Practice

[pianoplayer51]

Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but how much should you practice?   Especially when it comes to exam time?

I am studying for my exam where I have to play a range of scales, three pieces (each piece two pages long) and do an aural as well as a little sight read test.

Today I decided to dedicate my practice/study to my three pieces.   I played them in no particular order in the book.   I played the first one a couple of times and then went on to play the next one and played that once and the third and final one I played twice.

I then went back over the first one to  brush up some bits that I thought needed brushing up (I only did the brushing up bars) and then played it once again from beginning to end to see if it was better than the previous time.

Then I took a little break for an hour or so and returned to the pieces and played them again.

All in all I put in a LOT of hours of study (not all at once  )

They say you should not practice more than half hour a day but if you compare it to orchestras and pianists who play professionally with orchestras, I would bet they spend most of a day going over and over practicing and rehearsing for their concert so they put in hours of work too.

But they are used to playing for very long periods day after day (especially when they go on tour).

In the end I played my three pieces so many times over, I was sick of listening to them, and the pieces themselves are not very interesting but were the best of the bunch out of the exam book so I chose them and each piece, although not sounding very exciting, actually do give me a range of different skills to learn.

Piece 1 has pedaling all the way through
Piece 2 has a few trills
Piece 3 has a lot of detached notes

So for today I am all played out.   

[j_menz]

Individuals require different amount of practice to obtain the same results, part of that seems to be an unchangeable trait, and part of it is the quality of the practice.  Some pieces also are more "slippery" than others - inexplicably harder to learn; and some pieces represent more learning (a bigger jump in skills).  So, how much is a very individual thing.

In the present circumstances, the amount you should do is the amount required to get you to where you want to be for the exams.

There is no rule that more than half an hour is bad, btw, and lots of people practice for much longer.

[Bob]

As much as you can (and more). 

When I was in college it was (laughably) three hours for music ed majors.  Six for performance.  I forget was the generic music degree was. Maybe an hour a day but... yeah.  That's just what they were supposed to say I think.

Strangely, nothing like that came up for studying secondary instruments for music ed.  Those had been crammed into shrinking credit hour classes.  I've heard "in the olden days" music ed students were expected to spend similar time on each of those second instruments. Made sense to me.  Not that there's time though.

[outin]

They say you should not practice more than half hour a day

Who says that? Half an hour is nothing... That's the minimum I do with a full work schedule and it definitely is not enough to keep the music going and learning new things every week...Usually I don't even notice any time passing until I've sat at the piano at least an hour. But I've noticed on the weekends that over 3 hours is too much for my body...