Efficient Piano Practice: 10 Expert Tips

Everybody is under intense time pressure these days, and musicians are no exception. I receive a number of requests from visitors asking about efficient piano practice. In reply to these requests, here are some expert tips I've developed over the years that can help you make the most of your practice time.

1. Get organized. Efficient piano practice is really about how to organize oneself to get the best results from the effort expended. The first step in this process is to write a daily practice plan. Working step by step from an organized list will not only allow you to stay focused on your most important practice tasks, it will give you a feeling of accomplishment as you complete each item.

2. Set practice goals every day. Your daily practice plan should begin by brainstorming, on paper, all your musical tasks for that day. It's vital to make each item as specific as possible. Each goal must be concrete and measurable. Thus, unless you're a prodigy on the order of a Mozart, "Learn new Beethoven sonata" will be overwhelming to complete start to finish in an afternoon practice session, but individual steps such as "Read through first movement of Beethoven sonata," "Complete formal analysis of first movement" and "Write fingerings for first movement" are all steps that can be completed within thirty- to ninety-minute blocks of time.

3. Prioritize your daily practice goals. Efficient piano practice means working on your highest-priority musical goals at all times. Once you've made your list, order each item by priority and sequence, and then work on your list in order.

4. Focus on one task at a time. Discipline yourself to complete each practice goal before moving on to the next. In the long run, you'll save enormous time by completing the day's work on your Mozart sonata before studying Debussy, rather than bouncing back and forth between them at whim. While you might not get that new Chopin etude note-perfect and up to tempo today, you can indeed 'finish' a given passage with musical polish at a slow tempo. Indeed, Sviatoslav Richter's way of building his enormous repertoire was to finish each line of music before moving on to the next.

5. Only practice with full concentration! In his autobiography, Daniel Barenboim cites this as a fundamental rule for practicing. If your practicing does not demand enormous reserves of concentration, then you're not practicing properly. One of my teachers, Dr. Harvey Wedeen of Temple University in Philadelphia (who taught some of the world's top talents such as Marc-André Hamelin), insisted that five minutes of concentrated practice is far more valuable than five hours of disengaged finger-moving. The mind must be active at all times, since it is first and foremost the mind that must play the piano, as Joyce Hatto insisted.

6. Don't allow yourself the 'luxury' of mistakes. Mistakes cost far too much time to repair and only create uncertainty when your practice ought to build security. Remember, your performance is a direct result of how you practice, and efficient piano practice means playing correctly. If you start making mistakes, it means either that you're going too fast to learn the music or that your brain is tired. If that's the case, it's best to take a break and do something -- anything -- else.

7. Always warm up first! Properly warmed-up hands will allow you to accomplish the physical tasks demanded by difficult repertoire with greater ease and with fewer errors. I find that scales make for the best warm-up. I caution that "technical" studies as such should properly be avoided! Every moment at the piano should be musically and emotionally rewarding, which means that no note should ever be played mechanically.

8. Schedule your practice sessions. As useful as this tip may be, it must be subsidiary to the rule of only practicing when the mind can best concentrate. For many people, this is first thing in the morning. Not only is the mind fresh, but you'll have a feeling of accomplishment having started your day by completing a major task, not to mention an emotionally rewarding one.

9. Keep a practice journal. I created a simple Excel spreadsheet that allow me to create entries at the end of each day listing exactly which pieces I studied and the number of minutes I spent on each one. I've discovered that timing myself forces the mind to focus, and the clock doesn't lie. At the end of the week, month and year you can discover how much time you spent on each piece, which can help you when planning your repertoire and performances in the future.

10. Study away from the piano. Some of the most efficient piano practice can be accomplished without a piano. Analyze the piece, listen mentally, hear each voice in your inner ear, sing each line, discover thematic relations and harmonic subtleties. It is always amazing to me how many music students simply learn notes without ever really knowing the piece or its compositional strategy. Instead, be sure to make mental study and analysis an integral part of your piano practice.

While these efficient piano practice tips themselves take some practice, I'm certain that you'll experience gains in productivity from the first day you start using them. Happy practicing!