"Learning Time" as I see it

[1piano4joe]

Question #1: How long would it take to play a 60 measure piece in Common Time with the metronome on 60?

Stop reading now and think about this before reading any further if you don't almost immediately have the answer. I will provide the answer down below as I don't want to post it so close to the question.

Now consider this question:

Question #2: If you sight read a piece at tempo hands together perfectly in 2 minutes then what was your learning time?

Please wait and be patient the answers are coming. I promise.

Question #3: What is the purpose of this post?

This I will explain now as I am convinced there are people on here who just won't get it if it isn't and some who still won't even after reading the explanation.

The answer to Question #3 above requires that several additional questions be asked to be really appreciated. So here they are.

What is learning time?
What is performance time?
What is practice time?
How does an amateur think?
How does the professional think?

Maybe even more questions later but let's start with these.

Don't take the following too literally as it is simply for concrete illustrative purposes only.

The mental aspect of the "Professional" is around 90% and the physical aspect is let's say 10%. Let's not quibble about the percentages as it really isn't important for the discussion. If you believe it to be 80% mental and 20% physical then fine. It may well be.

The obvious point that some people may have missed is that professionals certainly have much more physical skills than the amateurs. The physical skills of a professional are primarily a given. They live, eat, sleep and breathe piano. They maintain the many skills they have by "doing their thing".

So what does the 90% mental aspect consist of?

Answer: Knowledge, Concentration and Attitude.

It's upside down for the rest of us nonprofessionals.

The mental aspect of the "amateur" is around 10% and the physical aspect 90%. The amateur struggles with hands separate, hands together, big jump, big stretches, etc. The list is endless.

The professionals have not only the skills but more knowledge, better concentration and a much much better attitude.

That's the purpose of this post. Learning to start thinking more and more like a professional while hopefully you struggle less and less with the physical as you develop your skills.

Does anybody really disagree with that?

And now the answer to question #1 above is exactly 4 minutes. 60 measures with 4 beats to the measures is exactly 240 beats. The metronome is on 60 which means it beats once every second.
Therefore 240 beats requires 240 seconds. Dividing by 60 yields 4 minutes. Please give me a break and not bring up rubato, accelerando or ritartando.

Answer to question #2: Learning Time is zero. Performance Time is 2 minutes.

I can't provide a definitive answer to the question, "What is learning time?" as it probably means different things to different people, but considering the title of this post I will now provide the, "as I see it".

MY Definition of learning time "as I see it" is,

Soon as you can play hands together at the most ridiculously slow tempo. Learning time is over.
I can play low level pieces hands together provided the metronome is set low enough. My metronome goes from 40-208. Yet, I very often play immediately hands together as slow as 5-20. How do you ask? Just change the time signature. Beat eighth notes and not quarter notes. quarter notes now get two clicks (beats) and presto your playing hands together immediately at 20. I have even beaten sixteenths (metronome at 10) and 32nds (metronome at 5). I used to spend way too much time on hands separate so that I could start hands together at 40 or 50. But after considering the math involved of okay 2 hours left hand work at 150% tempo and 2 hours right hand work to get up to 150% final tempo. Okay now but them together starting at 50 and you reach final tempo in only 30 minutes. Isn't that 4 and 1/2 hours to learn a simple piece? It is more efficient (try it before you criticize this) to start playing hands together at a much slower speed and so what if it isn't reached in 30 minutes. You just eliminated 4 hours of hands separate practice by starting hands together immediately. Right? So even if the hands together now takes three times as long (1 and 1/2 Hours instead of 30 minutes) this is one third of the "practice time" of 4 and 1/2 hours. That means learning 3 pieces instead of 1 in the same time. Right?

There essentially is no learning time. People bemoan the long learning time of a piece. This is the misinformed attitude of the amateur. What people mean but aren't expressing is the long practice time of getting a piece up to tempo. These are two totally different things as I see it.

I know how to do it so there is little if any learning involved. I just can't do it. There's that misinformed attitude again. Horrible little monster that attitude isn't it.

A much much better attitude is the following:
  
The tempo for this piece is supposed to be 100. Okay I am playing it perfectly already at 10. This is an unsatisfactory interpretation of this piece. Let's see how I like (that's all that really matters isn't it?) the interpretation at 20. I will slowly increase the metronome with each repetition until I reach 20. The repetitions at 12,14,16,18 aren't learning times as previously mentioned but are practice times. Right? Maybe, Maybe not. I prefer to think (that's what this post is about your feelings and emotions that make up your attitude) of them as 4 additional interpretations or opportunities to really listen to the sounds I'm making.

If you perform a 2 minute piece you love many many times since you like it so much then what does it matter about the slower sounding interpretations. What is it that's a "drag" for you?
If you perform this 2 minute piece 300 times in your lifetime (that's 600 minutes) or 10 hours of priceless pleasure for you and your listeners. So why does it matter to so many people if it takes only 1 hour to learn? It is said, "Success is the journey not the destination". Here the "journey" is a day at the beach. So, what's with all the brouhaha?
 
A perfect analogy is taking a 10 hour flight to some dream vacation spot and then you tour for anywhere from say 7 days to 14 days. 7 days by the way is 168 hours of heaven. If not, get another travel agent.

One last piece of information. Playing a 2 minute piece at a tempo of 10 that should be 100 takes 20 minutes to play. You can accurately calculate the "practice time" as I see it to get it up to the suggested tempo of 100. If after sight reading this at 10 you dial it up to 20 (1/5 suggested tempo) this first repetition only takes 10 minutes. 30 minutes total so far. Right? This is so easy you say to yourself as you dial it up to 50 (1/2 recommended tempo). You finish the piece in 4 minutes flat since 1/2 the speed takes twice the time. My amateur physicist background recalls from kinematics that Distance = Velocity X Time. So what's that got to do with it. Well, the distance is the number of bars long the piece is that you will travel. Velocity is your choosing (setting of the metronome tempo) and Time, well, that's what no doubt some of you might feel they wasted reading this long post.

Hopefully, the rest of you are developing a professional attitude.

Now if only I could get hmmm, let me see the skills, the knowledge and oh yeah what'd he say? Concentration.

[slyfox2625]

reading this gives me a headache, but um, im pretty sure you're better then me so just keep up the good work

[keypeg]

Ok, first off - to question # 1, it depends on what the time signature is to your 60 measure piece - i.e. how many beats there are in a measure.  I'm not sure how that question leads to your point, unless you expect that most people would tap it out with a timer running, rather than calculating it.
If you are talking about a professional attitude, I agree to the thinking part.  I do not agree that once you can play it at tempo HT you have mastered the piece, and therefore it takes a shorter time.  Certainly doing HS needlessly wastes time.  But a professional attitude includes shaping the piece to make it musical, which is also partly a mental process.  Being able to play it in the right time with the right notes is only the beginning.

[nyiregyhazi]

There is some sense in this post, but it's coldly rational and disconnected from real practical issues to the point of being outright irrational much of the time. Just because you play the right notes in the right order in a ludicrously slow speed does not mean you are learning anything. Learning is not about fulfilling a check-list in which every note is played correctly in a rhythm. To pretend that it's all about repeating enough times or that consistency is assured each time you raise a click if just wishful thinking. Start too slow and you will train a totally alien quality of movement that it will be very hard to break from. Equally, being able to play a piece hands together first time does not mean learning time is zero. Is it memorised? No. Do you necessarily have ANY sense of physical flow? No. You're trying to be far too formulaic, but neglecting many key practicalities.

You can't start number crunching to "prove" that a certain method takes a certain amount of time, because it works on the assumption of never going wrong. After the drudgery of going ultra slow over and over, most pianists will be guaranteed to hit a wall upon speeding up. There's no magic guarantee that simply by speeding up the metronome gradually enough, technique will evolve. Going at a snail's pace over and over with both hands is likely to be vastly less effective than starting by getting a moderate pace with separate hands. And it will take longer.

The thing about slow playing is you have to test it. Often this should be done fairly early- but only to expose holes for immediate fixing. If you build up your way, you might not fail any tests for a very long time to start with- until you finally start failing a thousand and one tests all at the same time. Good practise cross-references slow and precise with faster tests. It doesn't get lost in slow and untested movements.