overpracticing/not practicing

[jennbo]

whenever i practice 3 hrs weekdays/ 6 hrs weekends and then perform the piece for my teacher the week after, she complains about how wrong everything is.    then whenver i let my piano collect dust for 2 weeks,   and i play the same piece for her, she says its the best i've ever played.  :-/

so should i stop practicisng all together?  

Anyway, how many hrs do you guys practice?  
I have 7 IB classes, so it limits my practice time  
which sucks a lot, but then again, I sound cruddy when I practice alot o.0

[bernhard]

Should I stop practising?

No, you should not.

Here is a possible explanation for this paradox (the playing gets worse if one practises more). It may not be applicable to your case, but I have seen it happen with a lot of my students.

They will start a new piece, and practise it until they get it right. Then they stop.

They do not realise (especially if they are beginners) that practice can be divided in two stages. In the first stage you are basically figuring out the notes, the rhythm, the fingerings, the movement patterns and so on. If they are working on a few bars (as they should) this probably means a few hundred repeats where everything is more or less wrong. Then suddenly everything falls into place (or sometimes gradually everything falls into place), and they get it right.

That is when they stop and move to something else. In fact, it is when one gets everything right that real practice start (or the second stage of practice).

Both stages are important. The first one is investigation and study, the second is getting the right thing into your subconscious.

If the student stops when s/he gets it right, it means that in his/her subconscious there will be stored hundreds of defective renditions of the passage against only one correct rendition. Comes next piano lesson, guess which rendition the student will play?

The solution is to practise not to get it right, but to never get it wrong!

When you practise, write down after each repeat of a passage if it was perfect or imperfect. Stop practising only when the number of perfect repeats exceeds by far the number of imperfect ones.

Here is another important principle. Always stop practising with a perfect rendition of your passage. It is this last rendition that will be stored in your subconscious. If you keep practising, you will start making mistakes out of sheer tiredness. Then you give up in despair “I will try again tomorrow”, and it will be this imperfect rendition that will be in your subconscious waiting for you next time you come to practice.

So you must experiment and decide how many perfect renditions you can accomplish before stopping practice. It has to be a number large enough to counter the wrong repeats, and yet not as large as to induce new wrong repeats caused by fatigue.

I hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[Dave_2004_G]

It's also extremely important not to rush through pieces (well difficult pieces anyway) alot - the more you do, the more and more inaccurate they will become, so most of your practice should be slow!

It is hard when you've practiced something inside out to still play it in performance and bring back and feel the magic that you felt the first time you ever heard it

Dave

[Clare]

Does the teacher explain why the things are wrong and how to fix them?

My teacher doesn't mind if I make mistakes but she always gets upset when she can tell I've been practicing wrong.

Bernhard's advice is great. I like to play a piece all the way through only at the start of my practice, and then notice all the stuff that went wrong and break it up into little bits to play over and over again separate hands.