Could you elaborate on what in it helped change your practice approach? I tried reading it a while back and I couldn’t really get past the style. I’m sure there is good advice in there, but it’s very off putting due to the rambling style.
- Do not try to practice the whole piece at once. Split it into pieces
- Start by listening to the piece. If possible get multiple performances/recordings (usually easy with YouTube) to get a feel for different interpretations.
- Take the piece and number each measure from 1 to finish. Figure out where the repetitions are, which measures are the easiest, which the hardest (this will differ for left and right hand usually), where key/timing changes happen
- Practice both hands separately, start with a single measure that is one of the hardest (if need be you can split it up even more). Overlap the measures slightly so that you also practice the transitions. Play as slowly as you need to so that you can play expressively from the very beginning (albeit with only one hand). As you learn the measure, increase speed, but only so much that you can still play expressively. Switch hands once your hand gets tired.
- Since one hand (usually the left hand) is often much easier to play in many measures or even entire pieces, it will get much less practice. To offset this, make sure to also practice the hardest measure for each hand first. Sometimes you might even need to practice the left hand from a different piece (if the current piece only has easy stuff), while the right hand is resting.
- Keep practicing all the measures in the piece in this fashion (with one hand) until you can play them expressively even at higher speeds than the piece is usually played at.
- Now is the time to put the hands together. Use the same method of practice as described above (splitting up the piece into overlapping measures, starting with the hardest one), only this time use both hands.
There are other nuggets of wisdom in the book, for example:
- How to properly practice playing chords
- Very fast notes played in succession are really just "imperfectly played chords", where your hand is already in the position of playing the chord, except one or more fingers are slightly lower than the others as your hand goes down. Thinking of it this way, you're not trying to speed up individual notes, but "slow down" a chord.
This summary omits one of the major themes of the book. Granted, the discussion of speed is quite nuanced. See 1.II.13: https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/chapte...
One relevant excerpt, though large chunks of the book are dedicated to this topic:
> To vary the speed, first get up to some manageable “maximum speed” at which you can play accurately. Then go faster (using parallel sets, etc., if necessary), and take note of how the playing needs to be changed (don’t worry if you are not playing accurately at this point because you are not repeating it many times). Then use that motion and play at the previous “maximum accurate speed”. It should now be noticeably easier. Practice at this speed for a while, then try slower speeds to make sure that you are completely relaxed and absolutely accurate. Then repeat the whole procedure. In this way, you ratchet up the speed in manageable jumps and work on each needed skill separately.
This has been my biggest ever piano hack. I now practice bar-by-bar and don't move on until I'm happy, and its taken my practice to a whole new level
The end result is a book that is useful, but that could do with some serious editing by an advanced pianist or at least someone more knowledgeable about various piano teaching practices.
What's the alternative approach? Repeatedly play the entire song making mistakes at the crux, but insisting on playing the easy parts and pushing through the difficult ones?
This deliberate one-measure-until-it’s-perfect isn’t something many folks learn on their own.
But man, this is life in general. Difficult math? Solving a bunch of arithmetic won’t help you with laplace transforms or difficult integrals. You need to practice the hard problems to get better at the hard things.
However, it seems like it would be a motivation killer. I'd have thought there was more emotional value in getting through the whole piece, to hear each part in context, to "follow the story".
Can you talk about this method's interaction with your motivation? Would it suit an absolute beginner?
(I'm commenting from my imagination rather than experience. I almost always rely on a sequencer to play for me ;-) )
Listening to the piece first is always helpful, but be careful not to become overly dependent on learning by ear - it can cripple your sight reading in the long run. Same goes for separate hand practice. While both of these can speed up your progress early on, becoming a good sight reader pays dividends later on.
I bought a ton of books in this series and started spending time every day playing them:
https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Evans-Jazz-Piano-Solos/dp/145840...
I'm classically trained but really enjoy playing these. They're hard enough to be challenging yet not something you have to practice for months like many classical pieces. An especially good thing for sight reading is that instead of lots of fast passages like in a lot of classical music, there are lots of chords where you have to read and play 8 notes on a beat. With time (I did this for about a year), you start reading entire chords by sight rather than individual notes.
Working to get better at sight reading makes learning new music much more enjoyable. You could probably do it by reading a lot of classical music below your playing level too, but for me, the jazz stuff is a nice break and something different.
My teacher was forever nagging me to "play what's written, not my interpretation of it". She'd also tell me to "go home and practice the actual lesson", boring Czerny scales or such, "...and not muck around and waste time playing songbook stuff that I liked the sound of".