Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum keep practise old pieces or just learn the new one

Hello everybody,

I am 34 year old, so I am old enough to join this ABF .

I study piano with my private teacher for nearly one year and now have finished about 7 classic pieces (they are all easy pieces for first year piano learning)

The issue is, I can play those pieces but the performance is far from perfect, so should I spend more time to practise them over and over until I can play them well, or I just need to learn new piece that the teacher give me?

If I dont play old pieces for a month, I forget them totally just like I havent learned them before.

Do you think which choice is better for me? please dont say that I need to practise both new and old pieces because I will not have enough time to do so and also forgive me for my poor English as it is not my native language

I'd say pick two or three of your favourites and practice them to clean them up. It's nice to have something reasonably polished to play for people. Otherwise, move on. When you get to five or six pieces polished up then you can make some decisions on what to keep up to date and what to let go. As you progress, relearning easier pieces you've been through will be much faster.

You are right that there isn't enough time to keep up with all the old pieces and practice new ones. I find going back to old ones (that I want to still play) once or twice a week for a go through and refresh is good enough and then devote most of my time to newer material. I can waste hours just going through stuff I've previously learned. At some point I have to decide what's important to be able to play and what isn't. Those decisions change with me all the time so I'll let something slip and then have to relearn it later.

Depends on what you want. Being able to play 15 songs by rote does not excite me. Knowing how to play - and then taking that and working my way through a fake book or a stack of lead sheet music and picking out songs I would like to play does excite me. I enjoy the thrill of being able to play something new - to perfection is not that important - to me. Improvising - messing around just me and my keyboard - is something else I find enjoyable. What would you like to do? That's what is important.

Have this conversation with your teacher. I bet your teacher could take you any way you want to go. If not, find one that will.

Good luck,

Malcolm

Well, I think a lot about asking this question to my teacher but I so hesitate to do so because my situation is so different from hers, she is concert pianist who learned piano from 5 year old, and I just learn piano for fun, so maybe she is not fully understand my issue from her viewpoint.

It seem that the advise from HomeInMyShoes is good for me at the moment. Thank for your advise.

I find out that play a piece few times a week is just enough to keep them in the memory. There is no, very little technical improvement by doing so. For me, it will take huge amount of time to practise to really make the different.