Scaling down quantity into efficient practice

[cey444]

Hi everyone,

I am aware that this question has probably been asked a million times before but I would like some advice specifically on these pieces.
Basically, after finishing my undergraduate in music (just finished this June) I was used to practicing around 5 hours a day (not all of it completely efficient), but I went by the general rule of playing tricky passages very slowly and then speeding them up. Now I've started my Masters (musicology but a module in short recital) I don't have that time to practice, I haven't been practicing at all recently because I don't know where to start. I have my first performance seminar in January and I don't feel at all ready. On top of that I have found a lovely new teacher who is starting out as a concert pianist (kind of) but he focuses very much on the musical side of the pieces, and gives me pointed on how to improve technique.
I'm finding that because I don't have time to practice how I usually practice, my practice is becoming very inefficient. An hour a day is nothing, and with inefficient practice it's basically a waste of time.
My pieces are Beethoven Tempest and Chopin Ballade no 3, and I will be starting Brahms Rhapsody Op. 79 no. 1 soon. Having learnt the notes for the Chopin and Beethoven (not completely full tempo and with technical issues) I'm at a loss of how to practice and how to improve in the short time that I have daily. To top all that off, my teacher is away performing until February. Any specific practice tips would be greatly appreciated.


Thank you

edit: apologies if this is in the wrong forum, mods feel free to move it if need be

[bronnestam]

I would pinpoint the tricky passages - rather often you can narrow them down to just the shift between two or three cords, for example - and then concentrate my practicing to just them. Practice mostly in fast tempo and if it is too difficult, use just one hand.

That should be the fastest and most efficient way to solve the technical difficulties. The musical aspects can be practiced mentally in your head whenever you have got the time.

I am a bad amateur and let's conclude that I know all about unefficient practicing! Which is exactly the opposite of what I describe here above: play it all, play it slowly, repeat your mistakes in the stupid hope of getting over them "next time" (yeah, right    ) without ever hitting the core of them ... It will not just take forever to learn the pieces in full tempo, you will also hate them before you're done.
Been there, done that!

[michaeljames]

From 5 hours to 1 would be an awfully difficult adjustment!  Of course you're at a loss.

There are usually more difficult passages within a piece...for the Chopin Troiseme Ballade, for me that section started with the C# minor section...the rest fell into place pretty quickly.  So if I were just learning this and had your limited time, I would go right to that section and start there.

You know exactly where you need to work within each piece. The Brahms' Rhapsody only has a couple of quirky passages, so that should fall quickly into place for you.

Do you have more time on the weekends to devote to playing?  For sanity's sake, I'd take one day and only play pieces you already know!  Or at least sections of pieces that are sound.  I start each practice session playing something I know which is good for my fingers....but I also don't have any time constraints. 

I'm impressed with your dedication.
 

[Bob]

I made a technical routine that's denser than anything I would normally practice.  (Although that's all I do mostly anymore, just this routine.)  It keeps me in shape and I make some long term technical progress that way.

Otherwise for practicing music one thing I've noticed lately, depending on what your goal is (I'm thinking control vs. playing more automatically/ingraining the music in your fingers)... Don't discount repetition.  Take a phrase, repeat it over and over, make faster progress.  Or if you're willing to let some things slide, just playing straight through a piece is not so inefficient.  I know how the piece goes.  I play straight through it three time each day.  Doesn't take much time.  After a while I've got the piece down well enough without really putting much effort into it.

[lostinidlewonder]

.... I would like some advice specifically on these pieces.
My pieces are Beethoven Tempest and Chopin Ballade no 3, and I will be starting Brahms Rhapsody Op. 79 no. 1 soon. Having learnt the notes for the Chopin and Beethoven (not completely full tempo and with technical issues) I'm at a loss of how to practice and how to improve in the short time that I have daily. To top all that off, my teacher is away performing until February. Any specific practice tips would be greatly appreciated.

I don't see a specific question attached to these pieces rather you are just asking how do you improve these pieces with less time. Since it is not a specific question the answer you will get will also not be very specific.

How do you learn your pieces? Do you memorize them or do you play with the sheets? I would encourage playing with the sheets if you are time poor, improve to a point where you can play well with the assistance of the sheet music. If you are putting everything into memory and abandoning the sheets then of course you can't do this with less time unless you focus on specific issues. Squashing 5 hours into less hours is a very difficult task to do, it takes many years of refinement to your practice to do it so you will be forced to make more time in your day to deal with this instead. You might notice over your lifetime of piano playing you can learn faster and faster, but as you get better and better it becomes harder to improve your speed, like a logarithmic curve.

Sight read through the entire pieces, section them up into their parts, use different color to identify easy, moderate and challenging sections. Focus on the challenging sections, trust that the easy parts will solve themselves without your focused attention during practice sessions. Make sure you mark important fingering and not over mark the score, highlight patterns which occur in multiple parts of the score.

[cey444]

Thanks to everyone for the useful comments. Looks like my plan of action at the moment will be to take the tricky passages and try to make them technically secure, whilst working on the musicality away from the piano in the my head. Making myself stick to this routine shouldn't be too hard, my problem is I love some parts of the Chopin so much (the first 2 pages in particular) that I spend ages working on the tone/balance/pedal and disregard the technical difficulties in the latter parts of the piece! Hah looks like I need to discipline myself  

Thank you all for the helpful comments, I just wish I could practice all day ...

I don't see a specific question attached to these pieces rather you are just asking how do you improve these pieces with less time.

Sorry I didn't articulate myself well enough. I have learnt the pieces to an amateur level, but there are still technical difficulties/issues with security and musicianship issues within these pieces which need a lot of care and attention to reach the next level. It's not as if I am starting from scratch, I have put a lot of time into these pieces but some general problems arise which I need to sort out efficiently as opposed to putting in hours of mindless practice. I just wanted some general tips on how to approach this kind of practice for these kinds of pieces as it's not something I have done before. I know mostly this kind of thing comes with experience, which I don't have much of. But I will definitely alter my practice sessions to focus specifically on the challenging parts. And yes I tend to memorize pieces at the request of my teacher (within a few weeks though), he thinks that musicality comes through more without the hindrance of a score (for me that is, not for everybody).

[lostinidlewonder]

..some general problems arise which I need to sort out efficiently as opposed to putting in hours of mindless practice.

I just wanted some general tips on how to approach this kind of practice for these kinds of pieces .....

The above two quotes highlight you want general tips not specific details, so it becomes a little difficult to actually say anything that really helps the pieces specifically because if we start talking about something that you already know it's a waste of time. So you need to be specific and mention which bars are troublesome, perhaps highlight why its troublesome and what you are trying to do to solve it.

.... I tend to memorize pieces at the request of my teacher (within a few weeks though), he thinks that musicality comes through more without the hindrance of a score (for me that is, not for everybody).

The score will only interrupt your musical playing if your reading skills are not up to par. When I was younger I also believed the same thing, that if you sight read you cannot express yourself properly, but now I know this is not true. Of course there are sections which do not need to be or cannot be controlled by focused reading and an amount of muscular memory is used (eg: fast/dense passages, leaps, repeated arpeggio/scale/chord patterns etc). The problem I found with memorizing everything is that it slows you down a great deal and the amount of time you need to learn the piece increases. I would focus on improving your reading skills but this is a long term investment. Unfortunately there are not many schools of music which actually teach sight reading and students merely play a small collection of pieces at a high standard, but their rate of learning is quite poor (and they invest countless hours memorizing where they could be improving reading skills).

[cey444]

So you need to be specific and mention which bars are troublesome, perhaps highlight why its troublesome and what you are trying to do to solve it.

Well I have a few specific passages in each piece which are giving me trouble and any specific thoughts would be greatly appreciated, if you have the time and don't mind.
Chopin Ballade No. 3 - I don't have bar numbers in my copy, so the troublesome area is the section marked dolce, with the scalic passage /arpeggiated figures in the right hand. I have practiced slowly and securely but I can't seem to get the right sort of sound with the speed and accuracy to make the right hand flow really lightly and evenly. I also have some balance issues with the section marked smorzando and then sotto voce, at the moment I am trying to exaggerate the balance without the una corda pedal for now.
Beethoven Tempest -  The first movement has been giving my real troubles from a technical point of view but I think slow and relaxed practicing has been helping. Again balance and evenness from bar 21 to 39 has been an issue which I am steadily working on very slowly. The same with bar 103 - 118.
I'm still working on speeding the last movement up.

The problem I found with memorizing everything is that it slows you down a great deal and the amount of time you need to learn the piece increases. I would focus on improving your reading skills but this is a long term investment.

Yes this is a major problem of mine. It takes me ages to learn a new piece because of my poor reading skills, I tried to improve them for my DipAbrsm exam, whilst they have got marginally better I only managed to scrape the bare minimum pass for the quick study section (pass mark was 6, and I got 6) I know it takes a lot of dedication and time to improve reading skills, but because I have not chosen to specialize in performance and I have chosen a career in academic music, finding the time is very difficult.