How to study difficult pieces (autodidact pianist)

[stargazerdrk]

Hi! 

I'm new in this forum. I've been learning piano at my own for 5-6 years, and now I'm studying Chopin's Revolutionary Etude. I've memorized the entire piece (I'm very bad at reading music), and now I'm starting to speed up the whole piece by sections. The problem is: there are some points in which I think I need a lot of practice (for example, the right hand jumps), but I can't spend the whole session of piano in that, first because I need post-practice improvement, and second because there is a lot of work to do in the rest of the piece! The question is, can I combine working with the problematic bars and keep on studying the rest of the piece? And how?

Thanks!!

[adodd81802]

I'm thinking,

Particularly with the Chopin Etudes, is a lot of it repeats in terms of rhythm and technical difficulty so can you get away with working on sections that repeat to increase your efficiency in the overall piece?

I'm not sure how much the Rev Etude can qualify in my theory, but I know a lot of other Etudes definitely do, take the Butterfly as an example, if you can get a few lines of that fine full speed I would be confident that the rest could more easily be brought up to tempo with regards to the technical ability to perform.

**EDIT**

I just had a quick browse through the score, and it looks like a lot of it is similar, including some parts that actually repeat. I don't think you will have to work as hard at the other bits once you have got the technical down.

I personally think you have probably wrongly memorized the whole piece when it seems you could have gotten away with working hard away at the 1st page and then picked up the 2nd page a lot easier.

Conclusion - I cannot play the piece and I am not a teacher so please feel free to disregard my comment. Ultimately if this piece is within your technical capability I don't think, after you have gotten the difficult passages out the way you will struggle as much as you think you will, or have to work as hard for the similar sections.

I do think you need to consider your efficiencies when learning a piece, I tend to memorize it only as I go, rather than run through the whole piece and then work at it.

I also will listen to the piece I am learning many times to get an idea of the technical difficulties I may encounter and I am often mindful of them.

[lostinidlewonder]

If you are autodidactic you should have a keen sense of what works for you so use your trail and errors, observe then alter your approach. The problem with memorising a work completely but still play with hesitations, inefficiencies etc is that you will need to work against muscular memory which you have already developed that assists you in remembering what is played next and unfortunately often these unwanted issues themselves are used as part of the memory. So take inventory of all the issues you notice and start solving them one at a time, if you feel you need post practice improvement then you should test how many issues you can deal with simultaneously in this fashion.

[brogers70]

I think you can never go wrong by taking one problematic aspect of a piece and focusing on it, without worrying about the rest. Right hand jumps are an important technical issue. How is your arm moving? Are you preparing the position of your fingers for the upcoming chord even as you are lifting off from the previous one? Are you getting the physical sensation of the distance your arm has to travel? Where is there tension that could be released in fingers, hands, forearm, shoulder? If you spend a week making sure you've got that right, even if you completely ignore everything else in the piece, you'll have had a good week. Don't worry about the large number of notes in a piece that you feel you have to learn. Just pick the technical teaching points and focus on them. Once you've got those down, learning all the other notes will be easy.

[stargazerdrk]

Thank you all for the comments, I'm taking them into account. Regarding to the last one, I understand that, even it can take several time, it's important to focus on a problematic section/bar. But, is it good to "spend", let me say, 1 hour practicing a jump, for example? I feel that, even at the slowest tempo, after a few minutes practicing the same jump, I start introducing errors and feeling a kind of insecurity and imprecision, that releases if I play something different for 2 minutes.

Thanks!

[brogers70]

Remember that you are not practicing "a jump" you are practicing how to jump. There are lots of different right hand jumps in that etude. Make sure you've got the technique of long jumps from one chord to another optimized. It's not so much a question of mastering a difficult bar, but of getting comfortable with a technique. I'd say you could work on that for an hour, and then take a break (to let it consolidate a bit), and then work on another technical aspect, say getting the correct arm and wrist movements to do the LH accompaniment figure that goes with the theme. Work on several sections that require similar LH movements aiming for as easy and fluid a motion as possible. Do that for an hour and then take a break. [Actually you could do each of those things for just half an hour, instead of an hour; the important thing is to focus on them for several days or a week continuously].  Don't worry too much about learning all the notes in the piece, once you've mastered the techniques covered in the etude the notes will fall into place easily enough.

[ulven87]

I don't know if you have read any of "Fundamentals of Piano Practice", but if you haven't, it has got methods in there you can try when approaching the learning of pieces in a methodical way. It is not an easy read, but from what I have read, and from glancing through it, it s a very useful book to get sold ideas you can actively use, or possibly modify in making your own method.

https://www.pianopractice.org/FOPP3Ed.pdf

This is a fully free and legal to download pdf from this page:

https://www.pianopractice.org/

Spend some time with that, and try the methodologies it suggests and build an approach, one you can use for any piece.

I have just started playing piano, but have a lot of experience in bass. But, because of the different physical nature of the instruments in that at high speed it appears different methods of movement become necessary on piano compared to playing slowly, all I can say is focus on chunks and be persistent. Good luck, but I think the book will give some perspective and definitely A LOT of advice and tools done from what seems to be a fair amount of research. Might just be what you need. I am certainly going to spend my time digesting it.

[stargazerdrk]

Thanks for all your comments. I'm making subtile progresses with jumping since I wrote the post. I'm definetly going to read this book, as I don't have so much idea of what to do to practice piano. Nonetheless, I think this etude is not of my level, but I'll try to finish it. Some months ago I studied his Fantaisie Impromptu. Well, the result was not the expected, but I could play it "at tempo" quite OK, and I wrongly thought that Revolutionary Etude would be as affordable as the impromptu.  

Thank you!  

###EDIT###

I've just realized that I read this book some years ago (the spanish version), when I started piano, but superficially. I'm going to read it again deeply, because I remember it seemed very teaching and methodical.