Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum "Unlearning" bad habits

I guess my view is that from the beginning it's best to learn a piece exactly as it's written, with the fingering and dynamics that are prescribed. I'm not very good at this because I'm impatient. I fall in love with beautiful melodies, and in my haste to hear the melody, I use my own sloppy fingering which may seem easier at the time. Then I have to go back and learn it again the right way, because I usually discover that my flawed fingering limits how well I can play the song. It takes so much discipline to learn a piece slowly, only playing passages as well as I can play them correctly. And I sometimes get in the habit of playing wrong notes because I'm not disciplined enough to make sure every note is correct as I'm learning.

Having said all that, I love to improvise. But maybe the best improv comes after we learn to play a piece straight. For me there's also the issue of respect. there's also the issue of respect. I try to be humble enough to honor the composer by learning to play a piece as close as possible to what he/she intended.

I'm a very amateur composer, and I know how much I agonize over every note, every nuance of dynamics and tempo. I wouldn't like it if someone else played from a manuscript of one of my songs and immediately started changing things without taking the time to find out what I originally intended as the composer.
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Larry, while it is true that it's important to have good fingering on the onset, often it is hard to know what fingering would work best. There are times that I have to adjust fingering as the tempo of a piece increases as I discover the ineffectiveness of what I've chosen before. This includes when I've used the editor's fingering to start with. Sometimes it is inevitable.

This is one reason I've found it so helpful to start practicing right away with hands separate in short sections (as C. C. Chang recommends in his book on practicing). This lets you play a lot of things at the correct tempo, or at least closer to it, from the beginning so that you can come up with good fingerings. Once those are more or less in place, you can then do the slow practice that is of course necessary.

This is interesting. I have not tried this method myself except for once on Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin, Prelude. I tried memorizing each measure as I went along, bringing it up to tempo. I think I made it through the first page like that and then gave up. So for me, I guess it wasn't effective at all in the sense that I lost interest in the piece and didn't complete it. Perhaps this depends solely on the personality of the performer.

Morodienne -- I think a measure is too artificial a subdivision. I usually mark a piece out into musically logical sections, noting especially the difficult ones, and then practice those sections in all kinds of ways. The section can be as short as two measures or it can be a whole page -- depends on the piece.

This helps with a lot of different things -- understanding the structure, understanding where thematic materials is repeated and where it varies, and understanding exactly where the technical challenges are.

I do believe that even when you are playing hands separate, if you play groups of notes at the correct tempo you develop muscle memory much sooner than if you only play them slowly, and you also understand better how those groups of notes fit into the whole.

I too fall victim at attempting new songs at an unreasonable fast pace. I picked up this habit from playing bass guitar, where I would only read tab notations. Since tabs doesn't notate time it's very hard to not try and pick up a song at least close to the tempo. It's the only reference to rythm you have.

Bad habits from one instrument to another.