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Do any of you keep a practice journal?

What sorts of information do you include in it?
Do you find it motivating?
Do you keep a record of pieces you learn to teach to your students (i.e. easier but perhaps newly composed music) as well as more advanced pieces you're working on?

Any thoughts welcome.

[I'm not having lessons at the moment (although saving up for it) and I'd like to get more out of my time at the piano (or at least *feel* like I'm getting more out of it ;)). I haven't kept a practice record of any kind myself since I was a student; figured I should try out this thing I'm constantly urging my students to do!]

I keep a weekly journal of my progress by posting to the Achievement of the Week thread on the beginners forum.

I find it useful to write about any progress, how long I practice, what I actually do during the practice time, how long I have been working on a piece or a technique, what I might be struggling with, my feelings. I have noticed that feeling of failure, that feeling of being stuck, of feeling like there is no way to ever master this simple thing. And then I progress, and I note that, and it helps the next time I get that feeling.

I also experience mild physical discomfort. I note the symptoms and what I do to counter them in the reports, because the discomfort tends to limit my practice time.

I've kept various kinds of journals over the years. Rarely do I go back and read, but once in a while it is nice to glance back. The act of typing it out, is often enough without looking at it again.

I'm an ABFer not a teacher, but use a 'practice' journal of sorts...

I plan my practice as a series of timed tasks and have a software utility that directs and drives me through this process (it's a multiple task countdown timer)...

This is the "session" screen, you click "start" and it takes you through the tasks in sequence:



A key advantage is that all the completed practice tasks are saved to a database which are then available for review and analysis...



I use this a lot to figure out how much time I'm putting into pieces and technique, but more importantly to monitor progress. This means I can say how much time it took to get a particular piece or study to a particular level. e.g for my ABF recital submissions.

I find out a lot of things from studying the data such as it takes me around 2-5 hours of practice, to learn pieces just 1 ABRSM grade above those that I'm currently sight reading (slowly) and that 10-20 hours of work for those 2-grades above. Pieces that I submitted to the ABF recitals were usually >50 hours with one exception:



But this illustrates the numbers of individual tasks in a piece. I normally start of with an "overview" session, then develop a set of initial study tasks. These then get morphed and tweaked during the course of learning a piece.

All the data accumulates as a by-product and audit trail of the practice session. During practice it's fairly transparent. I have a Yamaha CP33 and run Pianoteq so the laptop is next to the piano. I click start and it moves sequentially through the tasks. I may tweak metronome values and repeat tasks if needed, other than that it's a hands off approach.

Before a practice session, I review the previous days and previous weeks records. Then tweak and sort the tasks accordingly. I try to identify the weakest aspects of my playing and construct focussed tasks for these.

I've been using this application for over 3 years (doesn't time fly when...?). Experience has taught me how to set the time for each task (e.g scales or a phrase of a piece etc etc). There are currently 7436 completed tasks in the data base and the summary stats shows:

Start date: 19/03/2009
End date: 27/06/2012
Time(mins): 49810
Time(hrs): 830
Days in period: 1197
Days of Practice: 714
Avg pract time: 70
Avg daily time: 42

The stats show that when I practice I'm averaging around 70 minutes, but that I loose a lot of days, most commonly due to either a) there's a push on at work or b) health (last year I went deaf for a weeks in the Summer).

I accept that this approach will not suit many. I still keep a daily diary of thoughts, goals and targets and tend to do monthly summaries of achievements in the previous month and goals for the next.

Having the data and self knowledge it provides can be a two edged sword. e.g I've stopped working on "challenging" pieces and am now happier rooting the pieces I'm working on closer to those that I'm sight reading (well attempting to ;-)). Covering a lot of easier pieces has revealed lots of holes and issues in my skills and knowledge and as a result, I'm currently focussed on technique.

i've always kept an informal journal

just the titles and total time spent.. it takes me all of 30 seconds to record. I have about 12 small books. it's a neat record of time spent. It's neat how my handwriting changed over the years and seeing the names of childhood pieces.

I lost my teacher at 10.. and there is an odd period when I didn't know what to study.. a piece would be too hard or too easy. An organist took pity on me and gave me a lot of his old repertoire.. bach, mozart, Thompson book 6, etc... kind of got me back on track. At one point in the early 80s i was practicing 7 hours a day.. i must have been unemployed.

I find it interesting that ABFers rather than teachers have responded to the OP's question ... Teachers: Do you not practice the piano as well as play and teach the instrument? If not, I'd love to hear your reasoning.

Do you feel you have reached your zenith for performance?

Do you play regularly and even learn new pieces but not consider that "practice"?

Are there no teachers/masterclasses that you would consider worth the time/money, and you don't see the point of practice except for when one is taking lessons?

(I have no idea if any of these statements are even remotely possible. They're just off the top of my head. That's why I'm asking. )

Does anyone actually enjoy practicing?

Yes, I practise quite a lot. That's because I'm a performing pianist more than a teacher, I suppose.Nope - I think I'm still improving.I'm not sure I always distinguish between playing and practice. I play through loads of music every day. Sight reading "practice"? I learn new pieces frequently. I think of it as pleasure, not practice. Of course there are masterclasses that I'd consider worth the money, and I haven't taken a lesson for many years, yet I practise constantly.I'm not sure why you ask this, but hope my answers were useful.

PS But I don't keep a journal.

Depends on what you are practicing, and how long you've been stuck with the piece. Sometimes, when I'm just sick of a sonata that I've been playing for so long, I just whip out one of my volumes of pop music transcriptions, and happily waste away an hour or two.

Yes actually, I do. If it's music I like.
If it's some tedious piece of dubious quality which I have to spend quite a bit of time on because the first rehearsal with the trumpeter is in two days' time, then no, I don't enjoy it much. But at least I'm getting paid and I'll do the best I can for the sake of the other player.

Yes.

I'd like to comment about the practice log software. For my students, I write down their assignments in a word document that we print out and put in their notebook. So we have a written record of progress like that. But does having all that detail like "I sightread 100 pieces this past month" imply that progress has been made? Or "I learned 3 new pieces this week"? It is something quantifiable, but it doesn't necessarily mean actual progress has been made because nothing is said as to quality. Are the pieces sightread being played well, or is no attention given to dynamics and tempo and articulations?

Obviously it's not a replacement for a teacher (and I don't think anyone is saying that), and to each his own as to what they deem as making progress. For me, a great test of progress is to play something that is too hard for me and then come back to it a year or so later and see that it isn't as hard now. I don't keep a practice log, but I have specific goals that I need to meet like preparing for a performance or something, so I need to learn this music. Spending time logging everything I do has little value for me, personally.

I'm giving a recital in the spring, so yes, I'm practicing!

It's sometimes hard to get motivated because practice is WORK, and hard work, but it's ultimately satisfying.

I have never kept a journal. I find it a waste of time better spent elsewhere (like the piano!).

I love practicing but like currawong, I am a performer and am mostly interested in adding to my repertoire.Sometimes I use a log but I rarely refer to it and would rather use that sort of time learning something new, arranging a piece or writing a song. Also, for a song to be in my repertoire I have to have it memorized or if it's a piece where I can ad lib I need to know the song well. Anything new that I learn has to have a very strong appeal to me musically because I am going to be playing it a lot.

rada

Yes, that was a useful reply, Currawong. As for distinguishing between play and practice, my question may not have been entirely sensible. Since I'm starting over at the very beginning, it all feels like practice to me. My time on the bench is spent in the necessary minutia of learning to read musical notation, the geography of the keyboard, eye-hand coordination ... None of it feels like playing. (Or sounds very much like music. Oy!) I realize now that at your level practice and playing would be rather indistinguishable.


I know that your question was directed toward teachers/advanced players but I'll answer anyway. I have a ways to go before I will feel as if I'm playing the piano, so I'm deliberately working at enjoying the process and routines of practice. My hope is to avoid some of the usual adult-beginner frustrations by making the idea "practice" into something rewarding in and of itself and allowing "playing" to be my rather vague and distant goal. Yes, it's a bit of mental gamesmanship with myself, but I figure whatever gets me to the piano and through the gazillion tiny steps ahead of me is just dandy.


While I've never managed to keep a log going, I do believe it can be useful as a way of allowing someone to see and appreciate their own progress. Even if a log doesn't prove any particular proficiency, it should show progression in the music being learned (from shorter to longer, easier to more difficult, etc.), or changes in musical tastes, or experiences with unfamiliar forms, new composers, etc. I'm tempted to say that logs may work best for someone in the early stages of learning ... but apple*s dozen journals prove that it's really not the skill level, it's the personality that matters. For some people, jotting things down (or intensely tracking them, as EJR does) becomes part and parcel of their piano journey.

That's a good start. I wish all of the adult students I've taught could learn to think that way.

And to answer my own question: I like practicing if I like the music. If it's for an accompanying gig (especially music with lots of complicated rhythms and poorly written stuff), then most of the time no, it's like torture.

When I was taking lessons on my other instrument a few years ago, at the end I made notes as I practiced of things I should work on the next day, and I also made notes of questions I wanted to ask my teacher. Sometimes by the time the week was up the questions had their answers. Sometimes at the next lesson, my teacher would present something which was an answer to the question I'd had in mind. I think I was more receptive to it, because I'd already felt the need.

I've been keeping an informal log/journal since the beginning of this year. I only spend a couple of minutes to quickly write in the details because I don't want it to become cumbersome.

First, I have a timer on my piano which I turn on and off each time I practice throughout the day and then I enter the total amount at the end of the day. I don't bother listing the smaller increments.

If I'm tired, all I note are the names of the pieces I worked on. But I usually enter some details, such as the metronome setting I am using on each piece, specific problem areas I am focusing on, or anything else which seems relevant at the time. Sometimes I note my feelings about a piece or something my piano teacher said during a lesson.

Comparing one day to another one close by can make it appear that I'm not making any progress - but when I look back a bit I'll notice that actually I've increased the tempo or such. Now that I have six months of notes, I have enough information to be able to look back and gauge my progress. I'm finding it to be well worth my time to keep this record - as long as I keep it simple.

Oops, another adult beginner chiming in here. I've tried a number of practice logging ideas, and have found that the one that works best for me is this free software: Task Coach

I'm a self-learner and I tend to work from a number of different books, depending on which musical genre I'm currently obsessed with, and which areas I'm more skilled at vs. the one's I'm just beginning to explore. The software lets me track where I am in all these different books, and then by sorting by category of activity, I can pull up a menu of options to choose from what I want to do a specific activity (e.g. rock vs. ragtime vs. classical repertoire, sight reading, harmonization, rhythm practice, etc).

The software can also track the amount of time I spend on anything I define as a task or subtask, which is kind of interesting when I want to look at a breakdown of how I have actually spent my practice time.

I'll also confess that entering and categorizing all this stuff helps channel my OCD streak. Sometimes I simply find it irrationally soothing to waste time sorting and cross-referencing things into ever more specific categories. And the pay-off is that when I feel like practicing any specific sort of thing, I can pull up categories/methods/etc and know just where I left off.

Theme & Variations,
I do not keep a practice journal. But I do daily general journaling and include new sheet music discoveries and workshops I attend etc. No need to record time practiced because I always practice a set amount daily (2 sessions using timer) and have a general pattern for structuring practice.

I attended a workshop yesterday and received some freebies. One of them is "My Music Journal" published by Hal Leonard. It's a one year practice planner and has sections for recording practice assignments, practice time, list of your music books, favorite pieces, pieces you're memorized, performances etc.

Anyway it's nice. You could easily review your year. Useful especially if you want to record your practice time, and assignments. The book costs $3.99