Yohevad Kaplinsky, the director of Juilliard's pre-college piano department, says a concert pianist should practice 4 to 5 hours a day but no more than 6. I think that's a comfortable amount.
I think measuring your practice with time is not as good as measuring your practice in terms of work to be done. Of course if you have limited time in the day and need to work by a timetable set your practice times, but it is much more beneficial to learn to measure out what tasks you want to accomplish and work with that.I often lure students into a "practice trap" by saying, play this section without mistake 3 times. If you can do it 3 times with no errors you can stand up and stop practicing. If that takes you 1 minute of 1 hour that is how long you need to sit there. I like studying in these terms, you feel like you accomplish more this way. Sometimes after 1 hour of floundering practice you achieve nothing.
Virtually no practice at all aside from ten minutes technique night and morning on the Virgil Practice Clavier, a discipline I have maintained for decades. Once at the piano I improvise, and I am still unclear if "practice" improvisation actually exists. I do have a small repertoire of pieces, but the practice required to keep it functional is insignificant. The time spent improvising varies so much a daily average is not meaningful.
So on weekdays, I do two to four naps a day, and on weekends I do three to six naps a day.You'll die the first few weeks but after that your body will get used to it.
My professor expects 4 hours on week days and 6 on weekends.But the key is not doing them all in one sitting!I remember back in the day, I would be like 'oh yeah 6 hours in one sitting GO!!'Nah... That won't fly.What you gotta do is divide how much you intend to practice for the day into a few smaller sessionsAnd in between each session, take a nap. Everything works like MAGIC.So on weekdays, I do two to four naps a day, and on weekends I do three to six naps a day.You'll die the first few weeks but after that your body will get used to it.
To all advanced students (university level and up), how many hours a day (in average) do you practice?
I have a bad habit of going days (sometimes even a week) without practicing 💀But when it do it’s 1 hour to 3 hours
I pulled a muscle recently below my shoulder blade, after lifting a heavy object and this made sitting at the piano excruciating after about 1/2 an hour. I decided to not play for a week until I recovered and after that I found that I had already lost some technique in the pieces I had been learning up until then. So playing every day or almost every day is crucial. I'm curious however, because I am attempting to learn many pieces at the same time, I am making progress slowly but obviously I cannot practise each one of them every day. It's around 10 pieces and all are at a reasonable level but not perfected. Back when I was studying for exams, I never did this, because I had a teacher, but now, is it better to perfect say, five pieces, and then begin learning new ones, or practise certain pieces every other day or every third day - I'm still making progress on all of them, albeit slowly.
1 hr/day during the school year, 1-3 hours/day during the summer. Typically, 50% of this time is wasted on old repertoire and improvisation.
lol I only practice when I have a concert. When I’m on tour I don’t practice at all
Interesting. I would typically find that pieces start deteriorating if I did that. Each mistake made during concerts start accumulating and muddying the overall cleaness of my playing eventually. Does that not happen to you?
Topic: How many hours a day? 