Piano Practice to baking a Layer Cake.
I often want to tackle pieces that are way beyond my current technical level. This means that by definition I need to gain the technique which I will need in order to be able to manage the new piece.
There is definitely a school of thought that says you can build technique through Scales and Arpeggios, by spending hours going over Hanon and Czerny. I’m not saying that you can’t take that approach, however, I think there is another way.
I’ve discussed before on my blog my view of the value of Scales and Arpeggios to the returning pianist . Have a read … you’ll see I don’t really get the point of doing them and so they are not part of my practice regime. I did hundreds of hours of them back in the day so I certainly know them all – I just no longer practice them.
As a returning pianist, I’m also not really interested in trying to learn ‘simple’ repertoire. I have a recollection of being able to play at a certain level so want to play things that are at least at that level – if not beyond. Equally, I also have a very limited amount of time to practice so devoting lots of that time to Scales or Hanon just isn’t for me. Perhaps this is the wrong approach but time will tell.
Louis Kentner (I got this quote from Graham Fitch’s PianoPractice Series) once said that “There is no such thing as a Difficult Piece. A piece is either impossible – or it is easy. The process whereby it migrates from one category to the other is known as practicing”.
At any one point in time, I have a set of longer term projects that I think might take me a year or more to learn, and I try to have one or two things that I think I should be able to get reasonably under control within a month or two assuming I can practice for about an hour a day.
In my day job, I’m an IT Program Manager. When explaining to clients why things are taking time and the results are not immediate, we use the analogy of peeling an onion. For any individual problem, it’s like peeling that onion, as you fix one thing, you reveal another problem underneath and it can take some time to get to the real root cause. I always used to tackle my piano repertoire by just plugging away, finding problems, solving problems and so on. However, this never really worked for me in honesty.
I’ve now adopted a different way of practicing that brought to mind the Layer Cake analogy. So, rather than waiting to find a problem, I pro-actively break down my pieces into elements that I’ll be able to tackle more easily, practice those until they are solid, and then add on the next layer.
I’m not saying I don’t need to figuratively speaking peel onions as I progress, but with proper planning I seem to spend less time now crying over them!
At the moment, my long term projects are:
- Liebestraume No. 3
- Chopin Op 25. No. 2 (the Bees)
- Rachmaninov 18th Variation on a Theme of Paganini
Each of these has sections that I simply can’t play and so I need to work on individual difficulties in isolation, but in such a way that I can progressively build on them to get to the desired result.
In my video I go through just bars 41 to 43 – where the main melody comes back in a fortissimo E Major.
This section has a few challenges for me:
Strong, clear octaves – mine have never been great
Jumps – with the hands first jumping away from each other
Jumps – with the hands jumping towards each other
It is also usually played fairly quickly (which for me makes it even more problematic).
I devote 5 or so minutes each day to a few exercises around these 3 bars
For my first exercises, rather than using an arpeggio, I use a block chord in the centre and then practice jumping both inwards from the octaves to that chord and outwards from the chord to the octaves.
I also play the 4th Finger of the LH prior to jumping to the D Natural and then the C Sharp octaves in the Left Hand. This is to ensure my hands are used to moving at slightly different times here (the Right Hand needs to make the jump first alone with the Left Hand jumping at the last moment).
Next, I do variations where I play all the notes but using two different rhythm patterns.
I use a first rhythm so that I insert a slight pause before jumping from the octave to the broken chord.
So I am practicing the outward jump closer to performance tempo with a pause before the inward jump.
Then a second rhythm that inserts a pause just before returning to the octave.
So, I am practising the inward jump closer to performance tempo but the outward jump after a pause.
To help understand this, I recommend you watch the video – go straight to about 7 minutes 25 seconds to get straight to this part.
Basically, here I’m focussing on practicing each individual difficulty in context, but in a way that separates them from the remainder without losing the context – so here I will have built it up in several different layers
This has 3 great advantages
- You spend more time practicing the ‘right notes’ rather than ‘wrong ones’ (because it’s a little easier to play this way)
- Your brain is able to focus on one technical problem at a time
- You are already practicing closer to a ‘performance speed’ with the specific element on which you are focussing
I’m sure this technique can be applied to many different pieces – let me know how useful you find it.
