🤓 More Hours You Practice 🎹, the Better, Right!?!?

17 Feb 2025 · 2 min

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This content was created by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This content was uploaded by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This is a YouTube video titled "🤓 More Hours You Practice 🎹, the Better, Right!?!?" (created 2025-02-17). The excerpt is a two-person instructional discussion about piano practice and pedagogy: one speaker (an instructor/teacher) and a respondent discuss the importance of focused, mindful practice versus mindless repetition, training the body to follow the mind/composer, and using playful, varied exercises (staccato, left-hand only, changing key, finger-specific drills) to improve awareness and learning.

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this bar, paying attention to that C-sharp, and the focus of the mind is on that one thing so that when you repeat, you've got a good chance of actually achieving the thing that you're focused on. But without the focus, it's chimps dancing on the keyboard. You know, what's that book, The Chimp Paradox? So I reckon here we've got chimps. We need to train these chimps. I've got two here. —two feet. These need to be trained to do what the mind wants them to do, and the mind has to be attuned to what the composer wants them to do, or the teacher, or whatever. So I think a lot of practice ends up being mindless, mindless repetition of the playthrough type, just bang-a-bang-a-bang away until you bludgeon this thing into some sort of shape.
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's like, that's a pitfall of practicing, right? So what you're suggesting is by creating variations to one practice, one passage, for example, do staccato, do, you know, left hand only, change the key, for example. By doing that, you are more aware of progress. You are more aware of what you're doing. Rather than just mindless practice for hours.
Yes. And you're bringing a sense of playfulness into the process, which is educational. Because if you think about it, we play music, we play the piano. Why is practice so often drudgery? There's no sense of fun in it. But if you give a student a challenge, like I've sometimes said something like this, so let's say there's a chord stream and I'll say, can you play your right hand but only play the second fingers? 'Just play the notes that the second finger plays, don't play any of the other fingers.' Um, that really makes them think. Or, 'Can you play the— just the thumb notes in this,' whatever it may be. And that's educational because it forces us to concentrate on the material.