About to give up :(

[anagha]

I've been playing piano since I was 13 and the keyboard since I was about 3. I'm now 20, I completed grade 8 before joining college. I left to a different city for college and was forced to leave my piano back at home. I come home every two months and have lessons with my piano teacher that are getting more and more depressing. I've been playing fantasie impromptu for the two years since I left to college and I can't complete it because I find it impossible to practice when I'm in college. I get an hour every few days with a piano and then I don't want to practice, I want to play. I'm really upset because I'm home now for a week, I've been playing fantasie impromptu for too long now, I can't hold my attention and practice enough, I'm bored of it. Is there some sort of a solution? I don't want to stop learning.

[chopin2015]

Dont give up! I used to go to college full time, work part time and practice piano 3 hours a day. I drank coffee and tea while I did it, it perked me up while I worked on my favorite pieces. Are you a good reader? Do you have a good ear? Work on those things if you dont want to practice. Listen to music and find a virtuous piece you like then try it out.
Idk what else.

[hfmadopter]

My thought is that sometimes we just have to put a piece on the shelf for a while and come back to it when things settle down.. Two years at one piece is a long time, no wonder you are getting bored. How about some fresh work, maybe in a different form of music ( I like to switch over to soft rock, movie themes and so forth for a change up) ? I would think it would help if you had a keyboard and headphones in your room.

I'm in a bit of a slump right now myself, busy at work etc. It's that time of year where we have corporate reviews of departments and whole facilities. March and April are like that for me. Things will settle down in the next month. I've taken this time to work on trouble spots in pieces and playing one or two tunes I enjoy. I just back off the heavy work when it gets like this. The piano isn't going anywhere !

I suggest not quitting, just a fresh approach. You have a lot of time and effort invested and it seems you must have enjoyed getting to where you are at or you wouldn't have made it this far. I quit for too long but ya know, it never really goes away. My wonderful teacher always told me that when music is in you you will always come back to it. She was right.

[larryt]

Do not give up! Find something that you like to play and play it. No one says that you have to practice all the time. Sometimes you should just play what makes you feel good.

[bronnestam]

People who have seen my postings for the last few months now know what I'm about to write. (Well, you don't have to read ...)

I have been in exactly your situation, with the only difference that my "ice age" lasted for nearly 30 years ...      Then I made a "final attempt" to pick up piano playing again, seriously, and this time I succeeded. I got a new approach. I decided to investigate WHY I was bored and WHY I did not make any progress - I really wanted to play, didn't I?

And I watched my little dog, who is very easy to train - if you do it right. The right approach is to let him make progress all the time, that is, to go down to baby steps in order to make every step so easy that he will make it in one or two attempts. Every training session must end with "success", that is, a little treat for my dog, or he will lose interest and get unmotivated.
If the dog experiences failures (= no treats)  he will soon quit training and start investigating interesting spots on the lawn instead. It is not his fault, it's mine, because I demanded too much and therefore the failure rate increased ...

I realized that I am not much different from my dog! I also need constant encouragement, I also need to feel that my efforts pay off!

So what I did was to give myself very strict rules, that I have followed every day since the beginning of last fall: I must NEVER raise from the piano without make a brief summary of what I've just learned, of the issues I just have improved. Sometimes they are so tiny that they seem ridiculous - nevertheless, they are improvements. And if I fail too much, my ambitions are too high, I have to go deeper down into details, until I work with three subsequent keystrokes or something like that. I DON'T bother playing whole pieces until I can play them fairly well, I concentrate on the difficulties only.
So, the rule is that simple: always note your progress. Always congratulate yourself for your progress, no matter how small it was at the moment. Never, EVER allow yourself to leave the piano with the sense of having failed, "it was a bad day today, maybe better tomorrow ..." Just ignore your "failures", tell yourself they are just details you have to work on a bit more. You must end the session as a winner, every single time. I cannot stress this fact enough. It might sound too simple to be effective, but ...

Don't compare yourself with your last practicing session. Just look at the session you are in, right now. And don't blame yourself if your session is just 6 minutes. That counts too. Don't give yourself ambitious practicing schedules and goals, because they will be a whip on your back when you are not totally motivated. Your motivation is like fuel to an engine - you have to feed it and refill it constantly, or the engine will eventually stop. So skip your high ambitions.

And don't think this is like saying goodbye to them forever. On the contrary.  To me, it worked like magic. Suddenly I realized that my "lack of motivation" was totally gone. I always long for playing the piano now. I play at least one hour a day, often two, and I'm learning new pieces now, with a higher degree of difficulty than ever before. By expecting less of myself, I started to get better results!

So what you need is this little change in your mindset. Don't condemn yourself. You get bored because you make no progress, and you make no progress because you only count big progress as progress - get it? You are like the dog who did not get any treats for a long time, and finally lost interest in the whole thing. Your goal from now on: have fun, earn a little "treat", nurture your positive feelings, get more treats (self-praise!) And realize that you are doing just fine.

If that Fantasie Improptu bores you, I agree with other posters - just leave it for a while. Or concentrate on just a few bars at the moment.


Two other good pieces of advice, that I've learned here and from other sites:
- ALWAYS end the session by playing very, very slowly. Don't finish by playing as if you were performing, that is to fool yourself. That is not practicing. Play ridiculously slowly, so that you can play every note perfectly, and let your subconscious mind ponder over it until next session. Don't underestimate the value of this little trick.

- Start to practice BEFORE you sit down at the piano. Think about what you are going to play and to practice. Read the sheet music, think about it. If that cannot make you motivated, you will hardly get more motivated once you sit there, right?
And when you make a mistake during practicing, take a little break and think about it before you try again. Exactly what did I do wrong now? What can I do to prevent it from happening again?
This will prevent you from "mindless practicing" which is a dangerous pitfall - you think your hands can do this by themselves, while you think of something else. You know what will happen? Same thing next time you play! Finally you will realize that you always think of something else while you play, and then you will realize that you play awfully, and then it is bye-bye. Believe me, I have been there, done that!