Is 4 hours of practice enough?

[alb-d]

For a ametuer is this efficient 4 hours daily?

[rach n bach]

For an ametuer?  Are you planning to go pro?  If not, less would, most likely, be a better option for you.  That's an awful lot of time to spend on someting you don't plan on going into professionally.

On the otherhand, if you are playing that much, you should go pro.

[debussy symbolism]

For a ametuer is this efficient 4 hours daily?

Greetings.

You somewhat answered your own question. "Is 4 hours efficient?" The word "efficient" plays a big role here in that 4 hours might just be as efficient as 1 hour or 2 hours. You can spend 4 hours a day practicing poorly and you can practice 1 hour a day efficiently. The set time of practicing isn't what determines how efficient the time spent is. Make sure that if you should spend alot of time practicing daily you spent the time wisely. Otherwise there is no set time for either efficiency or inefficiency as each person is different and practice time varies for individuals.

[Bob]

I know a professional who was doing 3-4/day in high school.

[alb-d]

I don't plan on going professionally. But music is pretty much all i do.  I just want to get better at a more rapid pace. I'm a music producer, but I'm currently taking classical lessons. Been playing for 3-4 years now. I figured the more I practiced the quicker the results would come in. Am I wrong here?

[danny elfboy]

I figured the more I practiced the quicker the results would come in. Am I wrong here?

Yes.

The first reason is that you should set goals. Small goals.
sitting at the piano to just do "repetitions" is not that useful.
You need to look at what you're practicing and determining a goal.
Then the time you spend at the piano is all about achieving that goal.
That's why the goal must be small, like you tell to yourself
< uhmm ... that run in bar 10 to 12 is not mastered. My next goal is mastering those bars>

So you can see it time doesn't become a criteria anymore.
If you have a goal you can reach it in 15 minutes or 1 hour.
It's all about having reached many small goal or one big goal at the end of your daily practice. It's absolutely not about a matter of X time spent at the keyboard.

So virtually you could think
<uhmm ... okay, if in 2 hours I can reach 10 goals in 4 I can reach 20 and in 8 I can reach 40>

But your mind and your body is not not like a limitless battery.
When your practice is too long you start to experience a process called
"central nervous fatigue"

Superficially your brain accumulates datas through your sense.
So listening, touching, seeing, tasting, smelling are all information you're picking up.
At this point all these information are in your short term memory.
The process that brings those information into your long term memory occurs at night.

So it's at night that your brain processes the information you've accumulated.
This means you don't do the processing.
Even when we believe to "analyze" something so has to better "understanding" it we're just picking up coo-dependent informations but we're not exactly "learning" as that happens at night.

CNF is that point is that which not only your brain becomes information-resistant but also in which new confused information are being superimposed over old fresh information.
That's why learning with CNF is actually "unlearning" and practicing with CNF is actually unpracticing.

Most people indeed sabotage their potential and their school efforts by learning through fatigue like resistance training athletes would sabotage their potential and effort by workingout through pain.

That is way account of pianists who practice 10-12 hours a day and say that was necessary to become good pianist is nothing but superstition which has never been tested by doing the opposite so they don't know any better. Just like the Chanteecler story.

It's not different than playing a sport match wearing a certain pair of socket that thinking your luck depend on them. So you keep wearing them because you become sure that if you don't wear them you won't have luck and will play badly. Since there's no way you can break the superstition circle you'll never play without those lucky sockets and will never realize that you can win without them.

In fact all of this is also the reason why is better to have one, two or more days a week without practice. They're "assimilationg days" or "processing days" and after them you've improved even if you haven't touched the piano at all.

4 hours a day are pretty close the threshold of CNF.
What is better though is playing 1 hour here and there or 2 hours in the morning and 2 in the night. 4 hours in the same session without rests is just counterproductive.

That being said only you know can know what is efficient, as it depends on achieving small goals daly and not just practicing as "repeating". Consider practicing as problem analyzing and solving not as sheer repetition of the piece over and over.

[lostinidlewonder]

Discipline is one of the foundations of musical study. If you can give 4 hours every day to your piano then you are going to get better, but. You need to understand how to allocate those 4 hours and understand how to organise your approach to your music. Otherwise you can do an inefficient 4 hours which could in fact be done in 1 hour of efficient study.

What improves your music study efficiency is as unique as your finger prints, everyone has different factors requiring efficiency training. Everyone can do with improving their sight reading skills; if there are expert sight readers reading entire pages at a time then you should question why you cannot get to that rate. Everyone could do with improving the rate of their memorisation, everyone could do with listening to themselves more carefully, paying more attention to effortlessness in technique etc.

Still we never measure our efforts in time rather by the content effectively learnt. Find out what your bar per day rate is and aim to increase it, that is a simplistic approach but really one of the aims of what we try to do when improving our music.

I had student who literally started doing half a bar a day, and they tried to increased this by half a bar every week. At the end of the year they managed to reach around a 15 or so bars per day rate of memorising music which was at their level, this was music which was completely memorised and would not leave the mind.  

This also allowed the student to understand what music was hard for them (when they noticed their bar per day rate dropping because they study harder music) and why and what music was easy for them and why. They then could more accurately measure how long it would take to learn a piece (which most students have no concept of, a real danger encouraging inefficiency), be able to identify difficult parts before their hands even touched the keyboard and concieve a practice method to practice away the difficulty before they even touch the keyboard.

As a teacher I often push and stretch students making them memorise more than they are used to in lessons and then questioning how they can retain that extra information, it is almost as if you open up their brain capacity, working on the insides of how their brains function Most students say to me when we do this, my head is sooo full I can't possibly learn more, the reailty is that the brain is so complicated and powerful it works at a very small % of what it is capable of so don't be afraid of pushing it especially when it comes to studying music. It won't hurt you, you will feel good about it, like the endomorphines you get when excersising, that is of course if music is your passion. I constantly give them memory guides such as; particular verbal statements, visual observations on the keyboard, even sound memory to allow them to retain extra memorised material.

You find if you push yourself to memorise even though you think you are forgetting what you do, stop, apply a memory guide and repeat, just keep on pounding away at your brain forcing it to memorise. I remember I was asked to study all 24 Chopin etudes in a little over 3 weeks, an impossible feat in my mind but I threw myself to the challenge and suffered! In the end I realised that the brain really can learn a huge amount more than we give it credit for, it just has to be forced into the suituation where it must work. Trap it, say, you cannot get away unless you get through this. The brain adapts and works harder and you learn more. Don't do this your whole life because that would take all the fun out of living and experiencing the world but if you never do it you will never experience greater potential in learning from yourself. Once you taste transcendental rates of learning you want more of it.

4 hours is heaps if you have the right study plan and set your mind right. It might be not enough if you are ineffcient, you probably have to do 12 hours then to compete with someone doing 4 hours of efficient study. Knowing if you are efficient is difficult, you basically fall into 4 quadrants when it comes to judging yoruself with anything, 1)You know you dont know 2)You know your know 3)You don't know you know and 4) You don't know that you don't know.

With 1) You know that you do not know how efficient you play, you generally require a teacher to guide you. But there are dangers not completely knowing how efficient you are because when you increase in efficiency how can you gauge it?

2)You know that you know how efficienty you are, then you have to decide can you actually improve yourself with your own efforts? Are there factors to your efficiency you cannot understand how to improve thus when you get a teacher you can ask for these particular improvements to be made.

3)If you don't know that you are efficient, then you are the kind of student who could benefit a great deal by exploring what it means to be efficient. Because you naturally are an efficient learner if you now take stock of what it means to be efficient you can increase your rate many times. What gets written gets done, don't keep it all in your head, plan out and expose the workings of inside your head. A good teacher is also a solution for you here because you might not exactly know what it means to be efficient you just do it and it happens, so a good teacher can tell you where to apply your focus and where to improve upon most to cause greater change in your efficiency.

4)You don't know that you are not efficient is the most dangerous place to be in. These are for students who simply ingore that they are inefficient because they can produce results which satisfies them even though it takes an amount of effort which is never reducing. These type of students need to see students of music who are better than themselves to be encourages to improve their efficiency rate.

[sevencircles]

For an ametuer?  Are you planning to go pro?  If not, less would, most likely, be a better option for you.  That's an awful lot of time to spend on someting you don't plan on going into professionally.

It is not easy to make a fulltime living being just a classical piano soloists these days.

You may be a stunning pianist but if you don´t have good contacts and play in a fashion that the judges likes, it may still be very hard to make a living just playing classical music.

It is a very good idea to have a different job to go to as well.

[pianowelsh]

I know amateurs who do 8, I know pros who do 2!!!

Do you see an improvement when you practice for 4 hrs??  If so its good for you.  Set goals and you can achieve a lot in a little!

[mosis]

Excellent posts, danny elfboy, lostinidlewonder!

4 hours is certainly not a limit, though. The key is to organize your goals into manageable practice sessions. At the end of each session, completely forget about it until the next day. With short breaks between sessions (2-5 minutes completely away from the piano), and spacing your sessions out appropriately (it is better to work on fresh material in the evening, refining material in the morning), you can accomplish more than you would believe with any amount of time.

[chopinmozart7]

You can play 6 weeks without leaving the piano but thats not going to help you.
Play/train effectly every day and deside the time yourself. You dont have to put a time setting for every practice. Just play until you feel that you have learned enough and that will be good

[franzliszt2]

It all changes dependng on the repertoire. If you are learning huge pieces, or huge amounts of pieces, you have to spend more time.

Somedays you just have to sit for 12 hours, to get the work done. If someone says can you play Brahms sonata for example in 3 days....and you say yes....its going to be 3 long days at the piano.

I don't believe that everyones practice becomes less efficient after x amount of hours. People are different, some can work for longer hours. Phsyically 12 hours shouldn't be painful, it will be exhausting, but never painful if you have a relaxed technique. It depends how you practice as well...if you do 4 hours fast work, you will be tired, but 7 hours slow concentrated work will tire your mind more.

The main thing is just to be efficient, and get good work done. I don't set targets, I just work on what I know needs doing all the time, and watch the results develop. If you listen to yourself properly at all times, practice will improve so much becasue you will hear what s wrong and fix it (hopefully)

[pianisten1989]

It's different. Some people aren't able to play 3 hours without getting tired, and some can play 10 and still be concentrated. The thing is, you have to stay focused when you're playing, orselse it might get wors.

[nyonyo]

For seriour amateur, 4 hours a day is a good duration of practice.
You have to self assess your progress. With 4 hour practice, you should see good improvement. If you don't see the progress, you should pay attention what prevent you from getting better.

It takes a lot of time to be able with good quality.