Another year has passed and it’s perhaps a good time to reflect on what 2022 has taught me about practising the piano.
Quantity wise, it’s easy to calculate. I managed to get 754 hours of practice done this year. All in all, I’m quite pleased with that! It’s less than last year, but with the lifting of COVID restrictions, travel has been back on the agenda, so I lost around 84 days due to various trips. That makes an average of 2 hours, 40 minutes each day that I did practice.
However, what about the quality? Am I progressing as quickly as I think I should? Here, arriving at the answer is much more subjective.
I think I have learned (or perhaps re-learned) three important lessons.
Remember to apply what we have learned
One of the first things to strike me was that in fact, often, it’s not learning some new technique that makes the difference, but remembering to apply what we have learned previously. This might sound an odd thing to say, yet I have noticed that often, I’ll spending an inordinate amount of time practising something. However, if I merely applied brain, it would likely fix itself.
One obvious example (of many) I’ve noticed is not remembering the ‘in and out’ movement. I wrote about this back in October 2019 so, you might think, it is a lesson I have now learned. In short, we all subconsciously use this motion – that of moving our hand towards or away from the black key area. Yet there are times when consciously exploiting this motion can be extremely beneficial.
For example, all too frequently, when practising the piano I’ll find I have issues with a particular passage. I’ll then work on it for ages. It’s only much later I realise that simply moving my hand slightly inwards (or outwards) can avoid an awkward twist that results in a missed or uneven note!
So, a key lesson for this year is to remember to keep applying what I have learned to all the pieces I attempt!
Pay close attention to fingering
The next thing was about paying more attention to fingering. Again, this is a topic of which you might think I am already suitably aware. After all, I bought and studied Rami Bar Niv’s The Art of Piano Fingering (I reviewed it back in July 2019). However, I was recently learning a piece that involved lots of rolled chords in the left hand (Silent Night, arranged by Derry Bertenshaw). On the face of it, nothing particularly challenging, yet stubbornly inconsistent execution!
I discovered, however, that a simple change of fingering made a night and day improvement. When rolling a chord in the left hand made of the root, 5th and 10th, my instinctive reaction is to use 5, 2 and 1. I guess this is hours of practising arpeggios where mostly we’ll use 2 on the 5th.
However, I had filmed myself using an overhead view and noticed that this caused me to twist my wrist to get my thumb to that top note (the 10th). Interestingly, if I instead use 5, 3, 1, then this twist is gone! This is a remarkably simple change, yet introduces great freedom! So, the lesson is if something feels awkward, I need to spend some time really questioning the fingering rather than just ‘working harder’!
Practice everything – even the easy bits!
The final thing is kind of new to me. It is that of practicing everything – even the easy parts! Like many, I came to the realisation some time ago that simply playing through our pieces cannot be called ‘practising the piano’.
So, I went to the polar opposite and would spend pretty much all my time working on only the tricky passages. As a consequence, I’d often spend little to no time on areas I expected would be easy to play. I’d then find that when I tried to record something, the tricky bits would come out fine, but the rest was somewhat lacking in conviction.
So, now, when practising the piano, I split my pieces down into much smaller parts. I call these Snippets and I initially work on each of these fragments individually. I’ll then work from front to back (or back to front) on consecutive groups of such Snippets (that I call a Segment) and will spend the amount of time necessary on each individual one. Anything that I can manage to play well without too much effort naturally gets afforded less time than anything I find tricky. However, and this is the key, I’m still working on everything so that things will come together in a more consistent manner. You can read more about this in my Four Step Process for Learning a Piece.
Of course, these are just some of the most obvious things that have occurred to me in my reflections. What things have you noticed over the course of this year?
