Are you able to practice as much as you would like to?

No lol

You're a conservatory student, correct?

There aren't enough hours in the day.

No. I can never practice enough. Either because music college is closed, because of my schedule or because there are no rooms.

Yes I am, though not for much longer

I can get usually an 8 hour slot. Of course some of that goes into score studying, listening to music etc (and of course breaks), so I get about 5 hours on average.

Right now I practice about two hours a day and could easily do twice that. I've got some depression issues going right now that seem to be more destructive to practice and concentration than jobs or kids or whatever.

I dedicate 3 hours to the piano and 1 to another instrument - other music exercises like composition, listening to music in a critical way etc. are not included in these 3-4 hours.

About 3 hours a week.

Yes.

You are very lucky!

It depends since I'm working as a music teacher so there's no fixed amount of time...I have to just fit in whatever time that I'm able to, I'm okay so as long as I manage to get what I'm supposed to get done

When I was prepping for my past concerts this year, I put in 3-6 hours a day, which pretty much killed me...usually it's closer to 2-6 hours a week during school and 3 hours per day in summer. Last year it was maybe 4 hours a week cause I had more work to do.

I don't get to practice much because I'm in one of the more demanding engineering programs in north America..

Where at?

4-5 hours on average, although there was one week where I practiced 10 hours a day.

I practice more this academic year: close to 2 hours a day during school and 3 hours a day during weekends.

Never.

I practice for two hours a day on the weekdays, before going to work. I practice 3-4 hours a day on the weekends. I try to take a day off every week, but don't always.

Anything less than 2h a day would be treading water for me.


-J

What I always find fascinating is people who have a non-music related job, the typical 8 hours a day, and still find the energy to practice every day. How do you do it???

I mean, when I have class and work on the same day, which can total about 8 hours, my practicing suffers immensely because my brain is just not as fresh as when I practice first thing in the day. And then I barely get anything done and usually can't do more than 3-4 hours.

Can't answer for everybody, but when I was doing this, I practiced before work. That way, my brain was fresh. Conversely, sometimes I would also practice very late (just before going to bed). This helped me to get my brain 'out of the way' and let the music flow better. (Obviously, I didn't work on anything 'technical' during those latter sessions! )

Of course, even on those days, I'm only talking about 30-60 minutes of practice, max. Often, I would have to make up for it on the weekends.

I'm struggling with this problem at the moment. I need my job though, to fund my taste for expensive kitchen utensils.

Usually I take a really long break before I start practicing, so that means that I end up eating dinner at ridiculous hours... but most of the time piano's not work, so it's a bit relaxing. But when there are performances coming up...the pressure helps me to focus.

And speaking of performances, Liszt sonata + Franck violin sonata in April! Arghh, not enough time..!

I work full time, and unfortunately I'm on the road a lot when I don't get to practice.

But when I'm home, it's 2 hours/day during the week (1 hour AM and 1 hour PM) and 4 hours on Saturday and Sunday.

I find this is the absolutely minimum required.

I practice pretty much everyday. Maybe 9 out of 10 days in the long run. I'll normally practice 60 min interspersed with 30 min of breaks making for a total of 1 hour 30min sometimes switched with 30 min before work, 30 min after as the day warrants. I'd practise more if I wasn't so busy. I'm not sure if I'm objectively productive by comparison but do feel productive at the piano.



The above got me curious.

All-Clad/Le Creuset pans, Shun knifes, a KitchenAid etc.

I would love to have more time for practicing. I work full time during the day, and teach a couple nights a week, plus have my own music lessons and rehearsals in the evenings. I'm preparing for a piano diploma exam right now (RCM), so I force myself to carve out practice time. Since January, I've been spending 30-mins every morning before work on technical requirements, and then about an hour later in the day on repertoire. On Saturdays, I can usually squeeze in more practice time -- about 3 hours. Also, I've just recently gained access to a church's C7, so I can go there to practice late at night (my husband doesn't like me practicing after 10 p.m.).



Often when I'm driving home from work, the thought of practicing or teaching when I get home exhausts me, but I find once I start, I get my second wind. Since it's not what I do all day, the hours I get to spend doing 'music stuff' are still really special and energize me rather than draining me. I do find however, that I can only handle a couple hours max of practicing after working all day. After that, I'm not able to focus.

Time gets lost when I'm at the piano. an hour, two, sometimes (rarely three) but never in such blocks of time. I might wander there for a few minutes to work on a measure that's giving me a challenge, or actually focus in for a larger block of time.

Sometimes I'm focused, sometimes not, but the time I spend is always rejuvenating.

I'm not under any pressure (except the internal 'why the @#$(*@#$& can't that trill settle down and sound natural', or some such), don't care about grades (although I get a grade for my lessons).

My MBTI (Meyers Briggs Type Indicator) score is INFP, heavy on the 'introvert' - meaning time by myself is especially enjoyable - so this makes sense.

Forrest

It's hard. Teaching is exhausting. I have to be "on" for 5 straight hours and the multitasking doesn't stop from 6:30 until 3:30 p.m. All the while I'm working, there is a little voice in the back of my head that really wants to be practicing. When I get home, my son or husband needs attention or dinner needs cooking or there are chores. I usually squeeze in about 90 minutes a day, even on weekends. The worst thing is when I finally have some time to sit down to practice and my mind is just too exhausted to concentrate. I have no time for TV and I squeeze in about 30 minutes to read. It's a long day. On the up-side, I get long vacations and my summers off. Then I can practice 3 or 4 hours a day, sometimes more.

2 hours a day during the week although sometimes I cannot make time at all. During the weekend I do more. Up to 4 hours. I am always exhausted so I do Bach pieces in the end. It always wakes me up. I have to do romantic pieces before anything else. Otherwise it makes me sleepy. I am in the middle management in my company and work 6 AM through 4 PM. Its a highly technical ans demanding job. By the time I exercise my dogs and feed dogs & husband, it's always 8:30 PM!

Kuan, that's an insane program!
Btw if you want I can hear the Franck sometime and plant some ideas if you need. I know the piece inside out!

Not as much as I would like. I've been using a music journal app recently to see how much precisely and it was less than what I thought.

With this revelation I've pushed it to an average of 2 hours a day.

I find it a struggle to get enough time, or as much as I'd like. I aim for at least an hour - sometimes I manage more (did about 90 minutes today), sometimes less. It would be even harder if I didn't work from home. Even then, I have to get any required work out of the way and give the dog a nice long walk. Then if it's a weekday and my wife's working too I have to get our fourteen-month-old from the child minder, so I normally need to fit playing in before that. Playing when after she's in bed works sometimes, other times it wakes her up.

When the wife works weekends I basically get no practise done, as it's pretty much all parenting duties. Should improve as the little one gets older and doesn't need constant supervision... until no. 2 comes along, anyway. Maybe by then we will have a nanny or au pair.

Could do a bit more at night, I suppose. I have a Yamaha S90 synth - not ideal, and no sostenuto or una corda, but it has 88 weighted keys and a sustain pedal, at least.

I usually practice about 2 hours a day on workdays and 3 hours on weekends. It varies some from week to week depending on what I am working on. when I first start a Bach invention, it takes me a long time to get it memorized hands separate (This is what my teacher wants before I put it together) so this past week I put in about 18 hours at the piano as I am also working on memorizing a Chopin waltz at the same time. I'm in my sixties and memorizing music is a lot harder than when I was younger. At the same time, I figure it's good for my brain so I do it. Most of the time I really enjoy my time at the piano. As someone else said, sometimes when I get home from work, I'm tired and don't feel like practicing but once I start I feel better and the time flies.
Zillybug

Three hours a day. Two first thing in the morning, and then a third hour later in AM, every day.

I'm retired, so I have time to practice even more, but there seems to be a point after which I fatigue, and I feel may be counter productive to practice further.

TomasinoTom
aka Tomasino

There's been the occasional weekend day when I've felt it's "enough"--but normally I'm wishing for more. This is probably a good thing, as it keeps me eager to play.

I don't keep track of hours spent. I used to, but then realized this served no good purpose for me.

Since music is an avocation for me, it's often time stolen from other things I could/should be doing (not quite like time spent playing video games or watching tv, but still an indulgence). So I don't document it.

I'd practice piano more if I weren't also trying to keep up my flute embouchure (OT).

Yesss, I will need help! + I'll need help on the Liszt too. I think I'll be ready by mid-march with both? So far I've learned the 4th movement of the Franck and have worked through most of the 1st movement, but the second one is tough.

The Liszt sonata meanwhile is ridiculous but soo fun to practice!

I get 1-1.5 hours on weekdays; more on weekends.

Sometimes I am just too tired, or have too much work to do in the evenings and don't have time or energy to practice.

I have absolutely no time in the mornings before I head off. There are simply too many bodies to get out the door and on their way to work or school. When I get home, we make and eat dinner, supervise any homework that remains to be done, do any chores that need to be done, then get the children off to bed. That's when I can begin my practice, but I don't want to practice too late into the night or I'll keep everybody from getting their sleep, including myself.

I find practicing is a release from the cares of the day. It engages my brain in a different way than my work. Practicing also helps me to be more patient at work. And, if I get stuck in a boring meeting, I can mentally run through my music and think about some of the bits that need more work (there are lots of those).

Cool! I'm away until mid March, and then have a couple of recitals, but done around the 24th! I'd love to hear it all!

I LOVE the second movement of the Franck sonata. I'll one day learn it and try to find violinists to play it with me. Usually it's the other way around, right? Lol.

Pogo, do you run your music and your practicing strategies/thinking about actually practicing through your head while doing other things? I do it all the time (same with conducting), haha. I think it helps me a lot.

Today I got about 5 hours in (on a really nice newly restored Steinway L). Unfortunately, I rarely get in more than an hour or two unless I have something important coming up.

I'm a junior in high-school and I am very dedicated to practicing. I wake up early and practice 2 hours of violin before school and 4 to 8 hours of piano after school. This summer I'm looking to practice 8 to 12 hours a day of piano.

Are you auditioning for any summer festivals? Keep up the dedication; that's really neat that you also play violin. My favorite violin works are the Bach solo sonatas and partitas, and Brahms' violin concerto

My piano teacher is interested in having me attend the Luther College Summer Music Festival in Decorah,IA this summer. She is part of the camp's faculty. On top of my college audition repertoire, I'll be learning Saint Saens 2nd piano concerto which I'll use to compete in the camp's concerto competition.

What app? Is it for Android?

iPhone - its called MusicJournal. Its basically a glorified timer but somewhat useful.

If you practice that much you must really love music, but it seems hard to get a reasonable amount of sleep and recreation/relaxation with that kind of schedule.

If school starts at 8:30am I'm assuming you'd have to get up at 7:30 am the latest but you said you practice two hours of violin in the morning so that would bring it back to 5:30am or earlier. If school gets out at say 2:30 pm and you get home by 3pm then just four hours practicing would be up to 7pm. With just two hours of homework and time to eat dinner that's up to 10 pm already. I guess some high school students get less than 6 hours sleep during on weekdays but I think some of them a least make up for it on the weekends.

Have you already decided you want a career as a musician?

That sounds to me like gross over-kill and probably not wise. How much can you efficiently accomplish after three or four hours? Even if the physical stamina is there, how mentally alert can you be without ending up practicing inefficiently? After about three hours, diminishing returns begin to set in for most people.

Regards,

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "practice".
There is more to the piano than banging on the keys.

Outside of the 3 or 4 hours on the instrument you could spend time listening to recordings, studying and analyzing scores, practicing concentration or meditating, relaxation or Alexander technique, brushing up on your harmony, solfege, or musical history, taking breaks to sight read or play repertoire pieces for enjoyment and refresh, attend recitals and concerts, etc. etc.

Much of the working world has to spend 8 hours per day working at a minimum at whatever they are doing. However, most with the autonomy to be able to plan their days work to alternate intense activities with less intense activities.

I think it would be easy for someone with the time and motivation to devote 8 to 12 hours to their "practice" of mastering the piano. We all should be so lucky.

Being home schooled has allowed me a flexible schedule to help pursue my musical interests, school work and also extracurricular activities such as boy scouts, sports, fishing, drama, skiing, etc. where as if I was enrolled in public school the time for music would be limited.

Here is what the average day looks like for me:

5:55 am wake up
6:00 to 8 violin
8:15 High school Orchestra
9:00 high school choir
10:00 to 3:00 school work
3:00 to 10 piano practice 10 pm sleep

Now, this schedule changes do to college orchestra, sports , instrument lessons etc.

I wouldn't call 8-12 hours/day lucky at all.

Perhaps some professionals or want to be professionals at certain times of their lives practice this much, but I think this is rare even in their case. My guess is that even most professionals would rarely choose to pratice 8-12 hours/day if they didn't have to in order to learn what their teachers demanded of, i.e. if it wasn't necessary for their career goals or engagements.

For the 99+% of the rest of the piano playing world much more than 2-3 hours makes little sense IMO. If one practiced 12 hours and slept 8 hours, there is only time left for about three meals, personal hygiene, and very little else. So 12 hours would be an extreme amount for almost anyone and extremely inappropriate for non amateurs who want some balance of activities in their lives.

Even five minutes spent "banging on the keys" is not good.

Hm, I'm going crazy over this right now. I work full time, am taking piano lessons and practicing piano maybe 2 hours a day during the week, 3-4 hours on weekends, plus practicing the cello when I can (have a concerto performance tentatively set for the fall), teaching a couple of students ... practice time never seems like enough.

Seriously, don't do this. Total waste. The optimal practice time according to various Juilliard professors is around 5 hours.

I admire your determination. You are a superman.

As a freshman at a public high school, this is a typical schedule of mine:

7:20 wake up.
7:50 piano time.
8:20 leave home for school.
3:45 come home, doing my homework.
5:00 piano time.
6:30 dinner.
7:00 Big Bang Theory rerun.
7:30 or 8:00 back to homework and study depending on how much school work left.
10:00 time to sleep after a bit of internet time.

This gives me about 2 hours of practice during school.

Well, if you enjoy it... Make sure not to overdue it if you feel unwell or tired. And I guess you don't live in an apartment building?

I think only those of us who teach or who have taught can appreciate the demands of class-room teaching, a job that some claim is easy because it's only a few hours a day with "summers off. (Yeah, right! - as they say.) Being "on" for five or six hours means just that. You can't tell a secretary to "hold my calls," while you take a break, you can't close the classroom door to work on a project in the calm and quiet of your own space when you have to be teaching, and that teaching very often involves consecutive classes at different levels without breaks and hardly any time to shift gears.

Isn't it ironic that students can ask to "leave the room" - ostensibly for bathroom breaks - whereas teachers can't?

Good teaching means that you are "on stage" continuously and relentlessly, trying your best for every minute of class time to engage, involve and captivate the interest of your students; if you aren't successful at that, the students are the first to grasp that and you lose them. Believe me, in a classroom full of students you don't want to risk losing one of them, for even a moment, or you lose control.

As Deborah says, it's exhausting!

Regards,

Completely. And I usually just call that "creative process" as opposed to "practicing". Sometimes you can come up with the most unusual things in the studio, reading a score.

Thanks Bruce. I know you know! It's frustrating when the media blames all the problems in education on the teachers. I don't want to hijack this thread with a rant, but from the teachers' perspective, most of the problems in public education can be solved in the home. I challenge anyone to find a more dedicated, harder working group of people.

It's depressing! I got into piano for a year when I was in university, I could manage a couple hours a day and progressed quite rapidly....fast forward to the present [work, family, kids], and I can't get time for anything Weekends are totally out, and if I'm not exhausted from work, then it's about 30min if I'm lucky. It's going to be slow progress, and might be disappointing as I have big goals, high aspirations, etc etc. Sigh...life!

Reading all this stuff makes me not want a family or kids but to continue what I'm doing....

I wouldn't trade my kid for any career in music.

Food for thought:
http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/

Do your future 50-year old self a favor: keep up playing even if it is 30 minutes a week. You will thank your self one day.

You have to do what is right for you, but kids do enrich your life, if you want them.

True - and a piano won't love and take care of you in your old age !!