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I consider the fine tuning of a piece as 'play for pleasure', as you can hear it improve fast at that point while it is already good.

Scales and technical exercises, no thanks. Maybe a few minutes a day if really necessary.

New pieces, you mean drilling in the right notes and chords. This is currently about half of my time, say three weeks working on the right notes, phrasing etc and three on the finetuning.

I play the piano because I love it. I love to practice and communicate with the piece. When I am playing, I don't think about anything else, totally refreshing. I believe music is an entirely different language for which there is no border. I can just feel the composer's feeling of sadness, happiness, sorrow, etc.. directly through those notes. My favorite thing is to sit at the piano late at night quietly reading through a music as my mood dictates. Sometimes it's an endless music (Bach), sometimes torrent of emotion, I just love it. It makes me thankful for my parents for giving me lessons that grew into my life time pleasure. I also count my blessing that I am in a peaceful country, healthy and gainfully employed. I earnestly wish many people can be blessed as I am. May Peace be on earth.

I love playing the piano and play the pieces I enjoy. Although I should, Hanon, scales I don't play. Don't like them very much.

Until now the pieces I've learned so far, I kept them alive by playing them for fun. The pieces were a bit difficult, so I'd played many times before I fully mastered them.

After that I played them often, because I wanted them to stay in memory. Now I think that's a fast way to overplay the pieces.

The pieces I will learn now, must be learned in a short periode at a level I'm able to sightplay. Then once in awhile, I pick the piece up, sightplay it and put it away again.

Therefore I have a lot of time to learn new pieces and because they are learned in a short periode, my book of reportoire will be soon bigger. And because I can sightplay them, there's no need to play a piece often.

To point of overplaying a piece will be reached far further in the future than now and my reportoire will grow faster.

So as soon I finish granados, für Elise and Dark eyes boogie no long and difficult pieces for me. More pieces like The witch, In church from Tchaikovsky.

At 5:30 AM this morning I sat down and played 30 minutes of Christmas music. The house was empty (except for Laurie's two cats, who ignore me) and no neighbors could hear me. Good thing, because I was singing along...

Sam

I'm such a beginner that I'm never really playing anything for fun. But I enjoy practicing because at this stage, there are so many small triumphs along the way (I am a bit of an achievement junkie). I learn something new almost every time I sit down at the piano. But I think the most pleasurable thing about piano playing for me is that in order to do it, I have to totally clear my mind of everything else. My job is much more stressful than my bad piano playing, so this is a nice thing to do for an hour or so a day.

With some 45 years of experience I can consider me an adult, but hardly a beginner. Still I enjoy following some of the threads under this forum.

I always try to improve my skills, and at any time I work with several pieces. I usually have at least one new piece where I try to get past the technical difficulties. Then there are a few pieces where I work with details. This means that I repeat 2 - 8 bars over and over again. Finally I alsays work with memorisation of pieces I consider myself mastering tehcnically. I use finger exercises for warm up, taking perhaps 10% of the time at the piano. Every now and then I also pick music I don't know and play it (at low tempo) directly off the sheet.

I generally enjoy it all. Even the tedious repetition to refine details I find very rewarding. When mastering something new it gives me a feeling of achievement. I'm also convinced that piano playing gives me a health benefit. Finally I consider piano playing to be excellent brain training. This is one of the reasons why I sometimes play music directly off the notes.