Secret to Playing Well

I once heard a student ask his piano teacher what is his secret to playing the piano well.  The teacher responded that his secret can be summarised in 3 words: Practice, practice, and more practice.

Yes, that is very true.  There is absolutely no short-cut to mastering the instrument.   You just have to keep hitting those notes until you get the pieces right.  But there is more.  Besides practising, you have to make the quality of your practice count as well.   The following are some tips to making your half-hour or so drills count:

1. Developing a habit of counting

Students usually gripe when I ask  them to count aloud and play at the same time.  Most of them tell me that it distracts them in their playing.  When I ask students to count, it is not meant to make their lives difficult.  There are a few reasons why I emphasize counting so much:

• without proper counting, the pieces will not be balanced.  Students tend to play the easy portions faster, and the difficult portions slower
• counting helps the student increase their focus and concentration on the notes and hence reduce the chance of them hitting the wrong notes
• the students can take the opportunity to count and sing out the tune of the song at the same time.  Singing in turn helps to shape out the melodic expression of the pieces.

Once students are able to play the pieces smoothly and evenly, I will let them stop the counting aloud.

2. Use the metronome

Metronome will similarly encourage even playing.  Whilst it can be irritating to hear the constant ticks from the pendulum, trying to follow the metronome can increase the student’s focus and concentration while playing the pieces.   Again, once students are able to play the pieces evenly, I will let them stop the metronome.

3. Learn the pieces by reading the score, and not by memorising the movement along the keyboard

Some students find it much easier to imitate and memorise my movement along the keys rather than read the score and figure out the notes by themselves.  But the problem with this approach is that the students will not be able to pick up from where they may stop at a piece of music (due to an error made, for instance).  Instead, they frequently have to re-start the entire piece in order to regain the familiar motion.  The problem with this approach is that in an examinations setting, having to re-start a piece will cost the student much more considerable marks than if the student were able to resume playing from where he may have stopped.   If the student is used to reading the score and playing, he should have no problem picking up from wherever he stops.

Another reason against playing by rote is that the method works only for lower-grade pieces.  As the student progresses, he will find it considerably more difficult to memorise the increasingly complex pieces.  By then, the habit would have been so ingrained that the student may find it impossible to carry on.

4. Practise over several days rather than cramp all your practices into one day

It is much more beneficial to practise for a shorter time but over several days than to practise for a prolonged period in a single day.  This is because our mind needs time to absorb and consolidate what we have learnt and practised.

Conclusion

As the adage goes, give a man a fish and he will feed for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.  My hope is that I can train my students well enough not just to pass exams, but that they would be able to learn new pieces independently.  In that way, they are more likely to continue playing and enjoying the piano even after they stop formal piano lessons.   Playing the piano is afterall supposed to be a life-time skill rather than being restricted to those 8 – 10 years of formal training.