Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum How do you know if a piece is at your level or not?

Lots of times I think a piece is way out of my league and later surprise myself at what I can achieve with some elbow grease. Some pieces look intimidating but in the end could be gotten up and running quickly. Still others look deceptively simple but when I start playing I face big roadblocks. I'm always working on 3-4 short pieces at a time so the differences are striking.

So how do I know a piece is at my level or not?

I'm not doing graded exams so I'm not really sure about my level. However I reckon I'm at lower intermediate on a good day.

I consider my level what I can play quite well in about a week if I practice it a bit every day, for example. I might be wrong, but I always get my personal idea of the level of a piece when I start it. And my idea of my own level is the beginning of L2, which would be different from Grade 2, I'd say! At least, I always see the pieces labelled under Grades more difficult than the ones in Levels. Probably they just belong to different types of study (Grades require longer practice of each particular piece to master).

My piano teacher (well, ex-piano teacher, but still....) told me that I was being too impatient and that I needed to give a piece 5-6 weeks before considering if fully learned. Just putting that out there for what it's worth.

I mostly use piano books of music that are labeled such as, late beginner, early intermediate, or the like, and some of those have intro pages that give you the order to play. But I would say if you can't get through hands separate without too many mistakes (too many, as in one every measure) at least by the 3rd time through, then it may not be at the right level.

There is no hard and pat answer to the question. Aids in trying to answer the question are (1) a teacher, (2) a book compiled for a certain level that you have had success with before, and (3) I can't think of a good no. 3.

There is so much slop in what level a particular piece is at and what constitutes a level in the first place that in the end you usually just throw your hands up and have a go at it and see how it works. I'd qualify that by saying that the difference between beginner and advanced pieces (and whether you'd be able to tackle one or the other) is usually reasonably obvious. But the difference between early intermediate and late intermediate--meh. Too hard to quantify.

I don't think how long you work on a piece is necessarily a good measure, but how long you work on a certain number of measures might be.

It really amounts to what skills are required to master the piece. If it introduces 1 or maybe 2 new concepts, then it should be ok. More than that though and it will most likely be set aside before polishing.

For example, if it has arpeggios and you've never done arpeggios, then it could be a good advancing piece. But if it has not only arpeggios but broken octaves and octave chords and you've never done any of those things, then most likely its too advanced.

Another way to tell is you should be able to sight read through it no slower than half tempo. Not hard and fast rules, but these are good guidelines.

I use graded lists like PianoSyllabus and Henle to get a general idea of the ballpark grade level. Usually, I'm at about grade 5 ABRSM. RCM is about 1 or 2 levels easier than ABRSM (so RCM 7 ~= ABRSM 5) and Henle is usually 2 or 3 grades higher (so Henle 2/3 ~= ABRSM 5).

With that in mind you can probably figure out how hard a piece is in one session. Look through the piece and try finding the "busiest" couple of measures, then have a go at it. If at the end of one session the brick wall doesn't show any signs of cracking it means that the piece is probably too hard.

When I shop for sheet music, I usually do so "in person." And, I set aside a couple of hours for the adventure.

I have some ideas, gleened from the posts of some of our senior members, about pre-viewing and pre-reading a score before beginning to attack it at the keyboard. I just move this process up to before purchasing. I study the score and make a determination as to whether I could play/learn the piece before purchasing it. It is not foolproof, but, I know that I save myself a lot of heartache and frustration that way.

As someone has mentioned already, the denominated "level" of a piece can be misleading regarding the difficulty, due to inconsistency in the various grading processes. So, taking the time to read the score carefully before purchasing can be a great help.

I've gotten to the point where 5-6 months is needed. But that is memorizing difficult pieces for juries...

Sam

Also, it depends on what your goals are. If you are a hobbyist who just wants to be able to learn a well-known piece in a few minutes or hours for the enjoyment of playing, then anything taking longer than a few minutes or hours to learn is too difficult for those goals.

If you want to push yourself and really learn something complex, you can take many months, but that doesn't mean it's too difficult at all, as those are your goals.

I am not sure if I agree with the comment above about should being able to sight read no slower than half the tempo, except for perhaps very early beginners; I wouldn't apply this guideline to even early-intermediate students. As an example, I am learning some very advanced atonal music now that I can't sight-read at all (and I am an exceptional sight-reader due to decades of accompanying/ensemble experience), but that doesn't mean the music is too difficult. There is one particular piece that I had to break down into unrecognizable sections, but I could play an entire section at tempo just a half-hour later.

If you can play it, it's probably at your level

Oh, how I love that book. Keep in mind it's intended for teaching, though (despite performance lit being in the title), therefore a Level 10 (the highest) in that book is roughly at the early advanced levels at the most difficult..

Maurice Hinson's Guide covers all rep, though, from easy to stuff most of us will never be able to play:
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=806940

I know this is the adult beginner's forum, but there are lots and lots of very popular pieces that aren't in the Magrath book because they are above that level, yet someone may want to know where a piece fits, and Hinson's book will have it. I'm sad I never got to meet him.

I think you are taking an extreme example - I'm fairly certain the OP is not advanced nor learning atonal music.
My comment is rather a standard in teaching piano, and also must consider the other point I made prior to this in my post. Like any "rules" in music, there are exceptions. But those are not helpful in the OP figuring out what music they should be working on.

Can there be harm in working on pieces too hard? It's possible that injury can occur, bad habits in playing that will stick with that piece (and possibly affect the rest of your playing) until you finally decide to let it go over a long period of time to forget those bad habits and revisit when you're more capable of playing it. This can be frustrating and could cause a person to give up on piano altogether, having unrealistic expectations. This is not always the case, but the potential is there and only the individual can decide what to do.

When I was a student, I was forever having a go at anything that took my fancy, from when my reading skills were good enough to enable me to do so. I never tried to find out what 'grade' any piece was - I'd know soon enough if something was way over the top of my head. If that was the case, I'd put it away for a while and periodically return to it to see if it was still too difficult (if I liked it enough to persevere). There were many pieces which took over two years from the time when I first tried to play it to when I could actually play it . But what I never did was to keep on plugging at something day after day, which I just couldn't physically manage: I had much better things to do with my time - like playing stuff I could play.....

The signs that a piece was beyond me include: discomfort in my fingers or hands when repeating a difficult passage (even after finding the best fingering), or my fingers being unable to move at a reasonable speed on a short tricky section, after practicing it for several days (including fast chordal passages).

What an excellent resource, thanks for the recommendation.

Since I believe that the sound of the music that I wish to play must originate from my mind, the any piece that cannot hear in my mind is to difficult. For this reason, I am developing my imaginative hearing skills very slowly with simple pieces in a step-by-step process. As part of this process I might reference various YouTube or course video or audio sources in order to reinforce my development. Emma Leiuman is a big believer in vocalizing first, which is why I also practice my singing skills. Scatting is very helpful for developing rhythm.

I have to say that even within a grade defined in a particular ranking system there is huge variability. In my RCM grade 3 books, there are pieces that have taken me many hours over the course of weeks to learn. Then there is a piece that my teacher assigned last night that I was able to learn in one evening. Same book. Same ranking system. I guess you just have to try them to know for sure.

Of course, there is always the odd one but in general I find the grading systems fairly representative of what's reachable and what's not.

I mean, it could be a rightly graded grade 3 piece, no? If the concepts in the piece are considered grade 3, but you're fairly familiar with them already, that would make it easier for you to learn. Another grade 3 piece, which contains 2 or 3 new concepts, would understandably take a lot longer, because there's a lot more for your brain to process.

I agree with you all, despite the different views expressed.

Certainly, I find that the grading system is a really useful place for me to start. Within that, there will be pieces that come easier to me and pieces that are harder - but this is generally because some pieces draw more on my strengths, while others feature more of my weaknesses and/or new concepts as Keselo mentioned. Within this also, some pieces may be harder to get playable at all, while others may be easier to get the notes but then more challenging to play really well. It's also worth remembering that within exam grading systems the same piece may appear on the syllabus at different grades, and in that case obviously the player is expected to reach a higher level with the material at the higher grade.

As regards the sightreading rule of thumb, that probably works most of the time if you know your sightreading is at or above the "aspirational norm" of 2 grades below your playing ability. I know my sightreading is much poorer than that, but if I can make sense of a piece on a play through and handle most of what's required (albeit much slower than half tempo, without any flow, taking it just a little bit at a time), I will generally have a good feel of how manageable it will be for me to learn.