How do you learn more than 2 pieces at one time?

[mariwhite]

Hello there, guys!
I was just wondering how you guys learn 2 or 3 pieces at a time. Do you play them all everyday or you set one day to play one piece, another day to play the other one, etc?

[thalbergmad]

Very much up to the individual I guess, but personally I would not play anything else during the process of learning a piece to performance level.

My habit nowadays is to play many pieces at the same time, but never learn any to competence.

Too much music, not enough time.

Thal

[richard black]

Speaking as someone who often ends up learning several dozen pieces at one time, I chop and change between them quite rapidly - 10 minutes on one, 2 on another, third, fourth, maybe back to the first.... You have to identify quickly the bits in each piece that need the work and concentrate on those.

[lostinidlewonder]

You need to get to a point where you realize learning one piece at a time causes a plateau in the amount you are learning. You may find working on a single piece over and over again yields diminished return so it is useful to have another piece to move to when you start feeling this saturation. You can get to a point where you need much more work to keep you satisfied and engines burning.

Beginners and Intermediates may find it difficult to appreciate this concept because they are thoroughly exhausted after practicing their one piece, but perhaps it may be interesting to explore what it is like to actually try another piece along side your main work. Put your main focus on what you normally do but when you start feeling excessively bored or exhausted practicing certain sections move onto another work. You may certainly feel re-energized to do work and in fact build up more will power to go back and then study your main piece again without break after dabbing with your second work.

[pianisten1989]

Practise one piece until it's "done", then go to the next one. Don't try to rush it, that's the most important.

[jollisg]

I personally like to have 2 or three pieces I bring up to performance level, but not start them all at the same time.
For example;
I learn piece1 until i can play both hands together, then I start with another piece and continue with piece1. Then I start with another piece.
I do that because it keeps me motivated. If I can play my pieces fairly well, I get bored when I'm I already know.

[slane]

I've adapted a suggestion from "The Musicians's way". I don't have the book here so I hope I'm not misrepresenting him but this is what I do now ...

40% of practice time is spent on learning a new piece to the point you can play it competently but not upto tempo or with your full interpretation in place.

20% developing a piece or pieces you've got past stage 1.

20% on maintaining repertoire, playing through pieces you've learnt previously so you don't lose them.

20% on technical work.

He also recommends you take notes and make plans for each practice session so you have specific goals for each piece. I'mm bad, I don't do that. I really should.

And I go through those steps, usually, in that order. In fact because I'm anal/OCD I use a timer to divide my practice, otherwise I just play all the pieces I already know and avoid working on the new one.

[brogers70]

I get diminishing returns if I work on just one piece at a time. I'd say if you have an hour and a half or two hours to practice, break it up into 15-20 minute intervals, and set an achievable goal for each interval, e.g. learn the next 20 measures HS, solidify a passage on a piece you know fairly well, get hands together for a part of a piece where you've already done HS, etc. Once you learn how to chop your work into 15-20 minute segments, you can work on 5-6 pieces at once and make steady progress on each. You can do different practice segments for different parts of a single piece, if you are in a hurry. What I used to do, which was really inefficient, was just to do something like "Play through new the new piece 5-10 times and play through the repertoire I already knew once." That makes the time go by, but doesn't help. A lot of repetition without clear goals and targets is very inefficient. I wish I had learned that long ago.

[mike_lang]

The best way I could answer this is to describe the way in which I am working at the moment:

I am preparing Ibert flute concerto, Franck violin sonata, an orchestral piano part for a piece by Matthias Pintscher, a Bach organ transcription, a Scriabin étude, and the Schubert fantasy for violin and piano. 

It is not rigid, but since I allow myself no more than three hours a day of practice presently, it works out that I spend somewhere around half an hour in each of those areas, though the time needed for each piece diminishes as I progress through the learning process (there are many more pieces and parts that I will have to learn throughout the summer, so some rep will eventually go into a two- or three-day rotation).

With the Ibert, I began by reading through the first movement for a day or two, getting a sense of structure, some fingerings, phrasing, and so forth; then, on the third day I began to practice it in sections, and began reading the second movement.

Basically, I work on several things simultaneously, but in sections, and at a pace in accordance with the "due date."  Rarely do I learn more than two or three things at once from scratch, except during the academic year, when I occasionally have no choice (as a Collaborative Piano student).

Hope this is useful to you . . .

Mike

[bachmaninoff]

I've adapted a suggestion from "The Musicians's way". I don't have the book here so I hope I'm not misrepresenting him but this is what I do now ...

40% of practice time is spent on learning a new piece to the point you can play it competently but not upto tempo or with your full interpretation in place.

20% developing a piece or pieces you've got past stage 1.

20% on maintaining repertoire, playing through pieces you've learnt previously so you don't lose them.

20% on technical work.

He also recommends you take notes and make plans for each practice session so you have specific goals for each piece. I'mm bad, I don't do that. I really should.

And I go through those steps, usually, in that order. In fact because I'm anal/OCD I use a timer to divide my practice, otherwise I just play all the pieces I already know and avoid working on the new one.

Thank you for this, this sounds very helpful indeed. A lesson to all of us I'm sure.

[fleetfingers]

Thank you for this, this sounds very helpful indeed. A lesson to all of us I'm sure.

Don't forget sight reading.

[mariwhite]

I've adapted a suggestion from "The Musicians's way". I don't have the book here so I hope I'm not misrepresenting him but this is what I do now ...

40% of practice time is spent on learning a new piece to the point you can play it competently but not upto tempo or with your full interpretation in place.

20% developing a piece or pieces you've got past stage 1.

20% on maintaining repertoire, playing through pieces you've learnt previously so you don't lose them.

20% on technical work.

He also recommends you take notes and make plans for each practice session so you have specific goals for each piece. I'mm bad, I don't do that. I really should.

And I go through those steps, usually, in that order. In fact because I'm anal/OCD I use a timer to divide my practice, otherwise I just play all the pieces I already know and avoid working on the new one.

I agree, this is really helpful!

[countrymath]

I usually do 3 pieces at time, and usually practice 4 hours daily, what gives me around 1:30 for each piece

I start playing the sections I already know very slowly. It takes about 10 minutes for each piece.
Then I do 20 minutes for each section, changing from piece to piece. I mean, 20 minutes on a section of Mozart Sonata, 20 minutes on Schubert Impromptu, 20 minutes on Cramer etude, and then I repeat it.

I also do a 20 minutes break after 2 hours.

[jeffkonkol]

bernarhd has a some posts throughout this forum on the topic of learning... it would be worthwhile to search them....

in general, most theories of learning stress the importance of the subconscious on learning.... meaning... if you do not give your brain time to sort something out on its own, you aren't efficiently learning....

again.. search the threads... it is an excellent discussion whether or not you ultimately agree with him..... what he advocates though is 20 minutes on a 'subject', and that subject should be a section of music that you can repeat 7 times within that 20 minutes.  Once you have spent that 20 minutes on that section, do not touch that section again except in perhaps a contextual playthrough of a larger section.

If you want to practice 2.5 or so hours in the day... practice 6-7 sections, each at the 20 minutes.

[nanabush]

If I'm working at 2-3 pieces at a time (which I usually do!), I try to be working on pieces that have way different characteristics (3 movements from a set shouldn't really count as three different pieces).

If I want to work on one piece for the entire session, I have a goal of overcoming a new difficulty, not just replaying the same damn 8 bars for an hour.  Best example would be fingering in a tough-as-nails section of a piece.  Rather than butchering it for 45 minutes, I'll treat it like a puzzle I need to solve, and once I get it, damn it feels good.  This could take an hour, but at the same time could save you hours and hours in the end if you never get around to it.

For me to do 2 or 3 pieces, I'll usually have each of them coming along pretty well - I won't start from scratch, on 3 new pieces.  Right now I'm working on the Beethoven Op 78 1st movement (I have a really ugly recording/video of it in the audition), that I started earlier this month, a Debussy Etude and a few other things.  I'll do a lot of slow practice, and then with a metronome, try to set a goal tempo for a section that I'm working at.  I'll work at that, and once I feel I've actually accomplished something (again, repeating a piece over and over from start to finish, badly, for an hour doesn't necessarily mean you'll have made progress) then I'll move on to something else.

One thing I can't do is spend hours and hours on one piece.  I either go crazy, or I'll get antsy and start rushing through parts with the "I'll come back to it" mentality.  Some people are able to, but I think I have some form of attention deficit disorder    I need my variety!!