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When you are working on a measure, line, or phrase, do you practice it over and over and over for hours?

Before you put too much stress you hand muscles, I always start with a few warm-up pieces. The first few minutes for pieces that are not very challenging and familiar to get the hands working. Like to start with church hymns especially because many are short 4 line pieces and they tend to be repetitive so you're playing as many times as the # verses.

Jumping into the piece I'm working on I'd repeat a small section a few times slowly and gradually bring up the tempo. For hours definitely not. If a section or a measure is difficult usually anywhere between half-hour to an hour max. Work on something else and come back to it later. Overworking your brain and your muscles is not a good idea. When you learn a foreign language, there is a technique call "space repetition". Instead of repeating a word or phrase 100x continuously, you'd do it for as many times as you can get it into your head. Stop for a few hours and do the same again. Every time you come back to the same section you find that it is less of a struggle but you have to give yourself a break in between.

Are you kidding? You make some progress within 5 minutes or you sleep on it and find a different bit to work on.

I always indulged in that "War of Attrition" approach. A challenge; thank goodness for headphones!
It doesn't work, btw. Much better to go slow and build up bars/sections at a time.

No, of course not! Repeating anything over and over for hours is a total waste of time. It's much more productive to repeat only a few times, listening very carefully each repetition to make sure it's exactly how you want it, and then move on to a different phrase or measure. As Whizbang pointed out, it's the sleep in between practice sessions that solidifies the learning, but the repetitions have to be thoughtful and correct rather than mindless finger-moving.

Yes, but not all the hours in one sitting. At the most, I practice just 10 minutes on a section in one sitting. Quality is more important than quantity. However you do it during the time frame, you must do it correctly for at least 90% of the time. I usually practice a section slow enough that I can play correctly for at least 10 times in a row. This takes a lot of mental concentration, but it can improve your finger muscle memory greatly.

I used to bar by bar practice when young but now I try to get as far as i can with one read and play then call that a natural buffer. I'm calling it work in progress and try to improve with each playing as apposed to when I was young trying to get each bar perfect before moving on. The problem is and I don't know about all of you but I think I have actually proven times goes faster when your older.
As a young teenager 30 minutes a night practice was an eternity. It dragged on for ever with your mates outside waiting for you.
Now I find 2 hours passes in the blink of an eye and I find my cup of coffee sitting there with the promise of a quick practice . I feel i don't have the time to Bar by Bar. At my age I want to hear more of the piece at one session and enjoy the challenge of playing deeper and deeper into a black and white note jungle. Does it help accuracy, no but it does help sense of pace and I enjoy learning this way for the moment.

Never on one sitting...only as long as my mind can focus on it properly. One measure it's only minute(s), a longer phrase might be 15-20 minutes.

That's for physically practice...Fingering and analysing may take longer but that's a different kind of practice.

A rule of thumb is that if you practice a section 7 times in a row, without nailing the 3 last attempts perfectly, you have chosen a too long section. You must divide it more. You should not do more than 7 attempts in a row. (My biggest mistake is often that when I have nailed it perfectly ONCE, I say to myself "ok, problem fixed" and move on ... I know by now that I must do a few more repeats in order to "engrave" it well enough, but sometimes I forget ...)

Of course this 7-3 rule is just a rough guideline. Perhaps you prefer 10 attempts and 4 perfect attempts in a row, or whatever ... but it is a good starting point, at least. "Hundreds of repetitions" - no, no, no!

Also remember Liszt's terrific advice: "think ten times, play once". Let's say you struggle with a little section then, repeating it over and over without much of a progress. Now, remember Liszt, take your hands off the piano, be quiet, analyse what you just did, then repeat it mentally, the correct way, a few times. Maybe ten. And THEN you play again. You will be amazed how effective this method is, even though you haven't touched the keys at all!

Also be creative in your analysis. For example, remember that you use your whole body when you play. In order to create certain effects - fast playing, loud playing, light playing etcetera - you may need to think of your posture, your muscles in your back, how you sit and so on. If something is not working for you, it is better to take your time to investigate the causes and the possible solutions, instead of literally banging your head against the wall and exhaust your hands and arms.

So, mindless repetitions for hours - that will not do you any good. Dare to go in clinch with the issues instead of hoping that they will vanish automatically if you just play again, and again, and again ... (I have tried the latter many many times. I can assure you: it does not work!)

I totally agree with outo. I would stop practicing before losing my focus. Before even physical practice, I would spend a lot of time on fingering and analyzing harmony to understand the music. It is like a planning to play the music. If your plan is good, you have more chance to succeed.

Someone posted something here awhile back about the length and number of times to practice something. After 7x or 20 minutes, or something like that, you're wasting your time.

Here it is ... I think I saw this on pianostreet one time too.

http://kantsmusictuition.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-to-practice.html

You practice it for as long as you enjoy it and the process of new discovery.

I've practiced the same Taiji form for decades and still discovering deeper meaning. In my piano practice, I still go back to the very simplest of pieces to discover something new. For me, deeper is more meaningful than wider, but each artist selects his/her own path. There are no rules for the process of creation and discovery.

One of my favourite piano stories is from the great teacher Heinrich Neuhaus, who amongst many others taught Sviatoslav Richter, a strong contender for the title of greatest pianist of the 20th century. Neuhaus reports hearing Richter playing the same four bars of Prokofiev over and over continually for two hours without interruption until he was happy with it. If such a great pianist felt the need to do so and benefitted from it, there's probably a lesson for all of us. Neuhaus complained about another student who would practice a passage for a few minutes and then give up and move on before it was actually right. He compared it to boiling a kettle, and said each time she came back to it she had to reboil the kettle and ultimately it took her much longer than it needed to.

If you need more convincing, consider the story of Liszt's performance of Chopin's Op.25 No.2 Etude with the right-hand in octaves, in a concert setting. He played just the first bar slowly, and then repeatedly, over and over, with a very slight increase in tempo each time he felt secure, until it was at full speed, and then proceed to play the whole thing at full speed in octaves. An almost miraculous piece of playing, and certainly a miraculous piece of learning by a strong contender for the title of greatest pianist of any century.

Individual tolerance for such disciplined practice will vary, and there is no point in practicing beyond the time at which you begin to lose concentration or feel repetition suppression kicking in. There is every point of practicing over and over right up to that time.

+1. Both examples are truly outstanding and I agree that individual tolerance for such disciplined practice varies. As Dirty Harry said, "A mans got to know his limitations."

Thanks for the link to the article bSharp(C)yclist. It made a lot of sense, I’m going to try this out starting today.

I don't think they are relevant at all in an Adult Beginners Forum. Richter could practice non-stop for 12 hours and Liszt could sight read Chopin etudes better than Chopin could play them himself. How are these examples of any relevance to someone just learning the piano? And in any case, these examples conveniently ignore the fact that these pianists also did a lot of mental rehersal and knew exactly what effect they were seeking before even touching the piano. Just saying Richter repeated a phrase for 2 hours in the context of a beginner asking the question without also explaining that it was highly thoughtful practice is highly misleading IMO.

They are directly relevant because the question was about practicing the same thing over and over and if it has any merit, and the answer is yes, as the examples show. Good practice techniques are not somehow completely different for adult beginners; musical and motor learning benefits from repetition for everyone. All learning should be thoughtful, but motor learning in particular requires repetition. I could cite you 1000 studies on it if you'd prefer, but I thought the Richter story was more entertaining.

I still think that is misleading in the context of this question. An accomplished concert pianist who already has a developed technique and knows what he is doing can practice the same movement for a long time to solidify it but a beginner doing the same without teacher supervision would be asking for trouble. Go to the teacher's forum and ask them about students who come back after being away on vacation having ruined a year of work by drilling something incorrectly.

Also one should remember that someone being a great pianist does not mean they have always practived effectively and were without "bad habits". Whether it was effective or necessary or just something he did anyway is not something we can know from hearsay...and we cannot even know how accurate are all the stories we read...just saying...

They are directly relevant because the question was about practicing the same thing over and over and if it has any merit, and the answer is yes, as the examples show. Good practice techniques are not somehow completely different for adult beginners; musical and motor learning benefits from repetition for everyone. All learning should be thoughtful, but motor learning in particular requires repetition. I could cite you 1000 studies on it if you'd prefer, but I thought the Richter story was more entertaining. [/quote]
1. No beginner should practice the same few measures over and over. If they have to, the piece is way too hard. When some beginners say something like they worked an entire week on one page or less the piece is way too hard. Practice should be enjoyable and endless repetition is just the opposite.
2. What's very occasionally appropriate for Richter is irrelevant for 99% of pianists and 99% of beginners. Most beginners don't practice more than an hour total so the idea of repeating a few bars during that time is nonsense. When Richter practiced a short section for so long he was aiming for a level of perfection totally irrelevant for beginners.
3. Richter certainly didn't practice every set of four bars over and over for every piece he learned. In fact, it was just the opposite. Pianists of this level can learn the most difficult and lengthy pieces in a week if they have to.