I usually have the tendency to learn one piece at a time, but is it better my way, or is it better with multiple. Now, we all know this depends on the practice hours, but say I wanna practice for 3-4 hours, then I will be pulling my hair out with the one piece. Multiple pieces would provide more experience for skills such as sight-reading, right? Some people may believe that it is better to finish one project before going on to another though.

I prefer to work on two pieces at a time. (I work full time so more than that is not possible.) After practicing for an hour or so, I often feel the need for a change of technique or mood to keep my practicing inspiring. If a piece is long and has sections, I can get the same effect by learning different parts of the piece.

I don't have a choice lol

I'm working on too many.... very tired.

I used to work on about five pieces at a time but I got stressed. Now, I work intensively on one or two (focusing on making small technical sections perfect before I put it together as a whole and often working backwards) so I can finish them faster. My teacher wants me to expand my limited repertoire as much as possible now that I'm in my teens because he says this is the time to do it. It's amazing. I used to finish pieces in about three months. Now I've cut it down to 1.5!!!!

So if I'm 3 times as old, I can take 3 times as long Or is the sad truth that leaving repertoire building until you are my age is, well, more or less impossible.

I usually am working on 3-4 pieces at any given time, but I often do not practice each of them every day. I try to keep a good balance between Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern. I think it is refreshing to have more than one piece at a time, because it keeps one's practice varied. For example, if one spends an hour perfecting the phrasing in Piece A, it is a nice break to move to Piece B where maybe all one has to do is figure out some fingering.

When you say "practice for 3-4 hours" do you mean daily? If that's the case, then surely that's too much time to spend on one piece, day after day, without some kind of burn-out. If you have that much practice time on a regular (daily) basis, then surely you'd be better working on different repertoire so that different skills and techniques are being developed at the same time.

[*Seeing "wanna" in print really annoys me!]

Regards,

i couldn't afford to do one at a time

If my practice time were truly limited -- I dunno, less than an hour a day, I guess -- then one piece at a time might work (particularly if I spent a little time on warming up, purely technical exercises, sightreading, memorization, etc., but I don't do any of that). With 2-3 hours available, though, I prefer to be working on a several simultaneously even if I don't work on each piece every consecutive day.

For me, there aren't any hard-and-fast rules. Different pieces have their own technical demands, and they might vary greatly in length as well. One reason I've been working on shorter pieces recently is that it's easier to juggle several at a time. With the longer stuff, I would find my progress rather slow -- and even if I had, say, 5 hours a day to practice, working on just one lengthy piece give me major burnout (as Bruce mentioned) unless it were both very challenging and had many contrasting sections in style and technique.


I'm confused! According to your profile you're just 7-1/2 years old!


I think the only way to get more experience sightreading is to devote a part (or a bigger part) of your practice time to signtreading. I don't follow how it would relate to the number of pieces you're actively working on.