A 20 minute practise schedule for an intermediate piano player
Saturday, November 11, 2023 | Uncategorized
This an example of a condensed 20-minute practice session tailored for an intermediate level piano player:
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Warm-up (3 minutes): Engage in light finger exercises and play through a scale to warm up your hands.
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Repertoire (7 minutes): Focus on a specific section or passage of a piece you're currently learning. Work on refining details and addressing challenging parts.
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Sight-reading (3 minutes): Quickly read through a short musical passage or a new piece. The goal is to improve your ability to read and play music on sight.
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Technique (3 minutes): Choose a specific technical exercise, like scales, arpeggios, or finger exercises. Concentrate on precision and control.
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Ear training (2 minutes): Listen to a short melody or chord progression, then try to play it back on the piano. This helps improve your ear and musical memory.
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Review (2 minutes): Quickly review what you've practiced during the session. Identify areas that need more attention in your next practice.
This condensed schedule covers a range of important elements in a short amount of time. Adjust the time allocated to each section based on your priorities and the specific aspects of your playing that need improvement. Regular, focused practice is more beneficial than occasional long sessions.
List of great pianists
Friday, October 13, 2023 | Uncategorized
I have attached a list created by another piano teacher of great pianists, both dead and alive. Each pianist’s name is a link to a YouTube video of them playing.
It is an eclectic mix of styles including classical, jazz, Latin, and pop. Some use keyboards, synthesisers, loop pedal and other instruments and techniques.
Maybe there is an artist that you think should be added to the list? Let me know what you think.
Why not take a listen to a few now, or maybe give yourself a target to 9listen to maybe three every day? It’s good to broaden our minds to different styles of music.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14d9eEvdfOjpwY075tq3TlycKSmJmcdfK/view?usp=drivesdk
Perfect Practicing 3
Thursday, April 6, 2023 | Uncategorized
Lesson 3
“I practice all the time, but I’m just not getting any better!”
Your brain 🧠 is very selective as to what it chooses to ENGRAVE- that is, to ‘permanently’ commit to memory.
If you learn how to properly enter. information into your brain, your brain will ENGRAVE this information, and retain it much better than before.
Any mistake- note, rhythm, fingering, tone, etc. will cause your brain to REJECT what you have just practiced.
TEMPO:
Since it only accepts and records perfect input, your brain rejects learning new material unless the tempo is extremely SLOW.
It shows you that it is ‘unhappy’ by making the usual random mistakes- notes, rhythm, fingering, tone, etc. whenever you practice too fast.
Your brain ‘likes’ to learn in a state of total relaxation, and fast practicing stresses your brain out.
How slow is slow enough?
Students often tell me, “I’m now practicing slowly enough to not make mistakes, but I still feel that I’m not making good progress.”
When you begin to practice slowly, you’ll see the mistakes start to fall away. You’ll begin to form the habit of playing perfectly. But ‘playing no mistakes’ is just the beginning.
If you don’t play slowly enough, your brain will use up ALL of its PROCESSING POWER just to play the right notes, and there will be no power left for the brain to ENGRAVE, to go into ‘record mode’, and retain the new music ‘permanently’.
That is why you can practice slowly and perfectly, and STILL make little progress.
You have to go slowly enough to achieve complete relaxation, and then go EVEN SLOWER than it seems necessary to play the correct notes, for the brain to have enough PROCESSING POWER left over to ENGRAVE, to go into ‘record mode’.
Once you have successfully gone into ‘record mode’, you can incrementally double and even triple your playing speed!
How will you know that you’ve gone into ‘record mode’ and ENGRAVED?
This part is amazing…
LOOP (seamlessly repeat) your 2-bar section 8-16 times. Since you are now playing extremely slowly, you won’t be making any mistakes at all.
All of a sudden you will lose control of your playing, blank out, and make many mistakes. DON’T STOP PLAYING!
This is called the POINT OF FATIGUE. When the brain goes into ‘record mode’, it can’t control your playing. The mistakes are the sign that this section is being ‘permanently’ ENGRAVED! If you
stop when you blank out, your brain will trash the recording, so keep the loop going until it becomes perfect again.
This music is now ‘permanently’ encoded in your brain.
Next post: “How do I know how fast to practice?”
Yehuda/Jordan Kaplan teaches piano & guitar world-wide 🌍 via FaceTime & Facebook Instant Messenger.
Contact: Yehuda Kaplan via Facebook Instant Messenger • https://www.facebook.com/yehuda.kaplan74
(C) Yehuda/Jordan Kaplan 2023
All rights reserved.
Perfect Practicing 4
Thursday, April 6, 2023 | Uncategorized
Lesson 4
“I find practicing boring and annoying.
Now you’re giving me extra things to worry about. Who needs this?”
You do.
Practicing, at its highest form should be a form of meditation. You should feel calm, refreshed, and ready to take on the world at the end of your practice session.
Here are some tools and concepts to help you achieve this:
How fast should I practice?
You can practice as fast as you like, as long as you make no significant mistakes.
There are 2 types of mistakes- insignificant and significant.
• Insignificant mistakes are one-time random wrong notes, finger slips, etc. Ignore them and move on.
• Significant mistakes include bad rhythm, constant wrong notes, bad fingering, bad tone & articulation, memory lapses, etc.
As you eliminate the confusion caused by significant mistakes by looping 2-bar phrases at a SLOW tempo, the insignificant slips will become less frequent.
ALL SIGNIFICANT MISTAKES ARE CAUSED BY PRACTICING TOO FAST!
Here’s a useful mantra:
“I made a mistake - I must be playing too fast.”
It’s better to err on the side of practicing too slow, rather than too fast, because
• fast practicing with mistakes, or even slow practicing with tension, will cause the brain to reject the input, and
• there is no down side to practicing too slow!
I will often ask a student to slow down,
and they will agree and play the passage slow enough to play no wrong notes.
But, that is not enough!
Just as the brain needs EXCESS processing power to avoid stage fright,
the brain also needs EXCESS processing power to ‘record’ what is being practiced!
If your brain is maxed out by playing too fast, you will have an ‘in one ear, out the other’ experience.
If you practice too fast with mistakes, the brain trashes the practicing, and little is accomplished except for some low-level muscle memory.
What people don’t realize is that one can make ‘no mistakes’ in their practicing, and STILL make little or no progress!
The brain will ONLY go into record mode when mind and body are in a state of TOTAL RELAXATION.
If there is TENSION, wrong notes, bad rhythm, etc., only superficial muscle memory will be recorded.
Muscle memory is the lowest level of musical memory, because counting,
knowledge of notes & chords, rhythmic accuracy, and emotionally intelligent performance can only come from brain memory, and not physical muscle memory.
Once the brain has a perfect recording of what you are practicing, it will allow you to play as FAST as you like, subject to your physical limitations.
I often have students initially practice at a tempo of 30 - 50. It’s not unusual for them to play from 90 - 132 or FASTER by the end of the lesson!
Next post: “The 7 ways we learn music.”
Yehuda/Jordan Kaplan teaches piano & guitar world-wide 🌍 via FaceTime & Facebook Instant Messenger.
Contact: Yehuda Kaplan via Facebook Instant Messenger • https://www.facebook.com/yehuda.kaplan74
(C) Yehuda/Jordan Kaplan 2023
All rights reserved.
Perfect Practicing 2
Friday, March 31, 2023 | Uncategorized
“What are mistakes, and how do we fix them?”
How many times have you said to your teacher, “I played that perfectly at home, but in front of you, I can hardly play at all?” - And even more so, in front of an audience.
That’s because you only practiced at the level of superficial WRITING.
Essentially ‘in one ear, out the other’.
The brain 🧠 can record information in 3 ways:
• WRITING - weak, superficial learning (caused by fast practicing of long sections, or even entire pieces)
• SCRATCHING - moderate learning that ‘scratches beneath the surface’
• ENGRAVING - deep, penetrating, permanent learning that avoids stage fright, confusion, insecurity,
memory lapses, and even most wrong notes.
The most powerful tool for ‘SCRATCHING beneath the surface’ is the SLOW LOOP.
LOOPING is taking a small 2 bar phrase (one bar or even half a bar when learning difficult music), and slowly repeating it in groups of at least 8 times. The loop must be rhythmically perfect. The last beat of the looped phrase must seamlessly be followed by the first note of the new repetition.
ALL MISTAKES ARE CAUSED BY PRACTICING TOO FAST!
If you made a mistake, you are practicing too fast. If you reduce the speed, you will eventually stop
making any mistakes at all.
But, even this is not enough. You need to continue to reduce the speed until you can play the 2 bar phrase in a state of TOTAL RELAXATION.
When you reach this state, practicing ceases to be unpleasant drudgery, and becomes a pleasant MEDITATION.
It is in this REPETITIVE MEDITATIVE STATE that we begin the process of ENGRAVING.
When one says “mistake” in music, most people assume we are talking about wrong notes.
Wrong notes are usually accidental and random, not that important in the long run. Occasional wrong notes are the price we pay for being flesh & blood.
The following are serious ‘mistakes:
1 BAD RHYTHM is the most common mistake. It is usually caused by:
• Initially learning a piece too fast.
• trying to learn a whole section &
• skipping over important rhythmic details.
2 IMPROPER OR RANDOM FINGERING which, in turn, leads to
3 POOR TONE:
• bad articulation
• improper balance between
melody, bass, and inner voices
4 POOR PHRASING:
• not understanding the composers’ intent in terms of melody, chord structure, rhythm, bass line, etc.
Music is a holistic UNITY, and if one postpones working on fingering, dynamics, rhythm, etc. and just
‘learns the notes’ first, they are currently practicing and repeating those other parameters INCORRECTLY. Mistakes are caused by mindless UN-PRACTICING of ‘just the notes’.
We will, G-d willing, in future posts, rebuild practicing to include all of the above parameters as a simple UNITY.
Yehuda/Jordan Kaplan teaches piano & guitar world-wide 🌍 via FaceTime & Facebook Instant Messenger.
Contact: Yehuda Kaplan via Facebook Instant Messenger • https://www.facebook.com/yehuda.kaplan74
• (C) Yehuda/Jordan Kaplan 2023
All rights reserved.
