I have several transfer-students that are in the method books between levels 1-2. ALL of them have issues learning a piece to the point that they can enjoyably play it without stopping or slowing down for "trouble spots." I have tried numerous explanations and it doesn't seem to stick...

-"Practise it until is feels 'easy'... you don't want to have to think about the notes, you want to think about the music!

-"Smooth out the breaks so that there are no stops."

-"How do you fix a trouble spot? The same way you memorize a phone number. Repeat, repeat, repeat."

-"The beat in music is much like a heart beat. It does not stop or slow down. At least, it shouldn't!"

-"Pretend the audience is dancing to this song. If the audience was dancing to YMCA on my stereo and all of the sudden it skipped, or stopped, what would the audience do? It would throw off their groove. You want to avoid this effect."

Week after week after week. After a student plays a piece in lesson, I ask them to rate their playing of that piece out of 10. Today a student told me it was a 15! Yet she still slows down and stops at the same spot.

There MUST be a way to deliver this concept. It's like they can't perceive the bigger picture-what the piece should sound like when it's done. Today I sat and demonstrated one of my student's tunes for him 5 times so he could really get it in his ears what it should sound like. I have no idea if this will work or not. Any other tips or ideas?

I see lots of advice about what they should do, but not really HOW they should do it. What does it mean (to them) to practice it? How do they solve problems?

You must show them HOW to work through a spot, not just what you want the result to be.

People can't do what they can't do. And they can't hear what they can't hear.

Based on that, to students something is perfectly correct until they hear that it is not, and that is a building process.

There is no magic bullet.

My students will miss many notes until they become aware that they are missing them, and that takes time.

Once they have all the notes, they will use weird fingering until they realize that there is a reason for logical fingering, and that takes time.

When they get the notes and reasonable fingering, they will make up almost any rhythm to go with it, until I stress counting.

When they learn to count, the counting is uneven until I stress, for a long time, how and why to make counting even.

It's a long process, and I do it in layers. Then, when I get a talented student who absorbs correct notes, correct fingering and "feels" the rhythm, I feel like I just got a free pass out of "piano teacher's purgatory".

Which is one of the great advantages of teaching with two instruments. I can literally pull them along, if need be. However, try starting two measures before the trouble spot, sing and count along as they play. Play an octave higher than they are playing, etc. Just do the two measure preceding to two measures after, until they "get it." Doesn't always work, but it may help.

Speaking of hearing. Play what they are playing, and then play it correctly. Ask the student to tell you what's different. It's a method of getting them to listen to themselves, and in fact, to listen, period.

Record them. Then walk them through the process of how to fix it. Don't just tell them to repeat. They must practice mindfully!

I have a few transfer students who initially had this issue. They didn't see any issue with slowing down for the sections where they had trouble. So, I started using the metronome within the first two lessons - "let's see if we can get this whole piece at one speed. We are slowing down a little bit here *points* and I think the piece would sound much better if we kept the tempo consistent." Within 3-4 lessons, I had the students playing their whole pieces at a steady tempo (although often slower than they would have probably opted for).

One approach you can take is drawing a circle or rectangle on the 1-2 bars they are having difficulty with. Then they roll the dice or pick a card to determine how many times to play that part accurately.
Sometimes this might even be half of a bar, but if they play it accurately many times in a row, each day for a week, they will more quickly be successful at that part.

To go along with the above, you can do the "nesting box" approach, where you have a bar (or less) circled with a #1. Then you make a larger circle that includes some more material but includes the first circle. Label that with a #2. Then make another circle that includes more material, as well as #1 and #2.
Then you could instruct them to play #1 many times until it is easy. Then #2 many times, and then # 3 many times. Use a card or dice to figure out how many times.
I have called these boxes silly names, with the help of my students. For example, you could use colour names, candy names, Halloween items etc.

Using this technique has lead to success many times for my students, especially if they do it at home. You will have to show them how to do it at lesson, and then check it again at the next lesson. You quickly can tell if they did it or not!

Good luck!

Or, have them play a similar passage, but with notes of their choosing, in a 5 finger pattern somewhere else on the piano, and see if they can play the passage smoothly on easier notes, to get the feel of it. It may be that in learning the difficult passage, they have also learned the rhythm incorrectly. It's hard to fix!

Have them use a metronome, slow the piece down to be slow enough to play from beginning to end without stopping, then gradually increase the tempo. If the trouble spots are an issue, work on the trouble spots alone, then ease into the trouble spots, then go back to the beginning with the metronome, etc.

you could also play the part they are messing up this way - purposefully play many wrong notes but keep STRICT rhythm. Show them that it's ok to miss notes as long as they are in perfect time. This will at least get their brain to think about the destination than thinking too much about the notes themselves.

Then isolate the couple measures and figure out multiple ways to practice it - melody only, speaking finger numbers while playing, playing in different keyboard registers, recording them and playing it back, etc.

Are you certain these students are working through the trouble measures at home until they are clean, rhythmic, and at tempo with how they comfortably play the rest of the piece?

I speak as a student (forgive my amateur opinion, as I'm not a piano teacher!) but believe it or not I went through three piano teachers and a decade or so of vocal and instrumental music practice and performance without having anyone actually show me HOW to practice, instead of just telling me to do it. They expected that when I got home I knew to zero in on measures that tripped me up, or work it up to speed HS before trying to put HT, or that it as better to play it perfectly at 60 BPM than flawed at 110.

So I practiced at home how I thought was intuitive - I stopped when I hit an error and didn't continue the pace of the music (thus training myself to not play through the occasional mistake and damaging my ability to perform without pauses), didn't note those errors be then intensely isolate and work the section until they were gone. The beginnings of my pieces were great because I played them constantly, but I never worked the ends as much and the pieces got weaker as I went through, because I always started over rather than working in bites, or beginning in random spots. I couldn't count well enough to begin in the middle of a phrase, couldn't read well enough or carefully enough to spot rhythmic or notational errors and thus got the wrong notes under my fingers, and quite frankly playing the instrument was so miserably unsatisfying - practicing and not seeing any improvement - that I up and quit as a teen.


I say this almost as a query - most students do what I did, are you teaching them HOW to achieve what you want? That is, are they learning how to practice a piece or are you assuming that these solid practice habits like changing where you begin or end a practice phrase to avoid awkward joins, working through the end and middle independent of the beginning if needed so all remain strong, etc etc, are things they already know? I had wonderful teachers trained in pedagogy and talented musicians in their own right who never worked with me on how to practice and just showed frustration, contempt, or bafflement at my claims that I *did* practice and yet showed little improvement.

In fact, even as an eager restarting adult, I still went through several months of boredom and frustration before I encountered suggestions on this forum that lead my to learn better ways of practicing. Even my talented current teacher assumed that I knew how to practice efficiently and thus didn't train me in it, when she took me on as a student.

Practiceopedia has been a blessing for me, for diagnosing and solving the problems that inhibited my learning music well and quickly. I suffered from almost all the most common practice problems and nobody recognized the signs in my performing and offered solutions. I would ask if you have instituted something similar to that book on your studio? Have you given the students resources on how to practice, specifically? Demonstrated exactly how you want them spending their time at home? Maybe having a lesson that models exactly what a half hour of their home rehearsal should look like, complete with a little notecard of 'formulas' or reminders - like playing each new measure five or ten times in a row, alone, before adding more - might solve some of their weaknesses?

I know as a student who had this as an obstacle for years and years what a saving grace learning HOW to practice was. It put the joy back in playing and I have grown in leaps and bounds as a musician, at a rate unbelievably quicker than anything I experienced before, because I was spending my time learning smarter and more thoroughly.



When I read your post I just had to jump in and ask, because this sounds like a classic case of 'doing it wrong in practice without realizing it'. If they cannot learn what you assign them, week in and week out, they likely aren't using practice methods that actually get results. A good primer in these could be the magic bullet that helps them out, as it was for me. Few people intuitively come across solid practice frameworks on their own, and thus need some very specific help.

Yes, and I have kids who will practice from beginning to end while stopping and/or slowing for the trouble spots despite the fact that the teacher tells them multiple times every lesson how they should be practicing at home. It's always good to go over with the parent how a child should be practicing.

This is heart of the matter. And the difficulty of teaching the HOW lies in how much explanation the particular child can take in. Explaining, showing and physically moving the child's hands to show him what it feels like can all work together to get the point across.

Telling someone to repeat begs the question "repeat what?" If there's a technical deficiency, that is what has to be understood before any repetition takes place. Otherwise, we have what I call mindless rote. In this case, there could be more incorrect playing than correct. This is at best a haphazard way of practicing and does not yield a reliable result.

I tell my students that practicing wrong is much MUCH worse than NO practice.

Good point. Parental supervision is essential for children under 12.

+1

I agree - I have had success simply recording the area of difficulty, and playing it back to them. Breaks that occur in the same place each time very easily become "normal" to the player-they really don't hear them anymore. I record them, let them hear how they are playing it, then select a different "start and stop" point in the piece to break up the habitual pauses as much as possible. This seemingly small "shake-up" is usually enough for them to break the habit of "the break".

You could decide to stalk the ones you have trouble with! Make sure they are practicing right in their own homes. Oh, and, get their family involved, too. (Said somewhat facetiously.)

Advice to practice by going from beginning to end? Did I understand this right?

That is the ultimate goal, so might as well get practice doing it without stopping .

Like what many have already said here, it is not only about practicing and repeat until it is right, a teacher must actually zoom in and troubleshoot the problematic passage in question. That means analyzing the problem in technical terms: poor fingering? poor arm movement? incorrect grouping of notes? etc. I think this is where what separates a good teacher from a lousy one. A good teacher will be able to isolate the problems and work on them in details rather than just asking the student to "repeat until it is correct".

I want to clarify my question on "advice to practice from beginning to end." It has been stressed in this forum, and stressed to me as a student, that in learning a piece it is important NOT to keeping going from beginning to end. Instead, to work on the most difficult sections first, to work on it in stages. In the beginning it is the teacher who would be setting this up, saying what to practice when and how.

The reasoning: That if you go from beginning to end, you'll be very strong in the first part and the last will be increasingly weaker - music also tends to be more complicated at the end. I can also see that if you go from start to finish then you never have a moment to master the hard part. You will approach it with increasing dread. Otoh, if you have mastered the hard part then you are more likely to play through smoothly. Eventually of course you do play from start to finish.

Anyways, that is why that post caught my eye.

I think the teacher should always be helpful in suggesting where the hard spots are. How much? For beginners, I think we can assume the teacher will almost always be right. For very advanced players? Well, there comes a time when music will be worked on that will be, at first, unfamiliar to the teacher, so in this case the "nasty" spots will be discovered, together, as an on-going process. I would still assume that the teacher will pick up problems that the very fine student might miss.

The idea of working on very hard spots, in my mind, involves finding "islands of dread". At first, there are these islands, here and there, and they don't necessarily connect musically. So some kind of overview needs to be maintained. We zoom out, to get the big picture, then zoom back in.

As a musician I always have the "Big Picture" in my mind while I am working, either for myself, or for a student. Once I have identified the trouble spots, I begin building into and through them, gradually making the "islands" bigger and bigger until eventually they touch. Either one large continent (the whole piece) is formed, or groups of islands connect so that there are bigger and bigger "masses", fewer in number.

There are few compositions that cannot be broken up into at least a couple large sections that ultimately can always be practiced separately. The bulk of my practice is always on nailing the large sections, zooming in and out on those. In the end, playing from beginning to end is very little about not breaking down but rather is necessary to build a complete conception. No matter how well sections, even large ones, work apart, a convincing interpretation involves a feel for the whole thing, and that does take some practice, beginning to end, more spot checks, more section work, then back to the whole thing.

But I truly believe an attempt at a full run-through in the form of a potentally serious performance comes very close to the end, and trying to reach this too soon blows the whole project to pieces and may force a re-working of the whole thing after it comes apart at the seams.

Thank you, Gary D, for that very full answer. I like the idea of the islands, and also the zoom-in, zoom-out. One thing that I learned about music is that it is a living contradiction, where for anything you learn, its opposite is equally true. If you fixate on one solution or one approach then you trap yourself. That is because everything works together. That is the "big picture" I get from your post. Could another maxim be that whatever we do should never be mindless, and is best done with a purpose? (As beginners, the purpose would be mostly with the teacher, and eventually transfer more and more to the student).

For some students, "repeat until it is correct" is the correct way to teach them.

LOL!!!
But I think the point is that the horrible teachers we all know about tell students to repeat, over and over, from the beginning, with no help as to how to fix anything. So apples and oranges...

There is nothing that my students need to fix! They play it perfect every time as far as fingering, dynamics, notes, technique, etc goes... they just slow down or stop in order to do so... EVERY time. So, yesterday in one of my student's lessons we spent the entire half hour repeating 2 bars over and over until it was up to speed. Then we added another bar until it was up to speed with the first bar. I dunno... is this how it should be done?

Sounds like you are onto something!

I will do this only to the slowest of the slow students, or to make a point to my advanced students. Otherwise, for the majority of students, such painstaking attention to perfection becomes demoralizing. They'll quit piano sooner than you think.

Then I am out of options. I guess I will just let him keep up this habit... forever?