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Thanks NobleHouse, you and I may be the only ones!

I'm reading too. How can you work on so many major pieces simultaneously? Don't you get them confused?

I just wish that I could get a copy of your spreadsheet

Tyrone, I'm not trying to memorize them all. As I put in my first post I have "sessions" or groups of music. Each of the 1st four groups has Technique, Faber Lesson, pianoTV, and something easy.

Session 1 Scales

Hit the reply to quick by accident, apologies. Anyway, I have essentially four groups of four pieces including time to sight read. So fifteen "pieces". None are over 2 pages. Many are arrangements for my level. Which is something I thought was being kept to a minimum until I started this diary and realized how much of my practice time these "lesson" pieces, and "arrangements" are taking up over working on real compositions. I know these leveled off pieces are designed to teach me and bring me along in an ever forward progress, but they are nowhere near as satisfying to learn or play as a real composition written to be what it is as in the Etude and Minuet in A Minor, both of which I love.

And NobleHouse. Wish I could attach the spreadsheet. In word form I made a list of every piece I wanted to learn this year grouping by categories: Lesson pieces, pianoTV.net pieces, RCM recital pieces, Etudes, Personal choices, Czerny & Mikrokosmos sharing an "execise group"

I have each week running down the left column, then a column for each of the above categories as you go to the right. Each week I put 1, 2 or 3 items from my list into their category slots. I like doing this because I can put skips in for travel. I can space out 18 etudes to every one every 3 weeks, I can put 2 or 3 or 4 lessons down their column, then put several blank spaces in that column to give me a few weeks to catch up if needed & still see I'll get them all done by week 52. It's on excel so I can move things around as life does its mischief to my well laid plans.

I adore your level of detail.

I will PM you.

Thank you for the update! I really enjoy reading these.

I have two questions (and they're not meant as criticism, if anything, I'd like to provide a different angle to look at them):

1. As others have noted, you seem to work on a lot of pieces at once. I remember from my early lesson days, even if they were very short pieces, I'd focus on 2 or maximum 3 at a time. You'll have them done in no time and can move on to the next. I'm just wondering if your approach could scatter your energy too much and prevent a deeper engagement with each piece.

2. Why so many arrangements? Again, this is purely my personal approach, but I'd rather play easier pieces in the original and wait until I have the technical level for the harder stuff. But then I'm an old, carmudgeonly purist, so maybe you and all the other "method book" folks should just ignore my mutterings in this respect

Anyway, I'm glad you're persisting in sharing these. Keep 'em coming!

Sibylle,
I can't answer in detail right now as Friday's are my work away from home day, but I LOVED your comments and look forward to engaging with you on them, as those are two questions I ask myself regularly. Are you a music teacher?

Not a music teacher, just a long-time learner But I have been teaching elsewhere (at uni, and doing trainings in companies and stuff), plus I'm a life coach so I know a little bit about focus and learning and the brain!

I thought that there could be only one of us on this forum!

Cheers!

I was going to ask the same thing about the number of pieces Holly. I am over 200 hours in, 3/4 through my first method book. It's been 4-6 pieces at a time except for Christmas I was up to 9 for my little show for the neighbors. I'm going to ramp up my daily practice time from the current 1-1.5 hrs in preparation for an intensive Piano Camp this summer. 4-6 at a time feels pretty good to me but interested in the experience of more experienced 'curmudgeonly' types

Never tried 4-6 hrs/day myself, but as an adult, I'd be a little concerned that this doesn't result in an RSI that could sideline one for good from piano playing. There have been a few posts PW from people who got a little carried away with their practice and ended up with an injury. Just saying.

Although it's not totally clear, wasn't Progman referring to 4-6 pieces in his post and not 4-6 hours?

Regards,

Oh my! You're right! <hides under a bush>

Yes, 4-6 pieces at a time but open to other approaches. Am planning to ramp up to 3 hours practice per day - at Piano Camp I get 4 hrs/day practice time if I want it and 1 hour lesson per day.

You guys have really had fun on here today without me!

How many pieces to work on at a time as a not exactly raw beginner with ~200 practice hours under the belt? This is the question...

2-3? 4-6? 15-20? I have heard all of these from supposed experts and more advanced players.

All I KNOW is that my current thinking on the subject comes simply from my experience of losing it after 10-15 minutes on a piece. Ridiculous errors, total melt down of concentration, no point at all in trying for longer. HOWEVER, I switch to a new piece and I'm a competent student again. (That time is average as the reality is anywhere from 6 minutes on something almost finished to 2 or 3 times a week looking at the stopwatch and finding to my utter surprise I've been going more than half an hour on one piece.) But given 10-15 minutes of quality time as the "most of the time" average, if I stop at 4-6 pieces I'm going to come in at about 1-1.5 hours/day of practice time.

I simply want more.

My sweet spot is 2-2.5 Mon-Thu and another 3-4 total spread out over the weekend. At this level I sleep better, my brain is sharper for numbers (I do the bookkeeping for the family business), I feel satisfied and flush with pleasure at what I've gotten done. I'm not burned out, and there is no pain in the hands or wrists that isn't the arthritis I wake up with anyway. Not bad for a hobbiest.

More than 2.5 hours and I'm fortunate that my body mechanics don't give me any pushback, but my life suffers, I start resenting having to cook dinner...AGAIN, really? Haven't you people heard of fasting?.[i]..I miss haircut appointments, nasty words like "obsessive-complusive" start getting tossed around by disgruntled family members...in short negatives start outweighing the positives.

So for me the question becomes: Keep doing what I'm doing, which is 15-18 pieces including everything from a 2 line snippet to two-page lesson pieces, or whittle it down between 3-6 and perhaps doing them in the morning and try a second session later in the day. Or as I read Keselo did, at least in the beginning, work them 3-5 minutes at a time multiple times a day?

I truly want to hear everyone's thoughts on this question. I'm not married to the idea of staying at super high volume (My husband is SO relieved), but I'm not going to be willing to budge on putting in 2-2.5 as it's my happy place.

EXCELLENT question!

Right now I do what I do because I don't have a teacher and I'm a nervous of cutting the umbilical cord of method books giving me a broader exposure to level graded technique, theory, and advancement than I might get picking material for myself. I'm coming up on the last two units of Faber Piano Adventures 2, which puts me in the Level 1 area according to RCM ratings. (I had two years as a child, another year split in 2 six months segments decades apart and this past 7 months I've put in 150 hours on my own with method books supplemented by original works suggested by an online teacher, and watching online lessons to track down my questions) I am MUCH farther along than I ever got under a teacher, BUT I know without a doubt the time will come, and likely before I expect it, that my progress screeches to a halt without one. I put in 6 serious years with the flute/piccolo so I know reading music and musicality far beyond my physical ability to play the piano.

I WANT to be one of those who plays original works, getting to know composers through their body of works, and loving every piece I play. The thinness of the ice under my feet in the world of piano keeps me hugging the shore of method books.

Throw me a life line to the magical world of original works, Sibylle, I really want to know how to get there.

For those peeking into my discussion of this with Sibylle, please keep it to arrangements versus original works, or some other points on learning methods and skip trying to brow beat me into finding a teacher before I decide to. I'm Scots-Irish. Really, don't waste your time.

Hi Holly, I just caught up to your thread after reading your latest post. I’d been aware of your thread, but had not yet taken the time to read all of it. Then, in your last post, you mention a method that seemed familiar to me, so I thought I’d jump in and give you my two cents. And then you mentioned my name, and I just had to go back, read it all, and give you a proper reply. So here it is.


I was going to reply to this, but Richard beat me to it a couple of days ago. It seems slower, but that’s just how it feels day-to-day. Once you start looking at it over the course of two weeks, you’ll likely see that your slow pieces are 1) more consistent and 2) sound much better. Tempo is some indication of how well you know a piece, but it should never be the indication.

I do want to quickly give my opinion on some of the things he’s said. Bear in mind he’s many times more experienced than I am, and that I don’t disagree with him about anything. I don’t think anything he says isn’t true, I just think other things are also true.


While Richard specifies that it works this way when memorizing, I want to state that it works much the same when reading. The difference lies in the message the brain gets (memorized notes vs reading notes), the rest of the process is much the same.


Yes, but it’s worth specifying that the point at which you can play a beginner piece slowly without the metronome should be within minutes. You should definitely be able to play it without the metronome first. It takes away the urgency, assures you’re in control once you do turn on the metronome (no guessing or rushing), and it provides you with a good opportunity to set and write down any fingerings you feel are required.
I think it's useful to keep in mind the material he learns is much more complex than what you and I learn on a daily basis. That's not to undermine anything he says, it's truly excellent advice, but it is important to realize that things work a bit differently when you're a beginner compared to when you're a much more advanced player. The general outlines are much the same, the nuances may crucially differ.


This is very important. It may not feel very relevant with how short many beginner pieces are, but it’s a mindset that you must make your own as soon as possible. I refer to this method as chunking. Something I vividly remember from my early playing days is how long an 8-measure piece could feel. Chunking it into sections of even a measure will help tremendously in learning it. It may feel slower at first, but you’ll be making a lot less mistakes than if you were to just play the entire thing through for 10 minutes. And it's correct repetitions we want, not those filled with struggle. This comes back to the sense of control that you mentioned earlier in your post.
Do note that, when chunking, it’s of great importance that you include the first note(s) of the next sectionl. This makes it much easier to eventually glue all sections together into a single piece. If it’s a particularly tricky section, you could even include the last note(s) of the previous section as well. It’s something I only do when a transition is particularly tricky, but you should be aware that it’s something that could help you tremendously.


Look up Satie’s three albums for children! They’re great, very funny with their subtitles, and each piece has a tremendous amount of room for growth. They look easy on the sheet, but they are so hard to play well. Great pieces to grow into.


That’s very impressive! The last 15 or so pieces from that book are far from easy.

Now, onto your latest entry..


I think the 15-18 pieces a day approach is fine as a beginner. Why? Because your pieces are so short that it only takes 10-15 minutes to go through it and make meaningful progress. Once you start getting better, you’ll likely be practising an equal amount of material. The difference will be that what are now three pieces, will then be condensed into a single piece. You’ll only be learning 6-8 pieces at a time, but the amount of music is the same. It’s more complex, too, as is allowed by your growing abilities behind the piano. Even later on, you may only be learning two or three things at any time. A ten-page movement from a Beethoven Sonata, to name a long-term possibility, is a lot of things to cover, even if it's 'only' one piece.

Covering the same piece multiple times on a single day is something I wouldn’t recommend. When you practice a piece, it’s like filling a cup with water. After 10 minutes it’s full, and you set it aside. If you come back two hours later, the cup will still be full, and you’ll essentially be pouring water onto the floor. When do cups get emptied? At night, when you sleep. (Quick edit: this analogy applies to sections, not necessarily to pieces. 5-10 minutes on a single section seems to be the sweet-spot. A piece can consist of dozens of sections, which would theoretically make it possible to put 3 hours of quality practice in on a piece.)

This cup analogy does open for another interesting discussion, which is practising something only every other day. Let’s say you practice, among other things, Mikrokosmos #24 for 10 minutes (day 1). You then go to sleep, and the next day you’ll be better at playing Mikrokosmos #24. Now, what’s funny, if you didn’t touch or even think about it that following day (day 2), went about your business practising other things, and then had another night’s rest, the next day (day 3) you’d be even better at Mikrokosmos #24. Despite not having practised it the day before. To use the cup analogy, you empty your cups at night, but you don’t fully empty it the first night. Probably not even the second night, either.

This has one downside, which is that it takes longer in terms of actual days to learn something. The upside is that it takes less time actually spent behind the piano to learn something, and efficiency is what allows us to learn more of all the beautiful material that has been written for us by so many wonderful composers. It’s hard to give you an exact number on this, but if I compare the time it took me to learn something before and after applying this method, I’d say it takes me about 20% less time to learn a piece to a point of satisfaction. Something worth thinking about, perhaps.

I’ll not make the mistake of getting so far behind on your thread in the future; I’ll be following it more closely and help wherever I can. You've created a beautiful thread here.

Thank you SO much Keselo! I'm a little star-struck. Not to make you uncomfortable or anything, but I read your entire thread last weekend, printed it and read it again over this past week with a highlighter and discovered the excellent document you made over on Reddit of original works by levels, also printed and highlighted. So, thanks to you, that Satie book for children is already ordered!

I'll be re-reading your thoughts here again many times this week as well.

As initial reaction: you and others have made a believer out of me to keep the tempo down, both lower and for a longer time than I was before so now it's a matter of self-discipline. Ah, Grasshopper, the journey down that path is long and arduous...

I wouldn't dream of starting with the metronome until after listening to the piece, working on it hands separate, writing in fingerings, sectioning (what I usually call chunking) the piece, and working on each section hands together while counting aloud until I can play it smoothly, if with glacial slowness, then I'll take a stab at the likely tempo I should set the metronome and go from there. Good to hear I'm on the right track with that. I just needed to get my head on straight with the advancement curve from there. This week has proven a slight incline with frequent dips back to level is much more useful than an exponential curve driven by ego over quality of musicality! Also, thanks to zrtf90, I spend more time without the metronome at all to feel the piece early on instead of waiting for some pre-determined tempo test to give myself permission.

I like your cup analogy. I remember it from your thread. It's part of what's had me up at numerous pieces instead of endlessly going over the same measures to get in my necessary time to sleep well. I also remember your recent posts (or were they last year?) about dividing your material into parts that alternated days of practice. I think I do some variant of that over the weekends when I skip Friday entirely then do 2 of my 4 practice sets each of the weekend days instead of all of it every day. I've noticed it doesn't seem to do any harm. Repertoire pieces seem okay with a week or so of idleness, when things get crazy, though I have to play them slowly if I've been that lazy.

I welcome, gratefully, any and all comments you might have here. I've heard your playing and the very first thing I thought, was "Like that! That's what it would sound like if an advanced player was playing a beginner piece. I want to play like that!" So, obviously, going on to hear how far you've advanced in under 3 years I am extremely receptive to any advice you might feel inclined to give.

Thank you again, so much, for your time.