Arg. Now I'm confused again. I thought a given practice session was intended to work on one thing, using 20 minutes to get it to the point of 7 repetitions, and continuing practicing that one thing for the remainder of the 20 minutes.. One thing being a RH passage, a LH passage, or a HT passage.. If you try to do more than one of those things during that time, aren't you reducing the effectiveness or have I still missed the point?
Yes, this is more or less correct.
Before starting a practice session you must decide what you are going to do in that practice session. This is the first priority. But how do you do it?
Here is my suggestion (which I believe at the moment of writing to be the most efficient way to go about it) in regards to a new piece you have never seen before and which is still impossible for you:
1. Spend as much time as needed listening to CDs of the piece and analysing the score. As your experience grows you will be able to know straightaway how you should go about learning it. But at the beginning this phase may take quite a long time. In fact most people fall back into old, inefficient practice methods because they get discouraged at this stage. But I will assume all that has been done.
2. So you start your practice session by sight-reading (HT) through, say, the first 12 bars of the piece. This may be a laborious affair. You may make lots of mistakes, and be hesitant and slow. But it will give you an idea what you are up against. It will tell you straightaway if you can skip HS and go to HT straightaway. It will tell you where the most difficult bars are. It may even be possible to learn the whole piece in this first sight reading. But I will assume the worst. The whole thing was truly impossible, and at the end of the 12 bars (which took you a full 4 minutes to complete) you are drenched in perspiration, feeling utterly discouraged and thinking to yourself: “this is impossible – I will never be able to master this piece”. At this point, write these feelings in your practice diary. You want – in two weeks time when the piece has been mastered – to go back and read these words again. And see how wrong you were.
3. Anyway, what are you to do? You must now decide what part of these 12 bars you are going to practise. HT is clearly out of question in this case. So start with the first two bars. Try the right hand. Repeat it 7 times. If anything is even worse than when you first started. So you know that even 2 bars is beyond your ability at the moment. This should have taken some 30 seconds – 1 minute. So move to the LH. To your surprise, by the 3rd repeat you had it mastered (= memorised and feeling really easy and effortless). So why not increase it? you go for 4 bars, and although more challenging after 7 repeats you did master it. This took 1 – 2minutes. Now go back to the RH. Cut it in half. Instead of 2 bars, do just one. And wonders of wonders, it is completely mastered after 7 repeats!
4. Now you are going to practise 1 bar on the RH and 4 bars on the LH. You still have some 15 minutes left on your session. So at this point start alternating hands. By the end of 2 minutes, there is really no more work to do on the LH. The RH is still giving you some trouble, so you must use all sorts of trickery: repeated note-groups, rhythm variations, etc. So work for a while (2 – 3 minutes) just on the RH, and when it starts to feel tired, stop and do the LH a bit. You still have 10 minutes left on you session. So go on and tackle the next four bars of the LH (they happen to be an almost exact repeat) and the next bar of the RH. So now you have mastered 2 bars on the RH and 8 bars on the LH. You still have 7 minutes left.
5. So join hands on the first 2 bars. You will not be able to simply do it. You may have to cut the 2 bars in half, or you may succeed with the dropping notes trick. You may even have to do repeated note-groups. If it takes you 15 minutes instead of 7 and your practise session ends up being 35 minutes instead of 20, that is Ok.
6. Now you have mastered RH bars 1 – 2, LH bars 1 – 8 and HT bars 1 – 2. Write this down in your practise journal and write down what to do tomorrow: another 8 bars on the LH (this may not be possible though – you will find out). Another 2 bars of the RH and have bars 1 – 4 HT.
7. Come the next day, and you simply play RH bars 1 – 2. Perfect? Move on. Not perfect? Try repeating it 6 – 7 times. Perfect? Move on. No signs of improvement? Forget about your plans for this session and repeat the session of the previous day
exactly without skipping any step. Do the same for LH and HT. If LH is ok, repeat the previous session only for RH and HT, and do a different LH section. In any case, the previous day you mastered the section by following those steps, so today you will as well. Except that it will take a fraction of the time: 10 minutes instead of 35 minutes. So you still have 10 minutes to tackle the 2 new bars on the RH. Maybe you will not be able to join hands to day. But that is Ok.
8. Next day repeat the same procedure and adjust your learning/practising accordingly.
9. And so on and so forth.
10. Now, let us say that you mastered bars 1-2 HT on the first session, and bars 3-4 HT on the second session (HS you may have mastered far more bars). On the third session, dedicate the full session to join bars 1-2 and 3-4 HT (if you have overlapped there should be no problems: the first 2 or 3 repeats it may fall apart, but after 7 it should be fine – if it is not you need to go back and do more work on the previous sessions).
There is no need for HS work at this level. As the passage you have mastered increases in size, most of your work will be HT. HS is only for the very small passages you tackle at the very beginning.
There are two very important exceptions to this guideline.
a. Counterpoint music. In this case you must learn
the whole piece HS. In fact, you should learn each voice (part) separately – if there are more than two voices – as in Bach fughes. The reason for that is musical, not technical: you must have a very accurate reperesentation in your mind of how each voice goes.
b. Long, fast, running passages, as in Schubert’s Impromptu op 90 no. 2. In such cases you need to work a speed HS at least 30% faster than the final speed hands separately, and you cannot really achieve speed efficiently working straight on hands together. You must increase speed HS and then HT will increase automatically.
The problem I face here, is that I can see too many instances where the paradigm above may not apply. So you have to
adjust and adapt this general idea. Nothing is carved in stone. But I trust this will give you the gist of it. The more you apply these ideas, the less doubts you will have, and you will get to a point where by just looking at the soccer you will simply know how to proceed. The beginning is slow though.
See, "but not before" - how can HT in the same session that you started HS possibly be the right time with that said?
As soon as you mastered HS, move on to HT. Do not wait until you have the whole piece HS to start joining hands. However do not join hands if you have not completely mastered HS.
Ok, lets take an example. The following is a 6 bar phrase taken from the Malaguena. Lets pretend for the sake argument that this is the piece in its entirety.
Lets assume that my RH can handle the RH part of bar 1 into the first beat of bar 2 based on the 7 rule. My LH based on the 7 rule can handle bars 1 and 2 since they repeat. How would you break this into sessions?
Ok.
Let us also assume that I am a complete beginner with a dismal technique.
1. My first step would be to analyse the score and notice that there is quite a lot of repetition. So how much of these six bars do I actually have to practise? On the left hand there are two groups: the first three chords (that takes care of bars 1 – 2 – 5 – 6) and chords 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 –11 – 12 (bars 3 – 4). In fact, All I have to learn are bars 2- 3 – 4. Now there are 9 chords there. I have two choices here: I can see if I can learn the whole progression after 7 repeats. If I cannot I just try four chords, and if that does not work, two chords. But there is a much better approach: just go straight on to the repeated note-groups. 9 chords is just at the limit of feasibility. There is one more thing I will do: When doing groups of two chords (the most basic groups), instead of doing the full E major chord (chord no. 1) I will do just an octave and miss the two middle notes. This simplification will allow me to concentrate fully on the accuracy of the skips – which is really the major technical problem on the left hand. As soon as I get the skips accurate, I will put the missing notes back . I am still doing just groups of two chords. This is a very tiring routine, so instead of moving on to three chord groups, I will stop, rest the left hand and move on to the right hand.
2. Again there is a reasonable amount of material repetition on the RH. The first three chords are repeated 5 times: the third repetition with a different rhythm. After that 3rd repetition there is a group of anthore three chords which are again repeated. At this point, the two main difficulties I see in the RH are accurately skip between chords, and simply move without hesitations form chord to chord. This is an exuberant piece, so there is no place for doubts and hesitations. So I will concentrate in this
moving from chord to chord to star with. For that purpose I will initially ignore the rhythm and just consider equal times for every chord (say, consider them all crochets). I will only play six chords: Chords no. 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12. (second half of bar 2 + bar 3). Mastering this sequence will imply mastery of the whole line. Again I willuse the same approach I used for the LH: Repeated chord-groups, and for the 2 chord groups I will start with octave rather than full chords. Once I get the accuracy sorted out I will complete the chords. By the time I finish 2 chord –groups, my RH should start to feel tired, so I will move on the the LH and do 3 chord groups.
3. I will continue alternating hands as above: for every chord group I finish I change hands. Once I get the whole sequence of 9 chords in the LH and 6 chords in the RH and can move easily, smoothly and accurately form chord to chord without hesitations and at speed, I will use a metronome and make sure the rhythm is ironclad (this will be relaxed later – since the notated, metronomic rhythm is never the true rhythm – but for the moment, the sections are too small and devoid of musical context to allow for a true rhythm, so a metronome is quite important at this stage – unless you have an unfailing sense of pulse that allow you to do without the metronome).
4. Now that I have the RH and LH sequence of chords mastered, I will learn the whole line HS. It should be straightforward, since it is just a matter of memorising the sequence in which the chord sequences I already mastered occur. One trick I may use at this stage to avoid hesitations is to repeat each individual chord several times – while I repeat them, I have time to think where to go next. This way, there is never a break or any hesitation – although this is rarely necessary if one has done the repeated note-groups routine.
5. I should by now have the RH and the LH at speed, memorised and moving forward without hesitations. This may have taken the whole 20 minute session – or perhaps a bit more. So I will have a 5 minute break.
6. Now I will start a new session to join hands. In this particular case I will start the session by playing through both hands (separately) a couple of minutes (alternating them). If there is any problem, then I will not do HT. I will do something else in the session, and start form scratch next day. But if everything is still under my fingers (it should be), then I will just go straight for HT by doing dropping notes. First the RH in full dropping the LH notes, and then the other way round: the LH in full dropping the RH notes. This should take about 5 – 10 minutes.
7. This passage is now large enough to allow for a musical rendering, so the reminder 10 minutes of the sessions HT, I will try to put the musicality into it. I will be working on the rhythmic accents, on the articulation, on trying to give a sense of exuberance to the sound. Ideally I should know in my mind exactly the sound I am after, and just keep repeating and comparing the sound I am producing with the one I want. Usually if the representation in one’s mind is clear, the fingers always comply.
Next day, I will sit at the piano and go straight for this section hands together. If it is perfect, that is it, all I have to do now is keep
playing it and refining my musical concept of it – no further practice (as described above) is really necessary. On the other hand if I cannot remember a thing, then I will have to go back to the very beginning and start from scratch not skipping any steps – not matter how powerful the temptation to do so. In fact it is when you start skipping steps that you start to do wrong repeats and all sorts of mistakes creep in and become habits. So it is important to keep a journal of all the steps you took – at least in the beginning – with experience you will not need such detailed instructions. Rest assured that if you follow all the steps it will take a fraction of the time to achieve mastery again.
Most likely, the next day the passage will be somewhere between these two extremes (completely forgotten and totally mastered).If so, observe carefully where the problem lies. You may be able to tackle it in isolation and not have to go through all steps again. Ultimately the final arbiter is your progress. As long you are progressing you are doing the correct thing. If you stop progressing or if everything start to consistently fall apart, then you must change what you are doing.
I hope this helps.
Best wishes,
Bernhard.
Topic: Pauls Plan to Try It Himself. For Bernhard