Happy New Year!
I wish you a wonderful 2025 full of happiness, peace, success, and, of course, good health. The new year is upon us once again. One of the most popular topics in my Facebook piano group, Adult Piano Returners (find out more about this group, here), often centres around finding a workable piano practice routine. It also focuses on keeping a regular schedule. Many of us have little time to practice, so how do we implement the best and most fruitful practice session achieving the most we can with the time we have? I hope this article provides a few ideas.
The 30-minute Practice Plan
With only 30-minutes available, we must focus our mind during this crammed practice session.
The First Five Minutes
Start with a brief warm-up. If you are taking an exam, you may want to run through a few scales and arpeggios. Chosen keys and note patterns will be dependent on the grade being studied. Try to vary keys every day and start extremely slowly: separate hand practice is preferable and when the hands eventually play together they will feel that much more confident and secure. Watch how fingers are placed on the keys during this time and aim for a firm touch using the finger tips for rhythmical scales – my students always use the metronome when practising scales.
If you don’t plan to practice scales, it’s the ideal opportunity to seize the moment for some sight reading practice. This brief session-opener will encourage your mind to focus optimally ready for the task ahead.
Repertoire
If you have two or three pieces to practice each week, aim to study them in rotation, that is, one piece per session, nipping any ‘drifting’ in the bud. Twenty minutes of solid work on one piece will prove more beneficial especially for targeted work.
The Practice Note Pad
My students never go anywhere without their note pads. Note pads provide fundamental support, not just in terms of lesson notes, but they also allow students to ‘plot’ their practice. Once you have acquired a note pad, make a note of what needs to be done in your session. Write down the main issues in all the pieces on which you are working, followed by what seems like a workable solution to each problem. I say workable, because this may change as you practice.
A Productive 20-Minute Session
Let’s say you are working on a J S Bach prelude, invention or sinfonia and, once you have a basic knowledge of note patterns and fingerings, you may still have issues keeping the pulse. This issue could be best tackled with slow, separate – and crucially – concentrated practice. Give yourself a certain time frame with which to work: five minutes, perhaps, and set a stop-watch so that you don’t go over time. Then, if keeping a reliable pulse is an issue, set your metronome to a very slow, subdivided pulse (use either quavers, or better still, semiquavers), and play through the left-hand with a full tone, followed by the right hand, sitting on the metronome’s tick for accuracy: ensure you know notes really well because you will probably need at least 50% of your concentration on sticking to the metronome’s tick. It’s helpful to ignore dynamics at this stage and play into the key bed producing a fuller sound. You may need to do this a few times for security. Remember, the slower the better in order to stop dreaded errors or hesitations creeping in. Try to become really familiar with your piece’s note patterns. Now you can cross off this part of your practice with a tick in your note pad when completed!
Once confident separate hands, which usually takes a good few sessions, the next five-minutes might be spent playing equally slowly (or even slower) but hands together this time with a nice full tone. Again, the stop watch and metronome will be beneficial. Depending on your level of fluency, tackle the piece line by line, then in larger sections, and finally all the way through.
A further five minutes could be earmarked for trickier areas, those where you are less fluent: always practice slowly here allowing your fingers and mind to fully assimilate notes patterns and be aware of the movements required from the arm, hand and wrist in order to guide fingers to the keys. I usually encourage students to practice using two or three different tempi at this stage via varying metronome speeds.
Now spend the last five minutes playing through the piece as a whole slowly with the metronome, but still under tempo. This time, lighten your touch and try to think about dynamic colour and how this is influenced by the work’s structure: if it’s an invention or fugue, you might want to consider articulation in the subject or theme, for example.
As a general rule, issues with security nearly always stem from not knowing note patterns, fingerings, or the left hand well enough, so pay attention to these areas and consider this practice time as the ‘hard graft’ demanded for technical mastery. You may have completely different issues to those I have mentioned, but you can still find a practice plan incorporating small segments as suggested above.
The Final Five Minutes
The final five minutes should be for your enjoyment and to test your knowledge of your new pieces. Why not play at least one through from the beginning to the end but aim to tackle a different piece from the one you were working on in the session. You can gauge how your pieces are progressing and ascertain the work which still needs to be done. If you can’t do this as yet, this time may be used to go through past pieces, so that you are building a little repertoire of piano works.
However, you choose to spend your 30-minute session, I wish you every success in your piano playing in 2025.
Image: Starline
