How do you practice?

[ChiarinaWieck]

I am interested in how most pianists choose to practice a new piece.  Please differenciate between those pieces that are easily grasped technically and those which are difficult.
Your replies will be very benificial to my studies!

[donjuan]

In easy and difficult works I try to sightread what I can, but will only make one attempt.  I then learn the melody and set it to the rhythm, eventually adding in the other voices as I become more comfortable.  
donjuan

[Chris_Repertoire]

I just started learning hands seperate, that is memorizing the motions for both hands before I put them together.  

I intentionally work on music that is too hard to play just by sight-reading it off the page.

After I have a good action in both hands I'll start putting it together. I'll still spend a-lot of time working hands apart, trying to get a definite fingerings, working on speed etc.  

I just started learning pieces hands seperate and then putting them together.   I can't recomend this more ...  it's much easier when you do it this way to go right to the bars you are having a problem with and work soley on those until you have them.  When I learned pieces of music hands together I'dusually end up begining back at the begining of the section I was working on and play my way up to it.   ... When you learn with hands apart for some reason it seems much easier to disassociate a line of music and work on it in isolation.

[in_love_with_liszt]

I seem to be the antithesis to everything. I just sightread it a few times and by then it's memorized, and I work on the details. Liszt, Beethoven, it doesn't matter.

[johnjwong]

i play hand seperate until i memorized the hand seperate for both left and right hands, i keep on practising hand seperate until my melody hand goes automatically and then join 2 hands together. I always break pieces into small sections like half a page and practise that, until you can play without breaks and memorized with hands together, I then proceed to next half page.

[JK]

For a new piece I tend to start big and then get smaller. By this I mean that I sightread through it a few times, even if it's very difficult I think this is vital. I do this because it helps me to get an overall feal of strucure and form. Then I tend to break it up into sections and gradually make these sections smaller as I work more detail into it. Some people may prefer to work through a piece methodically from beginning to end, this doesn't work for me as I get fed up quickly and I also think that it restricts your understanding of the piece as a whole. As far as actual practice goes I use a lot of techniques such as playing slowly and loudly, with metronome, reversing dynamics etc. etc.