Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner How much time do you get to practice?

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....