Piano Practice Routine: Plan With These 5 Concepts
Planning out a solid piano practice routine for yourself is the most fundamental secret to getting the most success for yourself and the most out of your piano lessons. We’ll show you how.
The great quote, “Without a plan the people perish” couldn’t be more true to how to kill the piano learning experience for yourself.
My husband is in the Air Force and one of his frequent quotes as a life principle our military takes on for itself is: hope is not plan.
If you want to get the most out of your piano investment of time and money, you can’t simply hope that you will come out successful. For example, you can’t hope that you will have the funds to support your piano lessons.
That said, you can’t hope that you’ll end up playing Beethoven in 3 years. You have to plan for it!
Here’s how.
Note: These Are Suggested Ideas for Daily Practice Routines:
In this article I will share 5 technical ideas on how you can plan out your daily piano practice routine.
Of course there are more ideas out there and your personal piano teacher will probably have a few of their own favorites.
That said, these concepts are what worked for me in my professional piano journey and training.
Take what works for you and leave what doesn’t. But make sure you add things that do work for you and fill out your routine rather than leaving it bare boned without much sustanance.
Alright, here we go:
1. First, commit to how much time your want to dedicate to your piano practice routines.
Sometimes a piano teacher will have an opinion here and tell you that they expect you to practice piano for X amount of time every day. Other teachers leave it up to the students to decide how much they want to put into their progress.
But if hope is not a plan, then you can’t simply hope to get your practice time in every day.
Commit to how much time you want to give to practicing piano every day. For the purposes of this article, let’s say you would like to dedicate 45min every day to your piano practice routine. Ok, now on to idea number two.
2. Second, choose a time in your day to do your piano practice routine.
First step, intentionally choose the time of day or the wedge in your daily routine that you’ll set aside for your practice.
Just like you choose to set aside a day and a time to get dressed, travel to, and then have a piano lesson, in the same way, set aside the same kind of commitment to your practice routine.
And you can break this up into pieces throughout your day too. For example, 20min of piano practice right after breakfast and 25min right after dinner.
Again, for the purposes of this article, let’s use the example of breaking it up into two sessions in the day. Next…
3. Third, consider what your music goals are for that week.
Is it to master a certain technique? And/or to smooth out a certain passage in your music that tends to be more difficult for you?
Pick your big picture goals with your piano teacher. They would have a better idea of what is attainable in a week. Then…
4. Fourth, break down your week-long music goals into daily goals.
For example, give yourself 2 days to master this, 2 days to master that, 1 day to master that, and 1 day to put it all together.
And let’s say you give yourself a day off 1 day a week (but only if you planned that as part of your weekly routine. Don’t just take a random day off or you’ll start to make bad habits!) Once you’ve planned out your daily goals, put together a list of practice techniques to use to accomplish those goals:
5. Fifth, include these practice techniques in your piano practice routines.
Here is a list of practice techniques that you can use as different ways to approach what it is you need to master for that day. Your teacher should also be teaching you similar practice techniques in your piano lessons. If they’re not, and just telling you to practice without telling you how to practice, consider changing teachers!
- Go slow to develop accurate muscle memory before picking up any speed
- Practice your hands separately until they are accurate in timing and technicalities before trying to play both hands together
- Pick the trickiest parts of the music, break them down into bight-sized pieces (mark your sections with a pencil), play each piece repeatedly, 20x each, before putting the pieces back together and playing them fluidly back to back.
- Play passages slower, play passages faster to mix things up but keep your accuracy into consideration. (You don’t want to be programing bad mucle memeory in your hands and body)
- Take a couple of minutes to break from intense practice moments to play something that’s fun and you already love.
Lastly, Keep Your Piano Practice Routines Interesting!
You can take any or all of the above examples of practice techniques and mix them up in any practice session!
You can use this list and other techniques you learn with your teacher as a checklist and make it your goal to spend X amount of time on each.
If 25min of practice time seems long to you, think about it this way: if you practice each of the above techniques for just 5min, 25min will fly by!
And before you know it, you’ve flown through your planned out piano practice time!
It’s a matter of life or death to your artistry: you must have a practice routine!
Having routines set with your music lessons will ensure your success for progress, get you passed the harder parts of learning, and start making you fall in love with your music!
The high of playing music that has become such a natural part of your natural body from repetitive practice is unmatchable!
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