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Effective Practice Habits
by Doug Lalli

In my years of teaching I’ve found that the most common reason students give up study of the piano is frustration resulting from poor practice habits. Look at it this way: A piano teacher spends one half hour per week with a student. The rest of the time the student is on his (or her) own. If he doesn’t go about his practice methodically and diligently, he’s likely to accomplish very little in the course of a week. If, however, he develops good practice habits, he’ll progress at a steady rate and almost never get bogged down with repeating the same piece week after week. I’ll go so far as to say that practice habits—even more than innate talent—constitute the most critical factor in determining the ultimate success or failure of a piano student. In this article I outline some of the main steps in forming an effective practice regimen, directing my remarks to you the student.

Most students tend to think that “practice” is synonymous with “playing through.” The fact is, it’s impossible to “play through” a piece with any beneficial results until you’ve learned the piece. If you continually play through a piece you haven’t learned, you’re going to be practicing (reinforcing) mistakes. The primary step in effective practicing, then, is to learn the piece in question.

Sight-read, then analyze...

During the lesson I’ll have you sight-read the piece. The goal here is to get through it with as little hesitation as possible, even though notes may be missed along the way. After the lesson you should sight-read the piece again. Then you should analyze it. By scrutinizing what you see on paper you’ll make learning the piece considerably easier. For instance, a phrase may be repeated several times in a given piece. Unless you’re aware of this before you begin to learn the piece, you might waste valuable time learning something you’ve already learned. Or you may note, in analyzing the piece, that a phrase is exactly the same as an earlier phrase except that it begins on a different note. Whatever you can discover in analyzing the piece will help make the job of learning it easier and less time consuming.

...then can you learn.

Now that you’ve analyzed the piece it’s time to begin learning it. For beginning students it’s wise to learn each hand separately to start with. It doesn’t make sense to try to coordinate your hands when each hand is still unsure of itself. So learn each hand separately and, if necessary, one measure at a time. Then begin to combine consecutive measures until you can get from one measure to the next smoothly and without hesitation. When you’ve learned one hand in this manner, do the same for the other hand. Then when you’ve learned each hand, combine them. You’ll encounter a whole new set of problems when you try to coordinate the hands, so again learn each measure separately and then each two consecutive measures until you can consistently play the piece through without hesitation or error. Having learned the piece you’ll now want to play it repeatedly to reinforce and polish up what you’ve learned.

Proper fingering helps

One more thing: fingering. Many students ignore the little numbers above or beneath the notes. These numbers indicate which fingers to use. The fingering guides are there to make the piece easy to play, not difficult. If you take the time to learn the piece with the proper fingering you’ll save yourself a lot of grief and frustration later on.

Effective practicing is rewarding

And to return to my original contention, a feeling of frustration is the main cause of the high drop-out rate among beginning piano students. After all, it’s no fun to do something that’s continually difficult and anxiety provoking. If you develop effective practice habits, however, you’ll find that the piano is enjoyable, rewarding, and not nearly as hard as you thought.

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