Learn Piano your way with a TakeLessons expert

By Dustin C. - Costa Mesa Piano Teacher

Learning to play the piano can be a very rewarding experience. However, the ability to express and communicate effectively through music can be limited without proper piano technique and learning procedures. In order to make steady progress as a student taking piano lessons in Costa Mesa, it is important to know how to quickly acquire the necessary technique to conquer challenging musical passages. The following are five efficient learning procedures that can be applied to any new piano piece you begin to learn.

1. When you are first starting to learn a piece, listen to a recording. Don't be concerned about imitating the recording because playing styles are very individualistic. If possible, listen to many recordings. The idea is to assimilate and gather new ideas and possibilities of how to approach the new piece. In the end you will most likely choose your own playing over some of those in the recordings.

2. The key for acquiring technique rapidly lies in being aware of specific tricks for reducing difficult passages to not only playable but often surprisingly simple ones. Start by practicing the most difficult sections first. Many will start a new piece off by learning the easy sections and avoid spending as much time on the difficult ones because they are not as fun and enjoyable. However, the hard sections will take the longest time to learn, so they must be given the most practice time.

3. Our next practice tip is to choose a short practice segment. This tip can have the largest effect on reducing the practice time for many reasons. First, within a difficult section there are generally only a handful of notes that cause problems for you. It really is not necessary to practice anything other than those note combinations. Second, rehearsing short segments of music allows you to practice them several, even hundreds of times in very little time. This type of practicing can teach the hand new motions very efficiently. Third, the shorter the segment you practice is, the quicker you can play it without difficulty because the short segments are much easier to play.

4. When practicing one segment or passage, make an effort to include the start of the following segment. This continuity will allow you to connect two small chunks of music that have been isolated for practice and connect them as a complete musical idea. The general idea is that any larger musical passage may be broken up into short segments for practice; however, these segments must overlap.

5. Hands separate practice is one of the most important ways of developing technique. Many students attempt to develop finger/hand technique by playing hands together and that can be much more time consuming and difficult for a variety of reasons. It is important to note that hands separate practice should be used mainly for difficult passages that cannot be played otherwise. As a student becomes more technically proficient during their piano lessons in Costa Mesa, there will be less of a need to depend on hands separate practice. However, many students and even some professional pianists never completely give up on incorporating it as a strategy in their practice. Having said that, beginning students would do well to practice hands separately with everything they learn so as to instill this important learning procedure as quickly as possible.

Whether you're a beginner who has just started piano lessons in Costa Mesa or a seasoned pianist, I hope these practice tricks will assist you in getting through the technical aspects of the sometimes monotonous and tedious phase of learning new music. Now that you are armed with these practice strategies I hope you will have more confidence and freedom to express yourself as a musician!