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Yes, there is that aspect to it, but practice should always be a creative process. And by process, I mean that as you improve as a pianist, you learn how to be better at practicing efficiently, creatively, and effectively.

I'm working on Rach 2 first movement and I'm having a lot of issues learning it quickly.

The opening arpeggios are hard to play while looking at the sheet music. So I've been memorizing it, which comes naturally with lots of repetitions anyway. However, even an hour of repeating a few 2-4 measure chunks of arpeggios, I still can't play it up to speed or even 75% (they go pretty fast) when putting it together. Any suggestions on what I'm doing wrong?

I've been working on it for 1-2 weeks and still don't really have the first two pages down (although I've jumped around and learned some other parts too). Is it going to just take more time for it to soak in?

From reading this, I have doubts about whether you are prepared to tackle this piece - I learned the first two pages with relative ease (in less than an hour). However, my suggestion is to play the arpeggios very slowly, and hit each note twice. This reinforces the patterns for your muscle memory, and also helps avoid missing notes once you've gotten it up to speed.

I'm working on Rach 2 first movement and I'm having a lot of issues learning it quickly.

...even an hour of repeating a few 2-4 measure chunks of arpeggios, I still can't play it up to speed or even 75%...Any suggestions on what I'm doing wrong?

How fast are the arpeggios compared to your normal speed for arpeggios?

If you've learned it well enough you should be holding yourself back on the speed. If it's hard to play at speed you've not learned it well enough slowly.

The real issue is efficiency of learning.

Is it efficient to keep working one phrase beyond a certain amount in one session?.... or is it more efficient to limit the time for that phrase, and use the remaining time for a different section(s) or phrase(s), or a different piece altogether, and then come back to the original phrase the next day after realizing the consolidation benefits of a night's sleep.

I think the evidence is clear, but it is easy enough to devise your own test of what you think works better.

What lead me to the question was the explanation in the book by Norman Doige why many stroke suffered patients never fully recover. Because they exercise maybe those 15 minutes on a movement. While those patients who try the simplest movement (like rolling a ball) through almost all the day succeed in the end and recover. Leaving musican issies aside and investigating only the technical issue, should I give more of my time to a few clumbersume movements of mine, which I spend months and years to accomplish but never fully got with them? Maybe I am like that unrecovering stroke patient who tries to make the movement with only 15 minutes devotions. Of course, I do not consider all the practice details to be under the question. Most of the procedures are understandable and I keep to them as all of you. Perhaps, I mean only very small purely technical issue. For instance, my left hand in the downward scale motion does not feel comfortable and accurate. Would not it be heplful if I, for some devoted period of time, do that motion much more in the day than 15 minutes?

But I'm not saying that more than 15 minutes is a waste, either. The individual determines how long they can concentrate... That is one of the limiting factors here. Working beyond that point is a waste of time, so it's good to find that sweet spot.

I do not agree that "the evidence is clear".

1. The human brain learns by “chunks”, and then by joining these chunks into larger chunks. Anything that can be learned by repetition will be learned after seven repetitions. If after seven repetitions you have not learned the “chunk”, it means that the chunk was too large for the brain to handle. You must break it down into smaller chunks.

Let us say that you want to learn a poem with 200 verses. If you read the full 200 verses seven times, chances are that after seven times you will not have learned it. Most people who are not aware of what I am about to say, will just keep repeating the whole poem in the hope that by increasing the number of repeats they will eventually master it. Let us say that it takes 30 minutes to repeat aloud 200 verses. Repeating the poem seven times will take 3.5 hours, and at the end of it you will not have learned it. So you repeat another seven times. You still will not have learned it. So you do another seven times with the same dismal and pathetic result. Now you have been reading this poem for 10.5 hours. Do that for a whole month. I bet that at the end of the month, practicing 10.5 hours a day (21 repetitions) you still will not have learnt the poem. This is partly because you cannot fit enough repetitions in a day (the poem is simply too large), but also because if you have not learned after seven repetitions increasing the number of repetitions will not make any difference.

So what should you do? You must decrease the size of the chunk of information that you are trying to learn. How much should you decrease it? Well, start by cutting the poem in half: 100 verses. Now this takes only 15 minutes to read through. After seven repeats, did you learn it? If you did, this is the chunk size you can cope with. If not, the chunk size is still too large. So cut it in half again: 50 verses, which you can now read in 7.5 minutes. Now let us say that by cutting it in half and trying to learn the chunk in seven repetitions you finally got to 1 verse. That can be read in 9 seconds. This is the exploratory stage of your practice: when you find out what is the larges chunk you can learn by repeating it seven times. With experience you will get this size fairly immediately. But in the beginning expect to spend sometime learning about yourself and your learning capacity.

So you figured out that one verse is (for you) learnable after seven repeats. After seven repetitions you just know it. So it is going to take you (9x7) = 63 seconds to master one line of the poem. To master the 200 verses will take you exactly 3. 5 hours, the same amount of time it took you to read through the whole poem 7 times without making any progress whatsoever. The conclusion is obvious: Breaking your learning tasks into chunks that can be learned after seven repeats will save an amazing amount of time, as compared to the alternative of reading the whole thing seven times.


2. The second principle is: You learn nothing until it is processed by the unconscious. Dreaming is one of the symptoms of this, so you need at least one night sleep in between learning sessions before you actually learn what you have been practicing. Usually you need several nights sleep depending on the complexity of your task. This is the 20-minute principle.

Going back to the 200-line poem. It took you 63 seconds to repeat and learn the first line. That’s it! You do not need to do any more work on this line today. You can do, if you want, but it will not make any difference whatsoever.

If you do your seven repeats (63 seconds), stop and go to bed, next day when you wake up you will find that you pretty much forgot the line. So you must start again, and repeat the line seven times (63 seconds again). But you will discover that although you felt as ignorant as in the first day, this time it took you only 5 repeats to get to the stage you were in yesterday after 7 repeats. So you re-learnt the line in 45 seconds, instead of the 63 seconds. Never mind that, do your seven repeats again (even though you have mastered it by the fifth). On the third day, you wake up and to your dismay you realize you cannot remember a thing. However, this time by the second repeat it is all back in your mind. This time it took you only 18 seconds to get to the stage that in the first day took you 63 seconds and in the second day 45 seconds. Again, even though you mastered the line by the second repeat, you do the full seven repetitions. On the fourth day, chances are that you will not need to do any repeat. You simply know the line. I have never met anyone who needed more than seven days to get to this stage. Usually by the third/fourth day they have learned their chunk of information (provided that the size of the chunk could be learned after seven repeats).

The important information here is this. If you repeat your verse 700 times (instead of 7), It will make no difference whatsoever to the speed with which you will learn it. It will still take four days. You do not need to believe me. Just try it. Get two passages of a piece. Size them so that they can be learnt after seven repeats. Do only seven repeats on the first one, and 700 repeats on the second. See which one is thoroughly learnt first. My prediction is that they will both take exactly the same amount of time to be learnt

In the case of a passage of music, you will probably do more things then just repeat it. After repeating seven times, I would work on hands separate and hands together. Depending on the passage I might use rhythmic variations, or play it in chords, or other practice variations. So it may take 15 – 20 minutes to go through all these routines, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. Then that is it for the day! Only go through that passage again next day. If you want to devote 5 hours a day to piano practice, use the remaining time to practice other passages, or even passages from other pieces.

So use the 7-repeat principle to define the section you are going to practice. Then practice it only for the time necessary to master it (usually less then 15 – 20 minutes, but rarely a bit more). Then leave it until the next day. Repeat the same process again until you finally know it (should take 3 – 4 days)