What do you practice?

[chopinmozart7]

All I hear are people practicing for approximately 2-8 hours a day.
But what do you put so much time and effort into?

Technique,Repertoire,Theory,Reading,Improvisation etc.

[countrymath]

interesting

I have a routine (can't really call it a routine, because i'm constantly changing it) of 8 hours of study per day

Basicaly, its 2 hours of theory by the morning, 2 hours of blues, lunch, 1 hour of accompaniment and 3 hours of classical.

I'm going to change it for sometime...maybe i will take 1 hour of blues and start practicing classical improvisation.

[williampiano]

My daily practice time usually ranges from 45 minutes to 2 hours. It's not really that much, but I'm also still a teenager so I don't really have a whole lot of time to practice.

[jollisg]

I'm a teenager now, but I practice 1-3 hours/day. In that I just include classical piano, because I don't practice improvisation, blues or jazz.. And I don't count theory to my piano practice. But I take some time in the day to read about theory, harmonize or just something.

[lorditachijr]

I'm also a teenager, and usually I get about 1-3 hours during the school year. Now that it's summer, however, I'm able to do 3-5 almost every day. What I do every day is I make a list of everything I want to cover in that day of practice. Then I systematically divide my time between each item on the list. I always spend about 20 minutes warming up on scales/arpeggios and Hanon/Czerny. Then I will work anywhere from 30 mins to an hour on each piece/item on the list depending on how much work it needs. I always take breaks every hour I'm practicing and go do something else for a little bit. This keeps me focused during my practice time. For each piece I work on, I'll play it through once, choose problem areas to work on, do as much detailed work as I feel necessary and play it through again. Doing this lets me see what kind of progress I make each day. Also I keep a rotation of the pieces I put on my list. I list my main pieces (audition pieces, recital pieces, etc.) more often than the side pieces so that they'll get the most work. Then when the technical challenges of a piece are conquered, I will listen to recordings and read papers/analyses written on it to help me refine my interpretation. I find this strategy works really well to ensure everything gets worked on and the pieces that need to be prepared for a competition or recital get prepared. It also helps to make sure I spend time on musical difficulties too, not just technical difficulties.

Good luck!
John

[scott13]

Piano major at university.

I spend 1-2 hours in morning on technical things, be it small sections from a piece (currently have 12 such sections from Beethoven Concerto #1), plus Dohnanyi (I really recommend this book, it is fantastic and covers every main area of essential technique)and Brahms Exercises (This book gets a bad reputation for being difficult for the sake of difficult, however it is another fantastic book of exercises, and makes picking up Brahms pieces much easier) and scales, Arpeggios, Octaves, 3rds, 6ths, 4ths, etc etc. The reason i spend so long on technical work is so when i return later in the day to work on pieces, in most cases i have worked on technical issues i find in these pieces, so learning them is much much faster (And if i find a somewhat technically difficult section in a piece, i make an exercise based on it and add it to my technique practice)

Then later on in the day i spend 4-6 hours on pieces. Pieces wise i like to try and always have at least one piece from each of the 4 main musical periods, plus 2 major works. As soon as a piece is mastered, i rotate it with another work from that period. This habit makes picking up pieces much easier as you have a musical understanding of the period and quite often the composer, so for many pieces it becomes simply learning the notes and bringing pieces to tempo.

[forgottenbooks]

It's a combination of technique and repertoire for me - the technical practice usually comes automatically with practicing the pieces I have learnt or am learning. I usually tackle compositions section by section: I don't move on to a new section until I've mastered the current one. Sometimes "practicing" means just playing because I like the sound or feel of it.

[paedelium]

It's not about how long you sit at the piano, it's about what you achieve on the piano.

Practicing is not about repetition. It's about constantly striving for improvement. Always find new ways of doing things, different ways of practicing, experiment with new ideas, listen, evaluate, implement...

[liszt_ani_rach]

I practice for 3 hours a day(the rest of the time I study, i'm in high school).
I practice my scales, arpeggios , broken chords, octaves, hanon exercises.
I also practice pieces.
Currently, i'm practicing Chopin 's Prelude op 28 no 24, Liszt's La Chasse, Scarlatti Sonata in B minor k 27.

[jollisg]

It's not about how long you sit at the piano, it's about what you achieve on the piano.

Practicing is not about repetition. It's about constantly striving for improvement. Always find new ways of doing things, different ways of practicing, experiment with new ideas, listen, evaluate, implement...

I like your post!
Everyone is like "you have to practice 8h a day to become someone", but I think it's more about how you practice. You can practice 8 hours, doing arpeggios, broken chords, hanon, pieces and whatever that is great. When you write that on the internet it sounds perfect, but if you don't put that much effort in what you're doing, you may not improve as much as if you would have practiced 6 hours and doing it properly.

[countrymath]

As I said up there, I changed my routine again =)

Now I do 2 hours of theory, 1 hour of blues, 1 hours of accompaniment, lunch, 3 hours of classical, 1 hour of improvisation

[drkilroy]

I usually practice about one hour a day, sometimes more. I once practiced nine hours because I had a guest that I am not particularly fond of and I had an excuse for not leaving the room for whole day. 

Best regards, Dr

[carl_h]

I practise about 1-2 hours a day, bit more in the weekend. Working 40 hours a week so I have to spent my time properly. I'm doing scales & arpeggio's but not every day, I like to play a piece 'cold' when I get home from work. Most of the time I'm working on pieces, at least 1 barok piece while studying others - if there are technically challenging parts I work on that specific technique. Also, something I find really important, playing pieces I've learned and memorized to improve my musicality and discover new 'things' in those pieces. I like to throw in an etude once in a while aswell.

Best regards
Carl H

[pianoplayjl]

I only practice 1 hour in weekdays but 2 hours on weekends. My practice session consists of scales. I divide them into 2 days. same goes to my pieces so that I can spend more time on 1 piece.

[jesc]

I haven't been playing piano "seriously" for a long time. Thus my muscles and techniques are limited.

I spend a lot of effort trying to bring out the best with what my hands can do. Adjusting the posture, the way my fingers move and the movements of the wrists.

I spend a lot of effort carefully listening to my play and shaking my head "that will not do". Then I go back to square one and try another approach. Repeat until after listening, I say "that's better".

[mosis]

after a 5 year hiatus, i've returned to piano interested only in learning Scarlatti's music. i'm learning a handful of sonatas right now (k322, k35, k149) and everything that i do - technique, theory, musicality, whatever - begins and ends with realizing these sonatas

[ted]

95% improvisation. Five minutes morning and night technical practice on the Virgil Practice Clavier - never the same movements every day though. Never known any theory and never seen any point in it. Unless the development of forms for personal improvisation counts, in which case I do quite a lot. Read music only to memorise something, which isn't very often these days.

Of these activities, only the few minutes of physical work is truly "practice", in the sense that it isn't the "real thing" i.e performance. I never perform and improvisation is always the "real thing", only being "practice" in the sense that it hopefully improves and grows organically over time with constant work.

I do a hell of a lot of work at the instrument but I think very little of it could be correctly termed "practice".

[pianoplayjl]

I want to do some improvisation but i can't because i don't know how to. Also, towards exam periods I usually do a bit of sight reading practice.

[Derek]

I'm an amateur and I manage to put in a max of about an hour a day, sometimes more on the weekends. My practice is focused heavily on improvisation (in which case, like Ted, I'm not sure if you can call that practice, since it is the practice itself), but at times I spend more time at reading and playing pieces. They sort of counter balance one another.

[m1469]

Right now I study "music fundamentals" for awhile before starting in on the serious playing.  Then I do chromatic scales in contrary motion in four note groupings.  Then I do whatever the mode of the day is in the circle of fifths.  The I do "blind chords" and arpeggios in the circle of fifths.  Then usually I'll play either the third movement of the Appassionata, or a couple of Chopin Etudes next, or vice versa.  Then I'll start in on current Rep.  When I must, I jam some singing I there somewhere, too (which I'm supposed to be looking at and working on RIGHT now, but instead I'm posting here). 

[pianoplayjl]

I usually begin my practice session playing my pieces once , before scales and then practicing.