Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum How long does it usually take to learn a piece?

Let's say your learning a piece that is around your skill level. How long roughly does it take to learn the piece not necessarily need to be perfect or anything but be able to play it and confident sorta? I know everyone is different, but I've heard that exams like ABRSM take around 6 months to complete. 3 songs to learn so 6/3 = 2 months for each song? Now that I mentioned ABRSM exams how many months or years (years?) usually progressing to the next grade if 6 months is a lie. Again I know everyone is different but what is the average time?

I am thinking taking exams. My teacher said I can skip to grade 2 LOL I dunno about that

Hi,

This video may help you understand the time commitment. Early in the video she says that children usually have 4 years of total study while adults may be able to do it with 2 years of total study. I would guess this would be with about 7 hours of practice a week on average. Hope this helps.


[video:youtube]NEk8Y6q7oeU[/video]

I took ABRSM grade 6 exam last year and it took me one whole year to prepare for the whole thing. Not just the pieces, you also need to prepare for the scale, sight reading and aural part of the exam.

Do you mean learn the notes or learn it well enough for an exam? To learn the notes and basic dynamics takes me about 2 weeks. Depends how much I practice. But to polish it to exam standard would take a lot longer.

Also keep in mind you may only play three pieces for the exam, but you should be learning many more at that level.

if the requirements were to play three pieces then you would start to learn those three pieces concurrently rather than sequentially. Six months is not a long time in piano years but sounds about right for a grade 2 piece. After two months you might play something passable but really you want the piece to be a lot more ingrained; how long that takes is the sixty million dollar question.

How well you can focus, set aside time, and make progress on skills you are yet to start would probably be the greater issue. Grade 2 in Australia, and I am sure in the ABRSM, requires a bit of ear training work which may or may not come naturally. Nor should scales and arpeggios be underestimated as well as the memorisation of musical terms. In short no exam should be considered easy.

My own strategy for preparing for my first exam, (grade 5), has been to allow eighteen months so that I am not stressed or overly worried. I want my first exam, but equally the time leading up to it, to be a good experience and so should you. A bad experience might put you off doing more exams which I think would be a shame. Not saying you should set aside eighteen months but the time it takes is something that should be carefully considered with input from your teacher. A timely post as I put my formal application in today and paid my money, no going back now

I keep pretty accurate records of my practice times, since I started using the Practice Journal App.

So I am getting ready to perform a Scarlatti sonata in an actual live recital next week, and I will play it for my piano jury next month. I played it for the last ABF quarterly recital. It is about as ready as it is going to get.

So far I have spent 65 hours practicing and memorizing it. I started on it Sept 21 of last year. That's almost exactly 6 months ago - I hardly ever miss a day. I was working on lots of other stuff at the same time, but that doesn't matter - it probably would have taken me just as long if my practice load had been less.

Sam

For myself I define to have reached a level, if I can learn a piece of that level in a month, being at the piano ca. 20 to 25 hours a month and practicing 3 to 5 pices in parallel but at different point of progress, and of course enjoying to play every couple of days my repertoir. So, I roughly every week finish to learn a piece of my level after having spent spread out over a month some 8 hours of concentrated practicing on it.

Polishing the piece takes me some extra 2 to 3 month, thus spending some 20 hours more on it.

Afterwards it is part of my reportoire, but from time to time I have to degrade one of my repertoire pieces to a 10 hours repolishing treatment.

So, for me it is some 30 hours for finishing a piece of my level.
It is of course different for advancing in the level. If I reach out for a piece of a higher level, thus studying the higher level, then ..., then I cannot say. At the monent I feel abandoned on a plateau and do not really feel that I would advance at all - although knowing (hoping) that I subconsciously do advance.

It depends on how you practice and not just at the piano.

I have the same question. I am an intermediate student and my teacher has assigned short (2-4 pages) grade 4-6 pieces (e.g. Turkish March/Mozart, Scarf Dance/Chaminade, Gavotte/Gossec, Moonlight Sonata Mvt 3/Beethoven). I practice 1-2 hours/day (not all on the same piece).


I usually start RH then LH separately to get the fingering correct and some sense of timing. Then both hands very slowly until I get the fingering and timing close to correct. Then start increasing speed (which usually leads to more errors). Usually start each session as slow speed before going faster.

As the original poster said, learning times may vary significantly with different students. But about how many hours might be typically required to play these pieces close to full speed with just a few errors?

With only these practice methods at your disposal, it would probably take longer than if you had other techniques.

Slow practice and HS practice aren't bad, but that won't be enough to get Moonlight 3rd movement up to tempo and accurate.

Also, I think "how many hours" is probably the wrong question to ask. "What must I do to make the most of my practice time and to allow me to play these pieces with ease, accuracy, and expression," might be a better frame of mind to have.

What other practice methods/techniques do you suggest?

BTW, I misspoke - Moonlight Sonata Mvt 1 (much easier).

The "how many hours" question is just to get an idea of what to expect.

Studying the music away from the piano, looking for steps, scales, leaps, sequences and any motifs that are repeated will help speed the learning process.

@ee375: Practice techniques are extremely important to make your practice as efficient as possible. Don't increase the speed in the initial stages of learning - that will only introduce errors. Your brain remembers all repetitions, whether right or wrong, so if you repeat 5 times wrong and then you get it right your brain will rember the wrong repetitions more than it remembers the 1 correct one. You have to practice so slowly that you don't make a mistake. If you make a mistake slow down until you can get it perfect, then repeat several times perfect, then STOP. Don't speed up when you feel confident because what will happen is that you start making mistakes and then give up on a wrong repetition. But your brain remembers the last repetitions more than the previous ones and your mistakes will become permanent.

The trick to making your practice efficient is to divide and conquer. Divide the piece into sections, work on each section for a few minutes until it is perfect (go as slow as you need to make it perfect) and then leave it and move on to the next section. Treat each section like a separate piece until each section is confident. Resist the temptation to play through the whole piece as that may destroy the work that you did. When you are confident with each section then group the sections into larger sections and practice them like that until you're confident. Repeat this process with larger and larger sections until you have the whole piece. Obviously, the whole process takes many practice sessions.

This is what I do. I practice each section for a few minutes and move to the next section, and in one practice session I'm able to go over the whole piece in small sections. In this way I can basically learn the whole piece at once in a short time because it's just as if I were learning several smaller pieces separately. I can get about 2 pages of an intermediate (RCM level 6-7) piece "under my fingers" in a week if I focus on just one piece. After just 2.5 years of piano I can venture to say that this is a pretty good result and I'm confident that my practice methods are what made this possible.

However, as others pointed out, getting the piece under your fingers is just the beginning and the real work is in polishing the piece. It can take anywhere from several weeks to several months to get it to a playable stage. It depends on the piece but how you practice is vitally important.

There are many more things you can do to make your practice more efficient but this post is getting long and I need to get back to the piano.

omg im in love with her. She looks like my Piano teacher LOL.

Every lesson she always hints something about exams. I refuse because I don't need it and the exams material is boring as heck. I'm not a kid anymore I don't want to do exams. I don't know how to explain this but I feel like its better to learn what you enjoy and not *study* to get that shiny certificate if you know what I mean. I dunno.

I'm with you cutestpuppie. When I graduated college, I swore off tests for the rest of my life.

I too am not attracted to these type of exams for two reasons:

1) I don't understand how arts can be graded. For me artistic endeavors are a journey not a goal. They are about expression of the spirit, not repetition of something past.

2) Tests just add stress which would be in conflict with one of my core principle of relaxation and full enjoyment.

I understand that everyone is different in the manner they approach their art, but exams just don't fit into my journey.

I love this teacher though and I do view her from time to time when I have the opportunity. She certainly brings a joy to her teaching. 😃

Cheers!

I did wonder why you were on the 3rd mvt...it didn't seem in line with everything else.

However, regarding practice techniques, it all has to do with the specifics issues you are having in a specific passage as to what technique you should do to fix it. There's no right or wrong, but some may be more targeted than others and thus more effective. So asking yourself why you are making a mistake, or what exactly is the problem with a passage will help you arrive at a good solution.

In the 1st mvt, a common problem is the accompanying features in the RH overtake the melody on the top which is played mostly by finger 5. That has to sing out while the rest stays in the background. So shadow playing will help this problem. You play the melody notes with the correct fingering, but the other notes you put your fingers on the key and press it slightly, but not enough to make them sound. Do this a few times and when you feel like you have a good handle on it (not 100% mastery, but somewhere around 70-80%), then actually play the accompaniment notes with the melody, but focus on keeping them in the background.

Each piece has its own set of pitfalls, and depending on the pianist, there may be some skills that they need to learn to overcome the problem areas. Have you asked your teacher specifically on how you should practice? And have her explain, demonstrate, and then let you try it.

Mastery for pieces at this level takes months if they aren't stretch pieces for you.

Same I graduated last year and I promise myself I never touch exams ever in my life lool. Exams nearly killed me

However, if I not have gone to Uni yet I *might* take exams because each grade is equivalent to x UCAS points. IIRC grade 1 is worth 50 UCAS points? Correct me if I'm wrong. Just FYI UCAS points are VERY important. More you have the more chance you get accepted regardless what degree you take. I know peopel actually do this I find it kinda sad in a way? It's cheating hahaha.

I checked out the pieces for grade 2 and they sound terrible... heck all exam pieces sound terrible IMO.

Typed on iPhone.

Sounds like fun. I'll let you go first. 😃

ahhh just checked out grade 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgifoooiDXE
top cat? isnt that from the cartoon series? Cartoon network? I like that however!

The time spent on a piece depends on the piece. For faster baroque pieces such as Scarlatti sonatas it can easily take 5 months or more for me to be even moderately confident. Such pieces simply have no room for error and also no time to lose focus or "rest". Muscle memory may develope rather soon but it cannot be trusted...I have to add so many emergency starting points in case of a mess up, it takes a lot of time... With slower romantic pieces it takes less, maybe 2 months for something with 3-4 pages. But I never feel really confident until I have had a break and "relearned" the piece or parts of it. This is what puts it more solidly in long term memory.

The initial learning process to the level of being able to play through something in moderate tempo and with no extra technical challenges takes about 2 weeks a page. This because I usually want to look it through with my teacher during the process before starting to really practice. Fingering takes time because of my hands.

The memorization is sometimes easier, but sometimes really difficult and slow. The worst time for me is when I can somewhat play the piece in sections but not the whole piece. That's usually when I feel like giving up... After I manage to play the whole thing from memory the practice becomes enjoyable again. I do return to the notes regularly and still practice in sections but having the whole thing in my head enhances the practice to a whole new level. Then it's all about little details that could be different/better and that kind of work is what I love the most