how to really polish a piece

[chopincrazy23]

Hi everyone,

I just finished memorizing a long and hard piece. (at least it's hard at my level) Now, I need to get everything up to par, and insanely accurate for an audition. Anyways, I wanted to know if anyone had some good tips on really polishing a piece?  The problems I am having is making some sections clear, and making really soft notes "play" when I touch them.

[pytheamateur]

Hi everyone,

I just finished memorizing a long and hard piece. (at least it's hard at my level) Now, I need to get everything up to par, and insanely accurate for an audition. Anyways, I wanted to know if anyone had some good tips on really polishing a piece?  The problems I am having is making some sections clear, and making really soft notes "play" when I touch them.

Which piece are you talking about?

[roseamelia]

Hmmm.... Let's see my way of polishing a piece is to do section by section. I did that with Fur elise and now I don't need the book.

It took about 5 weeks to finish it. now I can play it super fast and not have but a couple mistakes. One thing too is that I play the piano everyday so during the day, I wait till I feel ready to do my piece.

[slobone]

Can't say very much if we don't know what piece it is. But in general, I'm not crazy about that word polishing. It implies that up till now you've just been learning the notes, and now you're going to make it sound musical. But you really should have been doing that from the beginning.

In particular, if you're only just now trying to figure out how to play notes softly, how have you been playing them? The technique for soft vs loud can be very different. If nothing else, I just think it's a more efficient use of time to start working on phrasing, dynamics, voicing, etc, at a very early stage in the learning process.

[oxy60]

Record it often. Listen critically. Make it yours!

[chopincrazy23]

Which piece are you talking about?

I am playing the Mendelssohn Rondo Capriccioso

[g_s_223]

Can you play it immaculately absolutely without pedal? Work on any bits that are less than perfect when so played.

[g_s_223]

Another tool is to see if you can play it absolutely accurately at tempi significantly slower and significantly faster than normal e.g. 30% either way (use metronome to verify), again without pedal. Doing this gives you a margin of comfort when playing in other surroundings. Practice HS then HT of course on this.

[chopincrazy23]

Thanks! I will definitely make sure to do those things.