[cloogshicer]

It's sad that this book is written in such a self-validating tone (the very first sentence is "This is the best book ever written on how to practice at the piano!" for crying out loud), because the content is excellent.

I read it a couple years ago and it completely changed how I approach practicing.

[mtalantikite]

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.

[cloogshicer]

The main takeaways for me were:

- 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.

[spangry]

That all seems like pretty solid advice. Chunking the piece up but practicing overlapping parts is particularly good - if you neglect the overlapping part you can end up with obvious 'seams' in the piece when you put it all together.

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.

[prirun]

I was a terrible sight reader. My teachers never taught me is that sight-reading is a skill that has to be practiced, just like other piano skills.

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.

[spangry]

Hey thanks for the recommendation. I too am a (lapsed) classically trained pianist with poor sight reading. This might just be the motivation I need to get back into playing :)

[hilbert42]

That's very good advice if one's well disciplined. The trouble is many of are not and it's why we need a good teacher to keep us on the straight-and-narrow.

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".

[mtalantikite]

Right now I’m working with a jazz/improvisation teacher and he has me play through a piece once strictly as it’s written, once again strictly but singing the melody, and then the third time through with improvisation on the melody. Sheet music is thrown away as soon as possible. Of course jazz compositions are much shorter than classical pieces, but I do think the premise of getting it down strictly and slowly opening it up is a great way to practice.

[ecdavis]

> As you learn the measure, increase speed, but only so much that you can still play expressively.

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.

[alfiedotwtf]

> Do not try to practice the whole piece at once. Split it into pieces

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

[blobbers]

How is this a piano hack ? This is the basics of how to learn any song.

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?

[compiler-guy]

That is how many people practice. Beginning to end every time. Maybe slowly, but muddle through the hard parts and blast through the easy parts. Maybe, maybe, replay a measure where you made a mistake a couple of times until you get it right exactly once and then continue.

This deliberate one-measure-until-it’s-perfect isn’t something many folks learn on their own.

[blobbers]

Most people don’t become real pianists without a real teacher; I didn’t realize people tried to learn piano 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.

[alfiedotwtf]

This is how I've always played until last month. Made a mistake? Fumble through but never really focus 20 times perfect on a single bar like I do now.

[karmelapple]

I’m a little surprised to hear this as being somewhat unique to this book. I took lessons for years and this was a standard technique my teacher encouraged.

[jacquesm]

As a kid aged 9 this was what my teacher recommended me to do as well. (I suck at piano, but that was a pretty good teacher). This book is useful but it is way over the top in pretending to be unique or groundbreaking, it's more a case of the author being somewhat ignorant about what common practice is, something you can't really fault him for since he didn't actually play piano. What struck me as odd was that he believed that the teacher that his daughter had was somehow unique in her approach, whereas it all seemed pretty standard and 'common sense' to me.

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.

[alfiedotwtf]

Yeah, if only my first teach taught me this... It would have saved me a hell lot of time!

[the_other]

Intuitively, I can see how this helps accurate playing and deep learning of a piece. I imagine it builds better skills in the long term.

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 ;-) )

[jacquesm]

I've codified this method (and a couple of others) in pianojacq.com, the 'slide/easy slide/normal and slide/perfect' methods are specifically meant to automate the process of breaking up a piece in overlapping segments. At the end of a run (the end of the piece) it extends the segment length by doubling it and then loops back to the beginning until you can play the piece. It really works and the speed with which you progress through a piece is a huge improvement compared to some other ways in which you could approach the problem, but it is not without downsides, it tends to demotivate people that 'just want to play', which is fine (there are options for those people as well). Practice is fundamentally different from performance, and it would be good for all aspiring pianists to have this tattooed onto their foreheads in mirror image so that you are reminded each morning.

[alfiedotwtf]

For me, I want to play as technically perfect as I possibly can, so I guess the motivation is already built-in to my aims. For others, yeah this would be draining, especially for pieces that you're not actually interested in vs for me I just want to play whatever is in front if me regardless of genre

[wildrhythms]

This is how every piece of music was taught to me since grade 5 when I first started learning an instrument.

[jmchuster]

That's a preface by the individual who found this book only after years of research and then decided to post it online. This is not the author of the book talking about their own book.

[jacquesm]

This is incorrect, this is the preface lifted straight from the 2nd edition pdf on the original site:

"This is the best book ever written on how to practice at the piano! The revelation of this book is that there are highly efficient practice methods that can accelerate your learning rate, by up to 1,000 times if you have not yet learned the most efficient practice methods (see IV.5). What is surprising is that, although these methods were known since the earliest days of piano, they were seldom taught because only a few teachers knew about them and these knowledgeable teachers never bothered to disseminate this knowledge. "

http://www.pianopractice.org/

[jmchuster]

Ooh, that's a pretty bad miss on my part.

I read

> This is the best book ever written on how to practice at the piano!

> This is a work in progress, some sections have not been copied over, there are probably a few formatting errors/inconsistencies, and generally nuttiness. Please ignore or contribute patches on GitHub.

> This is Sphinx adaptation of Chaun C. Chang’s excellent book, Fundamentals of Piano Practice.

[cloogshicer]

Oh, you might be right.

I downloaded the book a long time ago as a PDF from somewhere. It also included this sentence and it stuck out to me because it was so weird. The rest of the tone of the book felt in the same style to me so I never second guessed it, but you might be correct.

[mkl]

Probably from the canonical site, http://www.pianopractice.org/, where a more up to date edition is available for free. The second edition (that the submission link is based on) does contain that sentence, so it is from the original author. The third edition does not.

[jacquesm]

He isn't, that is exactly what the book says.

[rossjudson]

I agree; it is surprisingly good. And conceited...which is an acceptable tradeoff ;)

[rossjudson]

I'll also point out (to myself!) that the third edition is a considerably better read. It's available for free at the author's web site (http://www.pianopractice.org/).

[amelius]

> "This is the best book ever written on how to practice at the piano!" for crying out loud

It fits with the current zeitgeist, where clickbait is everywhere, even in respected newspapers.

[jacquesm]

It was written long ago.

[amelius]

Yes. But maybe it explains why it resurfaces now.

[rackjack]

People have been doing this for decades, probably centuries... there was a book on shorthand (Eclectic shorthand) I found on the Internet Archive and the first couple of pages were extolling its virtues compared to the others. The difference is that you're seeing it.

[rossjudson]

I am pretty sure the current zeitgeist is to do the minimum possible amount of observation/research before passing judgement on something.