What's keeping you from being a GREAT pianist?

For the sake of simplification, we're going to say that there are 4 types of pianists in the world: Bad, Average, Good, and Great.  I understand that there are transitionary levels ("below average", "above average"), which do not need to be mentioned since these imply moving from bad to average or from average to good.  I also won't mention descriptions beyond great (such as elite) which represents a very small percentage of people who play piano, and honestly... If you're old enough to read this blog, and are reading about about how to improve your pianism, then you probably haven't started early and fast enough to become elite.  But don't be depressed.  Being merely a great pianist is not only nothing to cry about, but it is a laudable achievement that is something to strive for.

However, most pianists are not great.   Bad and average pianists probably make up way over half, maybe even 60% of all pianists in the world.  Of the remaining 40-50%, most of these pianists are good, with only a small percentage being great or elite.  Why is this the case?  For reasons you'll see, climbing up the ladder in pianist categories is hard.  This is very important before we go on.  It's crucial that you accept this fact before moving on with this article, because I'm going to make a big deal of it.

Being GREAT at piano is HARD!

Being GREAT at piano is HARD and takes A LOT of time!

Some of you might be thinking: Really? Okay.  I guess I won't be a great pianist if it's going to be really hard and take a lot of time.  I'll go be great at something else that isn't as hard.  So, let me go ahead and tell you this before you go away.

Being GREAT at ANYTHING is HARD and takes A LOT of time!

So if anything requires difficulty and time to be great, why not pursue that on the piano?  Let's proceed.

This article is about becoming GREAT, but we have to quickly talk about how to get from bad to good.

TO BE A BAD PIANIST

Simply play during your lessons, and hardly ever in between.  Practice, if it occurs, is unfocused.  Or...take a few lessons, and stop.  Don't practice at all.

TO BE AN AVERAGE PIANIST

Practice at least a few days per week with some focus.  Practice on new and challenging material doesn't have to be a high percentage of your piano time, but it needs to be something regular.  Do this consistently for at least a year or two, and you will be an average pianist.

TO BE A GOOD PIANIST

Practice needs to become a HABIT.  You need to shoot for daily time at the piano.  You need to be focusing practice on new and challenging skills and pieces.  You also need to be taking lessons, or have someone experienced who can give you feedback.  How much time should you be spending?  Honestly, it doesn't really matter.  Practice 15 minutes a day with focus, and you'll eventually be good, but it may take many years.  Practice several hours a day, and you'll get good faster.  But practice 8 hours a day with just what I said, and you'll never be great.  Sorry, but it's not enough, and that's because time and effort are only parts of what make someone great.

What's keeping you from being a GREAT pianist?

1. You're not GOOD yet.

This is a simple test.  Is practice a habit, a daily habit?  Are you focusing on new and challenging material?  Are you taking lessons, and applying feedback to your practice?  You have to do this to become good.  You don't go from bad to great or average to great without passing by "good".  Check your habits.  This is not requirement 101, but 099...something you must do before you can move on.

2. You place too much value on comfort and satisfaction.

As I said, practice 8 hours a day with the habits of a good pianist, and you won't be great...IF your material and technique doesn't stretch you to your limits.  A runner who isn't huffing and gasping every now and then knows they won't get faster.  A weight lifter who doesn't feel the soreness of muscle burn isn't getting much stronger.  As a musician, you must face the facts: Stretching yourself requires DISCOMFORT.  Practicing in a way to be great will not feed your ego.   If you want to be a good pianist with great self-esteem, then take that piece you learned last year that you already know and play it until it's fast and fulfilling.  Being a great pianist will not feed your ego.  The road to being great is chock-full of potholes.  It is constantly under construction.  There are detours.  You'll have times where you wish you could just go back to the land of good and stay there.  At the same time, the road to great does make progress, and you are getting closer if you persevere.  The next few points are related.

3. You waste time on easy sections, and ignore what is difficult.

Unless you're trying to jump many levels ahead, almost nothing you practice is totally hard.  It has easy measures and hard measures.  In most cases, it should be simple to figure out which is which.  The ego-driven good pianist practices what is easy every chance they can, because it's fun to hear the accomplishment and avoid the brain strain of what great pianists do:  Dive in, struggle, and wrestle with the difficult sections.  Commit a large portion of your practice to the hard places.  Tackle them first, and tackle them often.  If you have pesky measures, there's a huge advantage to doing 5-10 focused minutes of practice on the same spot multiple times a day.  Give yourself a break, but keep coming back.  Don't get mad or discouraged while it's hard.  You WILL win every match eventually if you simply don't give up.

4. Your music is too easy.

Here's an easy guide to the levels: To be average, play music that average pianists play.  To be good, play music that good pianists play.  To be great, play music that great pianists play.  Now this is tricky, because the road from Clementi's Sonatina op. 36, no. 1 to Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata (still regarded as one of the most difficult pieces ever written) has many, many steps in between.  Your music should always challenge you, but never overwhelm you.  You need to be practicing music that will advance you a few more miles down the Road to Greatness.   Practice easier music to stay in the land of good, but with more property. This is where a teacher is invaluable, to help you move forward at the pace that best suits you.

5. You ignore or underemphasize your technique.

 If you didn't already, please click on the link in the above section for Valentina Lisitsa performing the finale of the Hammerklavier Sonata.  To achieve the speed and independence required to play that requires many hundred to thousands of hours on specific scales and arpeggios, not to mention etudes and exercise that mix these together.  Here's a fact: The speed of your scales is the limit of how fast you can play music with those scales.  The same goes with arpeggios.  Learn your skills, then speed them up, then learn them in harder ways, and speed them up again.  This needs to be a regular part of your practice.

6. You neglect your theory.

I've met good musicians who don't know much about theory, but I've never met a great musician who was lacking.  Theory requires study, written study.  The more you know, the better you understand what you're playing. 

7. You haven't mastered the art of Deliberate Practice

This is the most important distinction between a great and good pianist.  A good pianist can work on something hard, but the goal might be: I'm going to start on measure 1 and play to measure 16 as many times as I can within 20 minutes.  The great pianist looks at the really tricky measure 12 (the one with the chromatic scale), and practices ONLY that for 15 minutes.  They practice it super slowly focusing on fingerings and absolute accuracy.  Then they apply long-short and short-long rhythms.  They also approach it from the end, moving progressively backwards from the beginning.  They notice that it's kinda chromatic, so they review a chromatic scale.   They then get out a metronome, and work on the tempo.  They'll also do this tomorrow and the next day and so on until it's mastered.

This blog was inspired by a book that talks about this 7th step, one that I highly recommend to those of all ages: "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love" by Cal Newport

By the way, there is nothing wrong with being an average or good pianist.  If you enjoy the fun side of piano, but get burned out from the challenge, this is not something to find shameful or embarrassing.  Music should, in the end, give you joy and serve your needs.  This article is only if you're wondering: what's keeping me from being great?  And the answers are: only your time, your resistance to difficulty, and/or your approach to learning.   Master those steps, and you'll too be great!

Welcome Newcomers, and Happy 2019!

This is just a brief post to welcome the several new students who have started with me the past couple of months, share a bit about what this is, and what I post here.

So first things first... Welcome new students!  Welcome long-time students!  Without you, I'm talking to myself and can't pay my bills.  I'm thankful for all of you, and wish you great musical progress in 2019.

Now, what is this blog?  While I have passions for composition and music theory, this blog focuses on piano.  When I mention something else like composition or theory, it's always in context of playing piano.  This blog is for my piano students, and anyone else who stumbles across it who is just interested in my take on the instrument.

If you look at the past several articles I've posted here, you'll find a trend:  I don't post much about technique.  You'll need to take with me privately to get the hands-on advice.  I post every now and then about something fun or trivial.  But this blog has found a home for me to share what I think is one of my specialties as a teacher: the art of HOW to practice as well as setting and achieving goals.

From age 6 to 18, I had a teacher who was great for challenging me and pretty good for technique.  However, her entire instruction for practice was..."you need to practice."  This was echoed by my parents.  I was encouraged to slow things down when I practiced.  It wasn't until college that I had multiple teachers who discussed how to approach music strategically and how to conquer difficult sections that I was able to understand that practice wasn't simply "play, try again, try again, get angry, try again, take a break, try again, hope it gets a little faster, try again, and get a little lucky."

The fact is: If you just play a piece often enough carefully enough, you will get better.  It may seem like it takes forever, because sometimes it does, but you WILL get better.  Here's an honest confession:  I'm a bit lazy.  I'm also quite busy.  I don't want to spend 2 hours practicing something if there's a way I can accomplish the same result in 30 minutes.

To practice well, you must first commit to the HABIT of practice.  This is why I tell every student the 5-minute rule: "5 minutes are better than no minutes".  Don't skip a day if you can help it.  The habit of practice is the foundation of learning and improvement.  After you've developed the habit, you need to work on your quality.  In private lessons, we address practice for your specific pieces.  This blog will hopefully give you general ideas and motivation in addition to your lessons.

There's 11 months left this year.   Remember this rule.  "Practice makes perfect" "Perfect practice makes perfect!"

Why do we practice?

We practice because...

• it's our only hope for progress.

• it's our only hope against regression.

• we don't want to merely like the idea of being a pianist, but we want to be the pianist.

• there is so much to learn!

• nobody else will practice for us.

• somewhere, someone else is not making excuses.  They're getting better and playing the music you want to be playing.

• we recognize that practice isn't punishment or a chore, but the proven secret to success, the formula that thousands of musicians follow every day!

• if it were easy, EVERYONE would do it.  It's not always easy, but it's always worth it!

• we don't think of it as something we have to do.  It's something we get to do!

It's all of the above.

"Practice only on the days you eat." -  sign in a high school band room.

The Myth of Self-Starting

This post may have a few things to say to my teens and adults, but this is mostly for my younger students and their parents.  Since at least 2014, I have had the following section on my official policy.  I've underlined the most relevant part for this post.

• If your child is under the age of 10, they can really use your active involvement.  I encourage an adult to sit in on the lessons and then be willing to coach your child at home.  I have found that students stick with lessons longer when a guardian is actively helping them.   Please also understand that is not normal for a child to practice regularly without prompting.  Practice is work, even if they really want to learn piano, and is highly unusual for a child under 12 to be self-responsible in this area.

One of the things that scientists have learned in recent decades is that your memory is largely fiction.  It's not a tape recorder, but rather a movie that idealizes your past.  It also gets blurred with how you felt at the time with how your experiences have changed you since then.  I know from Facebook posts and the memories section that 2013 was a tough year from start to finish.  However, I don't feel that way any more, because one of the good things to happen from that year (and what seemed mostly like stress until near the end) has had huge positive impact on my work since then.  My current reality has re-written my impression of the past.

A lot of parents get upset that their child isn't practicing on their own because they expect them to be self-starting.  Nothing has ever saddened me more than when a parent withdraws their child from lessons because "they're having to be told to practice".  If they're in middle school or beyond, okay...I see your point.  If they're still in their first decade of life, I don't think you have realistic expectations.  Part of the justification for that is that you probably feel like you were a self-starter at that age.   Here are three statements about that, and I am willing to bet that at least one of them is true for everyone.

(1) You actually weren't a self-starter.  Your parents or guardians probably drove you to do anything that felt like work.  If you don't remember this, it's because of (once again) our memories' tendency to idealize the past, give ourselves more credit than we deserve.

(2) You never always feel like doing the things that require effort NOW.  But as adults, you learn to weigh the consequences, or trade-offs of letting it go versus doing it anyway.  This is a trait that has to be learned, and not at the young age you might hope as parents.  (And let's face it...quite a few adults actually DON'T do anything optional that feels like work, but that's another topic).

(3) You might have actually been a self-starter, but your parents somehow came up with the right motivation for you to do that.  Maybe it was some sort of incentive or reward.  Maybe it was nothing conscious on their part, but you noticed that they treated you in a more positive way when you were working hard compared to just taking it easy.

Until you accept that something that feels like work is going to be a challenge, you can't move-on and actually become a self-starter.  Here are some ways to do that at any age.

• Schedule your time on paper or in an app.  Block out your fixed activities (like work, school, appointments, homework, this lesson, etc) and look at what time is left.  Plan your practice time and officially schedule it as an event or activity that you agree to do.
• Log your practice time.  If scheduling is the before, logging is the after.  How did you do?  Write down the day, how much you practiced, what you practiced, what was easy, what was difficult, and what the next day's priority is.
• When possible, always schedule practice before something leisurely, rather than after.
• Give yourself a reward that is contingent on reaching a level of success with your work.  For example, every 10 hours of good practice (logged), give yourself a reward: a new pair of shoes, a nice dinner, a road trip, a movie, etc.  For the incentive to work, it has to be something you ONLY do when you succeed at your goals.  If you do it regardless, it is no longer an incentive.
• If you're more motivated by negative goals, give yourself a consequence as a goal of not achieving something.  For example, if you like dessert, you don't eat anything sweet on days you fail to practice 30 minutes (or whatever you had scheduled).  Or maybe you don't watch television, read your latest book, or play a video game.

Anyone can be a self-starter, but parents...PLEASE don't expect your child to magically inherit this trait.  It takes time and a lot of effort on your part as well as theirs.  In my mind, the biggest success I can give my students is to have the ability to someday learn a piece on their own, but I have to teach them the right way for them to do that and not solely depend on me.  Your goal as parents of piano students should be to train them how to respect the time and effort it takes to practice, and how to cope with getting it done even when they don't feel like it.  Until they get to that point, keep reminding your children to practice each day.  There's a 0% chance that I'd be writing this blog if my mom hadn't done that with me on a daily basis until I was probably 10.

Understanding the Reality of Trade-offs

I had time between lessons yesterday to walk over to the nearby mall and do some quick browsing.  I happened to walk past a gourmet cookie bakery.  I went in with the intention of just getting a simple modest chocolate cookie, but instead I got a giant cookie with lemon icing, a $2 cookie!  This photo isn't the very same cookie, but it's pretty close.

The first bite was GREAT!  Soft, sweet, lemony.  I started eating it the moment I walked out of the cookie store as I headed towards the other end of the mall.  I continued to eat as I walked.  By the time I had passed 5 stores, let's say 200 feet at the most, the thrill was GONE!  I was left with a few tremors and a feeling of guilt for shoving that whole thing in my mouth.  It was a matter of time before I felt a total lack of energy after the sugar crash set in.  Worst of all, the pleasure of the taste (the WHOLE reason I got it in the first place) was over!  With this experience in my memory, I could approach a cookie like that right now, and ask myself one question before buying it.

Is the 2-minutes of joy this cookie brings worth the hour or more of misery that will follow?

Well, that's an easy answer when I phrase it like that.  But when I want the easy craving at the time, I forget to step back and just ask: What's the trade-off here?  And is it worth it?

Wait! Isn't this a PIANO blog?  What does eating a giant cookie have to do with piano?

Bear with me.  I'll get there eventually.

Every decision...not nearly every decision, but EVERY decision in life comes with at least one trade-off.

You keep using that word "trade-off".  What do you mean?

A trade-off is also known as the flip side.  You can't do everything at once.  Making a choice to do something denies you that chance to do something else.  Back in the early days of TV, before streaming, before internet, before DVR, before VCR or other video recording, if you had time at 8pm to sit down to watch a television show, you had to choose which one to watch with the knowledge that you were not watching the other choices (at first, only 2, but later more).  Here are some more examples.

• Staying at home means you can't go to the beach.  Going to the beach means you can't just stay home.
• In NC, going to the mountains means you don't go to the beach (at least at the same time), and vice versa.

But those aren't great examples, because you're not making a hard choice in any case.  What about when there's a harder choice?  You have to address the decision in a way that lets you know the flipside and the consequences if any.  For example:

• I love the taste of sodas, and sometimes I just CRAVE one.  I also happen to know that soda-drinking is one of the biggest triggers for causing me to get canker sores in my mouth.  I almost never get them when I stay away from soda.  So, would I rather have the few minutes of sweet taste, or avoid the not-certain-but-more-likely days of pain that will follow?
• I like eating out.  I also need to save money, and don't particularly like taking time to pack a lunch.  What do I want more, the convenience of eating out or saving some money for something more meaningful?
• This video I'm watching is really interesting, but it's getting very late, and I have to get up early in the morning.  Is the enjoyment of the video worth the price of not getting much sleep?

You see where this is going?  Any decision has at least one trade-off if you take time to think about it.

SO, what are the trade-offs related to your choices regarding practicing your music?

• If you watch a television episode instead of practicing, you're making the decision that the entertainment and escapism is more important than the opportunity to get better at your instrument.  Is that true?
• If you play a video game instead of practicing, you're making the same choice.  Is your goal to be really good at video games, or really good at piano?
• Time at the piano spent just playing old favorites is time that you could be spending working on your more challenging new music.  You're choosing comfort over challenge.  It's a common choice, but the trade-off of comfort is to not make progress.
• If your time is diluted with such a variety of extracurricular activities other than music (martial arts, sports, church, drama, etc), you are accepting that you will most likely be acquainted with many experiences, but be less likely to get really good at any of them.  I'm not attacking this lifestyle.  It's certainly possible that you are okay with this.  For many people, knowing a little of everything is more important than being selectively focused on a very few things.  But have you at least considered this trade-off and decided if it's what you really want?

In summary: You can't do everything you want or even need.  Giving your time to one thing means not giving it to something else.  Striving for comfort denies yourself the struggle that makes you better.  Sometimes, you may want to dial it down and enjoy that video game or TV show because the pleasure is worth missing the chance to improve at piano, at least for that one day every now and then.  Sometimes you need the satisfaction of affirming your favorite pieces you've already learned more than learning something new.  But I challenge you to at least BE aware of it.  You can do just about anything you want, as long as you recognize what it is you're giving up in exchange, and are convinced that you've made the best choice.

Student Survey

I am planning to make some changes in my teaching approach as soon as the Fall.  This survey will help me greatly.  It is intended for current students or prospects who have committed to at least one lesson, primarily intended for school-age students though all ages are welcome to participate.  Please download and print a copy, then complete and bring to your next lesson.

You can find the document HERE.

The Blog Returns/Learning Difficult Music (10 Steps)

Hello Again

Part of me is tempted to use my absence from this blog as a metaphor for how bad practice habits can become catastrophic.  My previous post was from November 2015, well over 2 years ago.  Did I mean to take a 2-year sabbatical from this blog?  Or did I mean to quit the blog entirely, and just came back early?  No and no.  Right after November, came Christmas.  In January 2016, I was preparing a show.  After that...  Okay, there aren't any real excuses except that it became easier and easier to move this down on the priority scale.  It's easy to say:  I'll just keep what I've already posted active, but there's no hurry on getting any new posts.  Then it becomes a habit not doing new posts.  Then it becomes hard to get around to it.  Practice is like this.  One excuse becomes two excuses, becomes multiple excuses, becomes the habit of not practicing.

Okay, so I did give into that temptation.  I don't have a fixed schedule for this blog, but I still have plenty more to say that doesn't need to be limited to individual lessons.

Learning a Difficult Piece or Passage

I was in the midst of practicing Cesar Franck's Prelude, Fugue et Variation, op. 18 - originally an organ piece that has been transcribed for piano by Harold Bauer - with a "business as usual" approach.  I got to a 11-measure section that was difficult, 5 measures which I found VERY challenging.   I also was working on a piece by Prokofiev that starts sight-readable (see my definition below under step 3), but every 8 measures gets more and more difficult. When this happens, and it WILL, you have to modify your approach, but can still have a very productive practice session with it.

1.  RELAX
This is a lesson that I didn't follow as a child (or even young adult).  Decades of experience have taught me that getting frustrated is never the cause of success and is usually an impediment.  Just relax and take a deep breath.  Also, try this:  Shrug your shoulders and give yourself an amused smile.  Try a chuckle.  Think or say, "Oh well.  Here we go."  This is the first of 2 attitude adjustments.  The second is...

2.  ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE
You can do four things with difficult music.  (1) Don't try it.  Quit.  (2) Practice it with carelessness and/or apathy.  (3) Practice it carefully while dreading it.  or (4) Practice it with calm delight.  Please tell me you've never seriously considered the first two.  I can't help you there, but hopefully I can encourage you to move from the third approach to the fourth.  Accept it!  This music (piece or section) is hard.  You're not going to be able to just plow through this or sightread it.  You're going to have to dissect it, slow it way down, concentrate harder, and struggle...yes struggle.

There's a great quote that is the basis for many memes: "Embrace the struggle. It will make you stronger, and it won't last forever."

This will be hard, but this will be fun.  And in the end, you'll learn this just like everything else, and you will be SO proud that you stuck with it.

3.  CUT YOUR MUSIC IN SMALLER CHUNKS
Here's a good scale that I use.  EASY - means I can just about sightread it up to tempo, or at least 2/3 of performance tempo.  SIGHTREADABLE - At a slow tempo, I can keep playing without much difficulty.  NORMAL DIFFICULTY - Too challenging to sightread well, but I can work for 20 minutes or so within an 8 measure section and make significant progress.  DIFFICULT (what we're talking about) - Need to cut to 4 measures, or maybe 2, or maybe JUST ONE measure at a time.  Review the steps RELAX and ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE, and just go ahead and do this.  Trim your music until it gets to be an appropriate section for the challenge.

3a.  Identify what are truly the most difficult passages within your section and work on those first.  Often, it's a few beats here and there.

4.  ENGAGE THREE SENSES with INTENSE FOCUS
(1) SEE the notes on the staff.  SEE the keys you are playing.  LOOK at your hand-shape and finger alignment.  Are you hitting each note or chord squarely?  (2) LISTEN to the sounds of each correctly played note or chord.  (3) FEEL the shape of your hand.  MEASURE the distance from one jump as you do it repeatedly.  Pay hard attention to each of these.  Don't play them while your brain wanders off somewhere else.  If you want to learn difficult music, you have to give it your FULL ATTENTION.

5.  REPEAT EVERYTHING MANY TIMES.
Get it right once and it's possibly a fluke.  Get it right 5 times, and you're on the right track.  Get it right 10 times, and you probably have it.  Get it right 20 times, and you've probably mastered it.

6.  SLOW TEMPO, NOT SLOW MOVEMENTS
This is crucial.  Slow the beat way, way down.  If it's 1/10 performance tempo, who cares?!  Slow it way down.  However, move from one position to another with deliberation and full speed.  Play the keys full speed and with emphasis and confidence.  Trills, grace notes, arpeggiations, and other ornaments all go at full speed ASAP.

7.  MAKE A TECHNICAL EXERCISE
This can include practicing in varying rhythms.  If it involves broken chords, block them.  If it involves scales or arpeggios, try some that are similar to your passage.

8.  SEPARATE THE HANDS
If two hands are hard, try just one until that gets easy enough.

9.  STOP WHEN YOU NEED TO
If it's truly difficult.  You probably won't master it in one sitting.  Make progress, and know when to move on.  Don't be surprised if the next time you practice feels like you've regressed a little, but you should quickly get back to where you were and be able to surpass it.

10.  PRACTICE DAILY UNTIL MASTERED
Don't get this started (like I did this blog), make some progress and leave it alone.  Leave things alone when you cannot overcome frustration.  If you're making progress, no matter how slowly it's coming, and can stand to face it again.  Keep coming back.  Eventually, you will have it and may soon forget why you found it difficult.