To plan or not to plan …?
Do you plan out your practice or just go with the flow? We all have limited time to practice and, if there is one thing I have learned with age, it’s that when things are well planned up front, it generally saves lots of time and effort down the line.
This post is to go with my YouTube video on how I plan my Piano Practice.
When I was young, any ‘plan’ in terms of practicing was fairly basic. I’d just split my time down into a few simple blocks:
- Scales
- Arpeggios
- Study
- Piece 1
- Piece 2 and so on.
I rarely had any specific goals in mind … I guess my goal was just to ‘practice’. More often than not, I didn’t even really have any set time limit – probably always intended to do at least 30 minutes to an hour, but that was the limit of my structure.
When ‘practicing’ Scales, I’d just play a random selection absent mindedly, on the principle that they’d improve by themselves over time (and this sort of worked well enough to get me through my grades). For Arpeggios, I took the same approach. I never did ‘exercises’ like Hanon – though I have very vague memories of some type of 5 finger exercise right at the very start just to get used to how to move my fingers across the keyboard.
My first memories
My first teacher would assign me a study to learn each week … not a ‘Chopin Etude’ you understand, just a basic technical exercise and also a Piece – I remember things like the slow movement of the Moonlight Sonata, Schubert’s Seranade and the like once I got past the very basics.
When practicing these pieces, I don’t remember any particular ‘plan’. I’d generally play through and, if I made a mistake bad enough to bother me somewhere, I’d stop and work on that part for a while and then continue.
This unplanned approach was probably fine given the earlier grades aren’t so tough and the technical challenges are much less pronounced. However, once you start to look at more advanced repertoire, it no longer works.
My current approach
These days, I take a much more scientific approach. One of my major inspirations in this area is Graham Fitch. If you read Pianist Magazine – check it out here – then you’ll be familiar with him. He has also created an eBook series (which I have purchased where he focusses on ‘how to practice’). This is a skill I think that on reflection I didn’t used to think about – it was more about how to play.
I’m not saying I follow Graham’s advice ‘word for word’, but basically, rather than just sitting down and Practicing, I now have a full plan. I plan how I intend to spend my upcoming Practice Session (a session varying between an hour and an hour and a half).
Setting goals for pieces
The planning process starts with the Pieces I want to learn.
For each piece, I identify a number of Goals that I’d like to achieve. Goals can be anything from ‘learning the notes’ to ‘getting bar 44 up to 135 bpm’. For each Goal, I then have my ‘Strategies’ – so what am I going to do in order to achieve that goal. Strategies can be things like ‘Play Slowly Hands Separately’, ‘Play in a Dotted Rhythm’ and so forth. My Goals are generally centred around areas where I know I’m going to struggle. I also decide how much time to spend on each individual Goal as part of my Practice Plan.
Therefore, if you do scales and arpeggios as part of your regular practice, you can set yourself specific goals around them. This could be attaining a given Beats Per Minute (bpm).
Recording time spent
When I’m practicing, I then record the time I spend working on each goal to help me evaluate how much progress I’m making (or not making as the case may be). Incidentally, I’ve found that it pays to keep changing Strategies to achieve a Goal both for added interest and also to make better progress.
Another thing I regularly do these days is to break difficult things down into exercises – so my Strategy might well be composed of the exercises I have created. I’ve created a Play List of videos where I go into some detail of different ways of creating exercises – you can find it here. In short though, the aim of the game is to minimise the amount of time spend practicing ‘wrong notes’.
My practice app
To help me manage my practice time more efficiently, I actually created myself an App to run on my iPad (I did download one from the AppStore log ago and then it suddenly stopped working).
Within this App, I have the ability to create my Repertoire List.
Next, I can also create a Practice Plan, including creating goals.
From my Practice area, I choose the goal I want to use and then Practice it
Finally, when just playing for pleasure, I use my Play area so I can keep track of how long I spend.
The App times how long I’ve been Practicing any individual goal so that I know where my Practice time has been spent.
Finally, I have a Review area where I can look at what I’ve been doing over the past days or months. I find this is a really motivating area (especially when I’ve had a good month and done some work each day). I created it so I can either look by minutes per day I have practiced or show the breakdown of the pieces I’ve been practicing over any given period.
You could very easily do something similar yourself using a simple notebook or a spreadsheet. I find using an app is just that little bit quicker rather than writing everything down. If you’d be interested in having a copy of my App, do let me know in the comments.
Are you a planner or do you use a ‘go with the flow’ technique when you Practice – let me know, I’d be pleased to hear.
Personally, I have found that a more planned approach seems to work better. If you’re looking to think about organising your own practice time, I hope this has given you ideas of how you might be able to do that.
