Last week, I kicked off my series on tools for practicing with this post about going slow. Today, I’m going to write about another tool that has served me and many students well in regard to practicing which is to take it apart into smaller sections.
What do you do to take things apart? Well, for piano, you can take hands apart. Right and left hand independently (and even adding in going slow) helps to simplify things in the brain. Once you build up a comfort level with each hand independently, the slowly (there’s that word again!) put them together.
Whether you play the piano or any other instrument, the most important part in taking your music apart is to break it up into sections or segments. Whether it’s line by line or working on a difficult section, this is at the heart and center of practicing. Practicing is not playing the piece of music from beginning to end a proscribed number of times. That’s playing it. And it’s reinforcing the uncertain parts, as well as the mistakes.
When you practice, you could play it once through to sight read it and determine where the challenging parts are. And then you can laser focus in on those parts. But when you do that, you want to make sure that you are going over those parts slowly and steadily.
How small should you break the music up into chunks? That’s always the question I get. And it depends on where you’re having problems. I’ve had music that I’ve had to take apart down to the individual beat, or even the subdivision of the beat! But typically, I like to work on a measure at a time, or 2 measures at a time, putting those together into bigger chunks or sections. If I’m breaking it apart, I don’t typically go past 4 measures, just to be able to really focus in on that segment.
If it is one measure giving you trouble, focus on that one measure. But be aware that sometimes our brain starts to sense that one troubling measure before, so you want to practice working into and out of that measure. That way the transition is smooth.
Practicing is going to look different for each student as well as for each piece of music. So take it apart, work at it until you feel like you have it. Then the biggest challenge is to walk away, go do something else for a time, then come back to it again and see how it goes! It is possible and you can do it!
Check back next Thursday to find out another tool for practicing!