Friday 6 September 2013

TIPS ON HOW TO IMPROVE LEARNING SPEED FOR PIANO

    When one first encounter a new piece of music, he will sight read the music and start playing hand by hand, bar by bar. This is the conventional way of playing music, from the beginning to the end, as many piano teachers taught about it. However, this technique of learning will just waste lots of time encountering the same problem, wrong notes and irregular rhythm. Students tend to hate playing the conventional way again and again. This is a very boring process indeed.
    The tips I would like to share is when you sight read a piece of music which is completely new, you have to divide them into several parts. The parts can be categorized into character, tempo or difficulty(technique). In a typical Classical piece, the ABA form is very common in most music. There are lots of repeated parts in a piece of music with modulations and minor changes(added ornaments). Those repeated sections can be grouped into one practice section. Every piece of music should have some parts that are more difficult to tackle, these parts should be highlighted and must be practised hand by hand. The time allocated to these parts should also be much longer compared to the others.
    A practice schedule should be made to manage practice time efficiently, lets take 5 minutes for finger exercises(scales) before starting the practice. After that, tackle the difficult parts for 10 minutes ex., right hand to left hand, practice until you can speed but don't forget the correct fingering (fingering is always crucial to rapid passages).Then, lets take about 5-10 minutes for the easier parts, you can practice by both hands(or separate hands). During practice, DON'T FORGET to add the DYNAMICS. Pedalling will be discussed in future topics.
    After much practice, the student may be able to combine the practice sections into a complete piece. Play the complete piece in SLOW SPEED, make sure EVERY note is in their correct FINGERING, note every mistake made while playing. Learn and improve from the mistakes made (crash fingerings,wrong notes)THEN ONLY you can speed up to the normal tempo.Forcefully playing with the normal tempo or faster is DANGEROUS as you will encounter 'speed wall' and mistakes that are irrecoverable. This is related to the memorization of the notes.

    This method of practicing will largely improve one's learning speed (sight-read/memorize) when used frequently.

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