by Holly Champion

Many beginner piano students, or students of any musical instrument, don’t realise that practising your instrument isn’t just about playing through your pieces or scales. Practice is actually a whole field of knowledge, skills and strategies. In fact, a lot of what you learn in lessons (with a good teacher) is not how to play, but how to practise.* The ultimate aim of lessons should be to enable you to work independently on your instrument. Most professional musicians will still have lessons with a master teacher, especially now and then to ‘check in’ and keep up their professional development, but they are able to practise far more independently than beginner musicians can.

Most strategies for practising your instrument fall into two broad categories. I like to call these “learning practice” and “performing practice”.

Learning practice is the kind of practice you do when you are learning a new piece or specific skill. I will take the example of learning a classical piano piece, because that is mostly what I teach. Learning practice involves slowly moving through the piece, often going over the same sections again and again, working out the details and memorising or semi-memorising the piece. The details of the piece that you are working out include (but are not limited to): the key(s) the piece is in, the time signature, the main motifs or musical material, the structure of the piece, and the nitty-gritty of the notes, chords, fingering, articulation and dynamics. In the classical tradition, most of the details of a piece will be set out for you in the notation, by the composer and/or the editor.

The second type of practice is performing practice, which is rehearsing the process of performing the piece, usually from start to finish, while imagining an audience. It is hard to do performing practice when you have only just started learning a challenging new piece. Most of the time, you will start to integrate performing practice into your practice routine after a few days or weeks of doing learning practice, and usually a few weeks or months before an actual scheduled performance. Especially when you are getting close to the actual performance date, you should try to replicate in your performing practice as closely as possible, the conditions of your actual performance. Some suggestions: if you will perform on a different instrument to the one you usually play, try to get some performing practice time on that instrument.  If you tend to get nervous and sweaty when you perform, try doing performing practice after going for a run, or try elevating your performance stress levels by recording your practice—especially on video, as it will allow you to see what you physically do during a performance (sometimes you will be surprised!). If you will perform in a particular outfit, try practising in that outfit. Sometimes shoes, especially high heels, can make a big difference to how you interact with your instrument. You might also find that your tight, nice-looking performance clothes don’t allow you enough arm or body movement to play effectively.

When doing performing practice, always keep going and stay mindfully in the moment. As in actual performance, any mistake you have just made is done and you can’t change it; the only thing you can change is what you are playing right now and in the next moment as you look ahead.  Thinking about the past mistake will only harm your concentration on the present, and thus harm your playing. One of the most painful things to witness as an audience member is not a mistake, but a performer stopping because of a mistake, or even worse, going back and ‘correcting’ it. As audiences, we want to forget the mistake. We want to be carried along with your beautiful music!

A lot of students struggle with this. If you often find that you feel a strong urge to go back and play the section again where you just made a mistake, or even that you tend to dwell on past mistakes while you are playing (sometimes you will only notice this ‘dwelling’ while you are actually performing), I recommend mindfulness meditation. It can be very useful as a regular brain-training adjunct to your instrumental practice. Please try to resist this urge to ‘correct’. It is an urge that has a psychological component, (“I have to fix my mistake!”) but it is also often evidence of your having done too much learning practice and not enough performing practice. Instead of focusing on the mistake you have just made, focus on the next moment. And the next. And the next. This mental training is arguably the most important element of performing practice, so try to integrate some performing practice into every practice session. Usually you can find an old piece, already learned, that you can use.

If you don’t have an old, already-learned piece, you can also use a brand-spanking-new piece! I know I wrote above that it is usual to approach learning a new piece by doing learning practice first for a few days or weeks and then starting to integrate performing practice into your routine. But there is an exception to this general rule, and that is when you are sight-reading. Sight-reading should nearly always be approached as performing practice. The key to doing this effectively is to prioritise certain elements of the music above others, because when sight-reading (especially as a beginner/ intermediate student) it is unlikely you will be able to accurately play every single notated element in the score, let alone also imbue the performance with the kind of musical nuances that make up a great performance. I tell my students that the top priority here is duration, consisting of tempo, pulse or beat, meter, and rhythm. Duration is actually the most fundamental of all the elements of music. But more importantly for our purposes here, if you can sight-read your way (however inaccurately) through a piece, while maintaining a fairly consistent tempo, getting the pulse right, and not stopping or correcting your mistakes, you are well on the way to developing effective sight-reading skills. This is because most of the real use you get out of being a skilful sight-reader is to be able to play with other musicians, either as an equal collaborator or as an accompanist. If you are out of tempo, have lost your place in the music, and don’t have the pulse, you will not be able to keep up with your colleague(s), and the rehearsal or performance will likely fall apart. On the other hand, if you can keep up (even if only mentally) with where the music should be according to the tempo and pulse, then you can find your place and catch up again, even if you completely stopped playing. (For more on sight-reading see my related blog post “Strategies for effective (piano) sight-reading”.)

Even when you are not sight-reading, your regular performing practice should often include this kind of deliberate ‘keeping up with the tempo despite everything’ especially for any piece that will eventually be played with others in rehearsal and/or performance. For solo performances, you can have a bit more durational freedom. Bear in mind however that especially if it is a well-known piece, the audience will be much more likely to be ‘humming along’ mentally… so it is a good idea to practise keeping up with them too!

So there you have it: learning practice and performing practice. If you can think about your practice sessions more strategically in relation to these two broad categories, you will start to notice that you will be more engaged with your practice. You will start to see faster improvement and overall more efficient results. You will be on the way to developing independence as a musician. Good luck and happy practising!

*Yes, in British English (which Australians usually use) there is a difference between ‘practice’ (the noun) and ‘practise’ (the verb). It is a headache for writers. Perhaps next time I will follow the American practice of spelling both with a ‘c’!