how to improve practice efficiency?

[toneqing]

Hi everyone!
I'm a piano major student. my skill is not that good, do I need to put more time on skill training? I practice everyday for six or seven hours, but still feel not efficient and usually get tired on mind or cannot concentrate enough. I feel a little hard to get progress.  Can anybody give me some ideas on practice?
 Thank you so much!!

                                                                            ToneQing

[lia04]

Hi Toneqing! I'm also a piano major student.  I think FIRST you have to make the clear little goals of your practice for each time.
And then the following are my tips for efficient practice:

Don't always start on with the opening of the piece, unless there are difficulties there. Going directly to the parts of problems and work on them and set little goals for this time's practice.

Recite those difficult sections so that you can concertrate on your music, your finger action or something else.

Recording your play and listen to it so that you can find out some problems which you cannot notice when during your practice.

Don't play for a long time without break. That not only harmful for your muscle but also your mind your spirit. You can set a fifty minute for a period and then have a ten min rest.

Hopefully these tips can help you with your practicing!!

[pianist1976]

Hi everyone!
I'm a piano major student. my skill is not that good, do I need to put more time on skill training? I practice everyday for six or seven hours, but still feel not efficient and usually get tired on mind or cannot concentrate enough. I feel a little hard to get progress.  Can anybody give me some ideas on practice?

A general advice would be "Don't practice mindlessy" (It's a very generic advice as you told very little about your background). You may have a better performance with only three or four hours but well used. Train your fingers but also your brain and your soul. Reflect on the technical problems and its musical solution, reflect on the musical idea you want to get. As Hoffman said, you must pratice with the piano and the score, with the piano without the score, with the score without the piano and without piano nor score. Also remember what Chopin said: "Time is the best critic, and patient the best teacher"

Why don't you please tell us what background do you have so we can help you more efficiently? (pieces you played before, what are you practicing now, your technical level, what school your teacher is...)

[toneqing]

Hi lia.

Thanks for your suggestion. I have realized I should make a detailed plan and practice the difficulty points limited to 15 minutes at most.

I will have a try in your way.

Thank you again!

[slobone]

Seems to me that with 6 or 7 hours a day, you should be making very fast progress. And yes, that allows plenty of time for purely technical exercises as well as working on pieces.

The only general advice I can give you that has helped me is, don't get too hung up on any one passage or problem. There's a law of diminishing returns, if the passage isn't getting better, stop and work on something else for a while. Trade off between exercises, sight reading, ear training, listening to recordings, and intensive work on your current pieces. And for goodness sake make sure you have a life outside of the practice room, otherwise you won't have anything to express.

[toneqing]

Hello,pianist1976

I'm agree with you  that We must use our head to practice the piece. But the point is that I couldn't  find more details in different part by myself. Every time my teacher tell me the main points in different  sentence, I did a double take. So I want to improve the skill of handling more and more details by myself, if not, my teacher will have to waste a lot of time in class to deal with those.

[g_s_223]

Read Leimer & Gieseking's book (search Google for pdf).

[ade16]

I can only reinforce and expand on some very valuable advice already given by others. I find that setting aside enough time to practise is difficult with work committments (I am a full time music teacher who only occasionally gives piano recitals these days), but I do make the time. Trying to maximise the efficiency of practice is crucial as well. For example, not wasting time just playing the same difficult passage over and over, tripping up at same places, physically or mentally or both; rather, drilling down to the problem, identifying it, then working hard to fix it through very focussed and intensive practice. This sometimes involves adjusting the fingerings as well as slow practice, gradually building up to the required speed and then placing back into the whole context of the passage or movement. This approach is nothing new of course, but I am very rigid with it given the limited time I can find to practise properly.

Correct fingerings are absolutely crucial, but not crucially absolute. At the end of the day you should try out alternatives and eventually settle on the finger choices which feel most natural and comfortable for you. However, once you have settled on your chosen fingerings then stick to them in a subsequent practice. Constantly changing fingerings will only add even more confusion in the long run. 

I absolutely agree with the idea of studying away from the piano with the score, imagining your way through a piece. This also helps when memorising. A teacher once said to me when I was a piano major myself, you do not know a melodic passage until you can play every note with one finger. I thought at the time he was being rather pedantic, until I heard him play a recital in which he was virtually note perfect, with excellent attention to detail too in terms of dynamics and phrasing.

My main concern is that, if you are practising several hours a day, as I used to do, there will come a point where your efficiency will decline through fatigue and loss of concentration. Shorter bursts of effort, say up to an hour at a time with at least a 20min break is far more beneficial, and each shorter session should have a different focus, whether excercises, different pieces, sections within the same piece etc I have probably repeated a lot of what has been said, but I have learned a lot from mistakes I have made with my practise habits over the last 40 years or so.