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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;-) )
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.
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
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?