I often tell my students there’s no real mystery to learning the piano. If you can identify the specific problems in any piece and tackle them systematically, you will always make progress. That doesn’t mean learning is easy, however. Even beginner pieces contain dozens of challenges; advanced works may contain tens of thousands. These challenges often overlap, making them harder to solve.
Clearly, one of the main difficulties in learning new music piano is managing complexity. Therefore, your first goal when you practice should be to simplify. If you can solve problems in a simpler setting, your brain will be better prepared for more complex tasks.
Here are three powerful strategies I encourage students to use to simplify their practice: chunking, slowing down, and isolating challenges.
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Strategy 1: Chunking
If I could only teach students one practice method, this would be it; the vast majority of my own practice time is spend this way. Chunking means selecting a small, manageable section of music to work on until you are satisfied with your progress. If you’re not sure how much music to start with, try one phrase (often four bars) at a time. The right size will vary depending on how challenging it is; in some places one or two bars will be plenty but with a well learned piece, several lines or a whole page may be appropriate. A good rule of thumb is to work in the shortest chunks that still presents a challenge. To avoid creating weak spots at the transitions between chunks, it is good to end with the first note or two of the following chunk, and sometimes vary where your chunks begin and end. Also feel free to change the lengths of your chunks if you discover a small places that always challenges you, or you feel you need more challenge.
Why does chunking work? Your working memory can only hold so much information at a time. If you play a piece from start to finish and then return to the beginning, a lot of the detailed feedback you had built initially will have faded. By practicing small sections, you keep details fresh, quickly reinforce improvements, and immediately address issues. So long as your mind is focused and engaged, chunking gives you the best chance of discerning exactly what is challenging you, finding solutions, and reinforcing progress.
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Strategy 2: Slowing Down
If chunking provides the framework to learn, slowing down is where the learning actually happens. Here’s why: imagine assembling a large Lego set. With time and clear instructions, you will eventually get every piece right where you want it. But what if you had only a second or two per step? Even simple steps might become very difficult. You need the freedom to stop, search, rearrange, and even backtrack until you find the way. I see students struggle with self-imposed time limits on thinking all the time. Sometimes we are trying to keep a steady beat, sometimes we forgot to adjust the speed at a more challenging section, but the result is the same: if we don’t give our brains enough space to think, solutions are harder to find. This is so important I’ll say it again: these are things your brain is capable of doing, maybe even easily, but they become hard because you are not leaving space for your brain to do all of thinking it needs to. Whenever I hear a student say “I don’t understand why this is hard,” or “I don’t know how to do this,” what I hear is “I can’t do this at this speed, yet.”
The solution is very straightforward in theory: give your brain enough space to think by slowing down. Aim to check note by note if you have enough information for your fingers. In practice however, almost all students resist slowing down. Typically we will slow down very slightly or not at all until we have some experience with this skill. I think deep down playing faster often feels closer to our goal (even if the quality of playing goes down). Slow down enough and it may stop feeling like you are playing the piece at all. So to be sure we can make a difference in our thinking, I encourage my students to choose a tempo so slow it feels ridiculous (and even then, we often find there are small mistakes).
To force the issue, I’ve developed a kind of practice I call “hands on, hands off.” Play the first note (or notes, if they are played simultaneously), then place your hands in your lap. Think about what the next note is. When you are confident that you know what to do, play those notes, then return your hands to your lap. Continue note by note, leaving enough space that you can tell you are following your plan. (You may sometimes choose to leave some fingers on the keys if you have held notes, or want to show articulations.) Playing outside of tempo and rhythm like this gives you the space to clarify your thinking. When you repeat the chunk, leave your hands on the keys, but check if you are still leaving space to think equally clearly. (If you are concerned about spending a lot of time playing out of rhythm, count out loud and tap the rhythm on your lap, and or count out loud even when you are deliberately playing out of rhythm).
Slowing down and practicing deliberately has numerous benefits, both when first learning a piece and when preparing for performance. It helps you deeply understand each movement your fingers must make and ensures that each action is intentional. It reduces dependence on muscle memory, allowing you to actively control your playing even after extended practice. Most importantly, practicing slowly enables you to experience and appreciate more of the musical details, opening the door to more expressive, meaningful performances.
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Strategy 3: Isolate the challenge
Not every challenge requires the same amount of attention. In some passages you may already know exactly what needs your attention, but sometimes it’s not yet clear, or perhaps there are lots of small stumbles. The easiest way to isolate challenges is so simple you may already be doing it, but so powerful it is worth discussing anyway: solve problems one layer of music at a time. For beginners, this usually means playing hands separate. If you are playing music with three or more musical ideas happening at once, try them individually, then in different pairings. I do often encourage my students to play hands together quite a bit to practice managing several layers of information at once. However when that isn’t working yet, we want to simplify any way we can. Get comfortable with each layer alone, then try the chunk slowly several times hands together. (If it’s really tricky, you may start with just one bar at a time hands together.)
There are many good ways of isolating challenges once you notice them (and playing sections several times in a row as you chunk will help you notice places you keep tripping up). Hand moves can be tricky sometimes, especially for younger students; try just finding where your hands go without playing any notes. When you find repeating patterns, try just the trickiest part of each one (it will often be in the same place on each repetition). Broken chords can be practiced in solid form, and complicated melodies can often be simplified into a few patterns. Not all of these ideas are useful in every piece (especially for beginners), but they are all based on the same principle: experiment to find the smallest group of notes you can play to solve a challenge. Spend time getting stronger at the core of the challenge before building up other parts of the music around it.
Putting It All Together
So now you have a strong structure for your practice (chunking). You are giving your brain space to do all the thinking it is capable of (slowing down), and you are getting better at isolating challenges. The next step with this chunk is to evaluate if you have enough control over your thinking and listening. Let’s say you play your chunk and everything goes how you want it to once. That one great run doesn’t give you enough information to know if you are in the middle of the learning process (where sometimes it’s what you want and sometimes not) or close to the end (where it is nearly always what you want). If are satisfied with two runs in a row, you know it wasn’t just luck. If you can do it three times, you can feel confident that your brain is really in control. If you return later in your practice and still execute well, you are giving yourself a strong chance at success every time you play.
Now, after all of this deliberate work, we have finally achieved the first step of practice: getting everything lined up the way you want to. This is significant because it means you now have all the necessary neutrons in your brain talking. The good news is that the second step is simpler: moving this series of thoughts from your working memory to your long term memory. And that happens with something you’re almost certainly already doing: repetition.
If you repeat this chunk three to five times consciously paying attention to all of the same details, that is generally enough to retain a lot of your progress when you play tomorrow. But when we try to repeat something exactly our minds often wander, so I often make a counterintuitive suggestion: add one more small challenge. Suppose you are solidifying the notes; try also listening a little for dynamics. Maybe you challenge yourself a little too much and up with some note problems again. That’s not a problem. You can try again, and now you have more information about what notes to pay extra attention to. Maybe this time everything goes well. Not only are you one step closer to your goals, but the extra focus required to listen helps you engage more deeply with all of the layers of what you are doing.
If this is quite different from how you have been practicing, don’t try to implement it all at once. Change your practice in manageable steps, and experiment to see what is works best for you. And as always, I’d love to hear how this is going for you!
Happy practicing!