What is the best ways to learn a lot of pieces at once?

[pianarchist]

Currently I am working on about 7 pieces (all of about AMEB grade 6 level except one which is a bit harder) . I generally try to practice each piece as often as possible, but with this many it can be very hard to practice them (meaningfully) more then 2 or 3 times a week. I am wondering if I should  try breaking the pieces into smaller groups of 2 or 3 and spending a week or so at a time focusing just on those pieces and trying to practice each of them every day. What do you think? 

[lagin]

Well I tell you what I do, though I don't know that it's the best, but it is the best for me.  I give x amount of hours per day to practice and then I divide that up amongst my pieces.  Each morning I sit down and take two minutes to divide it out borrowing from some adding to others depending on what I feel needs to most work, what I have a lesson on, what I need to perform soon, ect.  Another way of doing this would be to split them up into two groups and alternate so that you hit all your pieces every 2 days.  I don't do this simply because I find myself thinking, "Tomorrow is the day to work on Brahms....sigh..I would rather work on it right now."  I would rather hit everything all the time.  Blame it on a short attention span if you will, but I'd rather spend 1/2 hr on each of two pieces than an hour on one, one day, and an hour on the other the next day.  Here's sample (this is an extreme amount of practice, and I'm only doing this much because I'm a full time piano student who is cramming for an exam, just so you know).

Each day:

Bach Prelude 20 minutes (It's short and slow and I have a good handle on it, but I also plan to perform it next week so I don't want to give it only a few minutes).

Bach Fugue 40 minutes (This is also in good shape, but I wouldn't want to give it any less time because it is my most "worrisome" piece to perform and I want to make sure I really remember it, plus I need time to practice voices separately, and work on memory points throughout it, etc.). 

1st mvmt of Schubert Sonata 7 minutes ish (pretty much done, just maintaining it until exam time and it's very short)

2nd mvmt of Schubert Sonata 25 minutes (I have to perform this next week, so even though it's only a few pages I want to really give it some extra time). 

3rd mvmt.  1 hr, 20 min (This is my "beast")

6 Brahms' waltzes 45 minutes (that gives me less than 10 minutes a waltz, but they're not hard and I don't need to perform them for a bit yet).

Rach prelude 1 hr. 45 minutes (This is one of my furthest behind pieces and I aim to perform it next week - hence the ridiculous amount of practice time)

Bartok 8 min (also just maintaining until exam)

Chopin etude 1 hr (it's my least prepared piece)

I borrow and steal minutes where needed.  After I perform the pieces set aside for next week, I'll steal considerably from them and add those minutes to the next pieces I plan on performing.

That's just to give you an idea what sort of factors influence what pieces get more or less time and how I divide it up.  You can do this even if you just have an hour or two.  Also, when I practice these pieces, since I have so much time, I do try to run through them once (I like to tape myself doing this and play it back to weed out the hesitations and blunders), but mainly I attack the "trouble spots" in them.  For example, the first and last pages of my chopin are almost identical and I have a good handle on them so I would focus 90 % of my practice time just on the middle 2 pages.  Sometimes I won't even play the first and last ones, and I rarely ever play the last one, cause why waste time on notes that were already covered in the first part.  When I get closer to performing this I will run though the whole thing maybe once a day or once every other day, though.    I also try to break up the pieces into sections.  For example, in the 3rd mvmt of the sonata (alloted 1 hr. 20 minutes) I might spend 20 minutes on the exposition, 20 minutes on the development, and 20 minutes on the recap.  The last 20 would go to whatever needs the most work. 

Anyways, this is what works for me.  I'm sure others would have suggestions as well.

[ramseytheii]

Here's an interesting link from BErnhard about learning 20-30 pieces a month.  You have to scroll down to get to it, so be patient:

https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,4750.msg45125.html#msg45125

Walter Ramsey

[ramseytheii]

Also, a tiny piece of advice that has worked for me.  If I know I want to learn a piece, I usually have some goal for it in mind.  It has to be performed here, or put on this program, or whatever.  With that in mind, I start listening and studying the score way before I will start to learn it on piano.  This takes a bit of planning but you will find it is worth it.  Basically, I do what i can to get the piece in my system, then I find when I start actually playing it, I am already in the rhythm, and it goes much faster.

This is work to be done away from the piano, because you can't always do everything at the piano, and you certainly can't sit there all day.  I am a night owl (you can see by looking at my statistics on pianoforum) and often do this kind of thing when there is no practicing to be done (neighbors!)

Walter Ramsey

[amelialw]

For me, usually when I have a whole lot of new pieces to learn, ill practise 3-4 pieces a day and alternate between the 2 groups everyday. You should group up the pieces according to the genre of the composer. For example, if you have a Bach,Mozart,Chopin,Debussy,Prokofiev and an Etude. You should practise the Bach Mozart and Etude together.Besides that, you should always start off by playing through the pieces and picking out the parts that need more work as you will not always have enough time to practise the whole entire piece.