Practicing for hours

[zoey94]

How do people manage to practice 3-4 or even 5-9 hours a day? I can't seem to barely scratch 2 hours before being drained in many ways. I'm hoping this means that my focus is making up for the less hours and making them count more.

[outin]

How do people manage to practice 3-4 or even 5-9 hours a day? I can't seem to barely scratch 2 hours before being drained in many ways. I'm hoping this means that my focus is making up for the less hours and making them count more.

Wouldn't it depend on what else you have to do during the day? When not working I often practice for 3-4 hours a day. What then limits my practice time is my back defect.

4 hours means several session during the day. Sometimes time just flies when I am absorbed in solving problems in pieces. Other times I need to change focus often to keep my mind fresh. And one has to have enough material (and different kind) to work on.

[zoey94]

Wouldn't it depend on what else you have to do during the day? When not working I often practice for 3-4 hours a day. What then limits my practice time is my back defect.

4 hours means several session during the day. Sometimes time just flies when I am absorbed in solving problems in pieces. Other times I need to change focus often to keep my mind fresh. And one has to have enough material (and different kind) to work on.

Oh I do have time to practice, my mind just melts after about half an hour of practicing so I have to break it up into smaller sessions, but reaching at least 4 hours a day seems so gruelling for me.

Okay so here's a question, if I spent an hour on technique 30 min session on scales and 30 mins on arpeggios in another session, would spending the rest of the sessions on learning things like chopin etudes, say 10/4 and 10/5. Even if it is out of my ability right now but working on it every day, would that be good practicing for daily practice?

[outin]

Oh I do have time to practice, my mind just melts after about half an hour of practicing so I have to break it up into smaller sessions, but reaching at least 4 hours a day seems so gruelling for me.

Okay so here's a question, if I spent an hour on technique 30 min session on scales and 30 mins on arpeggios in another session, would spending the rest of the sessions on learning things like chopin etudes, say 10/4 and 10/5. Even if it is out of my ability right now but working on it every day, would that be good practicing for daily practice?

We are individual and I can only speak about what works for me...

If I tried to spend an hour an technique every day, there's no way I could do many hours because it's so tireing. I do such things only when I have spare time and nothing better to do (=working on actual music).  I don't really need to practice scales so I don't. If I was studying for an exam I would, but even then I would really think about the best and most efficient way to reach the desired goal, not just go through them every day.

On weekends when I have time for more than an hour or so, I usually work on one to three pieces for a session of 1-2 hours. I do this 3-4 times during the day. I may have a session with stuff like scales or finger exercises occasionally, but those drain my concentration so that I can hardly do more than 20 minutes and after that I am too mentally tired to work on anything else.

The reason I can easily keep working for over an hour at the time is that I do one thing only as long as my mind is engaged and then go to something else. Even with one piece I am constantly changing what section or how I practice. I've tried numerous times to make detailed practice plans or schedules but I never keep them. It's best to let my mind quide my practice, because it wants to and will not co-operate if kept in too much control. When I see a problem that should be solved, I need to work on it right now before some other problem takes over. When I am "in the zone" these tasks just keep coming and I don't even notice the time. But if I tell myself "now I will work 10 minutes on x measure and then 10 minutes on y measure" my mind soon gets distracted by something else and results are poor.

I do now use an app to record my practice time just for curiosity. For those times when motivation to go to the piano at all is low, having a vague goal of min. x hours a week sort of acts as an external push. But I rarely know what exactly I am going to do when I sit down, I just pick one of my pieces under work and see what needs work.

In the end if one wants to practice many hours a day the best way is to work on things you really want to or need to learn instead of just doing what you think you should do every day. If you need to learn scales you work on them. But if you need to learn a piece, you work on it. Always having a goal in mind even for one measure: Why am I spending time here? What do I need to improve here? How can I do it? No use spend much time practicing things you already can do imo.

[zoey94]

Great answer Outin, always welcoming your answers to my questions and posts. So this leads me to another question. I have seen many people talk about working on technique and that it should be the first thing you when you sit at the piano and also to warm up. A few people think you should work on your pieces first because your mind is more fresh and focused, and I find that when I've practiced technique for 30 mins to an hour, I need a break. And working on technique is also claimed the way to warm up but there is no warm up because I left the piano for a needed break and by the time I go back to the piano, I need to warm up again. And for me I also find it trye that working on repertoire after practicing technique leaves my mind in a less fresh and less focused state for working on pieces because the technique practice drained me for the day. What do you think?

[outin]

Disclaimer: I am neither a teacher nor an accomplished player. So consider what I write with a critical mind.

I don't feel I need to warm up physically to practice the piano. Maybe it's because of the kind of music I play, or maybe it's just individual. If my mind is up to the task, usually my fingers are as well. And when it comes to mind, it does not get warmed by technical exercises, rather the opposite.

But if you feel you need to warm up, maybe you could try just playing/practicing a familiar faster piece or two first?

In general, if you find what you do is not working as well as you would like, why not just try different ways to approach your practice session to see what might work better for you? Try jumping right into some complicated section and try to solve it andsee how it goes. Maybe do technical exercise only every other day and see if it makes a difference?

[hfmadopter]

When I was studying hard a long time ago now, I had at least 3 pieces of music going on and some study material as well. And I often had a contemporary piece I was doing as well. I would rotate through the pieces and I often found similar problems would hinder me. Say for instance my fourth finger wanted to always land before the fifth ( just saying as an example). I would then go find a cure for that and apply it to each piece. This all takes time, but it's also time at the piano and productive time at the piano. Additionally, maybe memorizing for a recital 5-7 pieces of music and at the same time working up some improv to read during the recital, 5 hours could easily be used up in a day. It just went so fast. Ya, if you have one or two pieces and an exercise to work on, it can get old fast. And in the beginning, the more difficult tasks at the keyboard are definitely brain drain. As time moves on you will find it easy to do 3 hours as you try to fine tune places and trouble spots more so than to just live through playing them.. .

These days I rarely work on other peoples music though.It's mostly my own or improv of someone elses music. As soon as I learn the main melody lines and chords in use ( they all have key signatures so that part is pretty easy unless I haven't worked in that key in a while), then I don't practice with any sheet music in front of me, which I find very liberating. And my own music just comes to me, there are no sheets involved with that either obviously, but they do morph and I add more to them as time goes by. Right now, I've worked up the Christian hymn Doxology and spun that off one particular contemporary arrangers rendition but made it my own by just using some of his general ideas but applying my arrangement to it. It presently goes through my head day and night, as do many of my pieces. I work more on expression than complication. You can make beautiful music that is not complicated music, once you hit a certain level of confidence and technique. And work on that for hours and hours, actually till your ears can't stand it any more. And in the middle of it, new ideas emerge and ultimately many times another new piece of music.

My suggestion, just hang in there and work smart, not just work.

[kalospiano]

there were some weeks in the last year where I would just wake up at 5 or 6 in order to play the piano as much as possible before going to work at 9/10 am. Back from work if I still felt like it I would play some more.

I was not able to keep doing that for very long though, and now that I wake up at 8 I simply sit down at the piano when I'm back from work and I don't wake up until I feel that I can't improve anything else for that day.

Usually dividing the same practice session in several different short activities helps feeling less drained and more motivated. I usually start with studying a section of a new piece, then I maybe do some slow practice for some old repertory, and then maybe some scales/arpeggios/exercises, or simply playing whatever I want. I usually finish repeating very shortly the same section of the new piece that I studied at the beginning.

I might practice between 0 and 3 daily hours during the week, depending on my conditions or on other activities, but during weekend days I might easily get to practice 4 hours or more without even noticing.

[mike_lang]

How do people manage to practice 3-4 or even 5-9 hours a day? I can't seem to barely scratch 2 hours before being drained in many ways. I'm hoping this means that my focus is making up for the less hours and making them count more.

Without having read the other replies, just a few points to respond to this:

1) Some do actually practice this long . . . but they've built up to it.
2) Many have a more expansive definition of practice: woodshedding passages, analysis, listening, run-throughs, reflection, etc. With this in mind, it becomes much more conceivable to spend this amount of time.
3) Also depends on how much repertoire there is to get through and what the deadline is. A teacher of mine had to learn Rach 3 in a weekend . . . he spent 10 hours each day. Had he had a normal amount of time to practice, he may have spent a couple hours each day over several months learning it. If you're a student with six pieces to learn over a year, a couple hours a day will do it; if you've got six pieces to learn for a recital next week, you'll have plenty to do in seven-eight hours.
4) One more time: variety. Nine hours is not 540 straight minutes of repeating passages. It's imagining, it's reflecting, it's analyzing, it's re-creating, it's listening . . . in which case, even nine hours (!!) can go by relatively quickly.

[outin]

If it's what you study or work on full time it's not necessarily so different  to any other creative work... No-one asks how people can work for 8 hours a day. When engaged in clearly defined tasks that are suitably interesting and challenging, time does go fast and you only need short breaks to go on. But if you are just doing what you are told without much interest, the days can feel really long...

[mike_lang]

engaged in clearly defined tasks

And there's the key!

[outin]

And there's the key!

I guess so. That is why I am skeptic about  doing vague things like "practice scales and arpeggios" for a determined time. What exactly is it that I am practicing? After I have determined that I have no objection to spending time with it.

[mike_lang]

I guess so. That is why I am skeptic about  doing vague things like "practice scales and arpeggios" for a determined time. What exactly is it that I am practicing? After I have determined that I have no objection to spending time with it.

In that case, presumably fluency, evenness, speed, balance, facility . . . but once those are achieved (or sufficiently improved for the day), no need to linger . . . time to move on to rep.

[hfmadopter]

I guess so. That is why I am skeptic about  doing vague things like "practice scales and arpeggios" for a determined time. What exactly is it that I am practicing? After I have determined that I have no objection to spending time with it.

I can only speak for myself on this outin. In my case it helps me get reacquainted between key signatures that various pieces are written in. Most recently, for instance, I'm working in B major after a long stay with a couple of other keys ( it's a piece I downloaded Sunday), the scales and chords help me to get my hands on the new key and then I do less fumbling within the piece. My hands want to leave out G sharp right now, within the piece ! So I know G sharp is my weakness in this piece of music and I work on that accordingly separate from the piece in scales and chords.. And I don't have to run the whole keyboard in scale fashion to address this (I'm not further damaging the piece by repeating the mistake either) maybe just an octave worth, straight up and inverted. In short I have to get this key signature in my hands but I want to do that outside the actual composition.. It works for me and in fact often that is how I wind up with a new piece of music of my own LOL !

[outin]

It was more of a rhetoric question meant as an example. Whatever you practice to make it meaningful you should practice towards a goal. Not everyone does that and that may partly be because they have been told to practice something for xx minutes a day...

[dogperson]

It was more of a rhetoric question meant as an example. Whatever you practice to make it meaningful you should practice towards a goal. Not everyone does that and that may partly be because they have been told to practice something for xx minutes a day...

This was exactly the instructions I was given as a child-student:   practice these measures, XXX times, or XXX amount; practice these scales in this way ---  but no explanation of what to pay attention to, or how to practice them.   Mindless scale practice might as well be knitting in terms of usefulness

[outin]

This was exactly the instructions I was given as a child-student:   practice these measures, XXX times, or XXX amount; practice these scales in this way ---  but no explanation of what to pay attention to, or how to practice them.   Mindless scale practice might as well be knitting in terms of usefulness

I'd say knitting is much more useful...to get some warm clothes
And it's good practice for wrists.

[mishamalchik]

I play about 2-4 hours on weekdays and 4-6 hours on weekends, with the exception of Mondays which get exactly 2 hours because of my school schedule.

I think there are some keys to practicing for extensive periods. For me it helps to:

1. Never go into a practice session with the goal of practicing for x hours but rather with specific goals for progress in your music. Tbh, it's very possible for a 2-hour practice session to be more effective than 6 hours, it's all about how you budget that time.
2. I usually switch up what I'm working on every 15-20 minutes, unless something has really gotten under my skin.
3. It also helps to understand that playing time doesn't equal practice time. Sometimes it's nice to just sit down and play through things, which can break up the monotony of tedious sections.
4. breaks are essential. I take a few minutes every hour to stretch, drink some water and refresh myself.

To be honest, if you can meet your goals with less practice time then there's really no need to demand more time of yourself. If your goals are particularly lofty or you're not satisfied with the progress you are making, then try mixing up your routine, taking breaks, and asking your teacher for practicing advice

[mike_lang]

I play about 2-4 hours on weekdays and 4-6 hours on weekends, with the exception of Mondays which get exactly 2 hours because of my school schedule.

I think there are some keys to practicing for extensive periods. For me it helps to:

1. Never go into a practice session with the goal of practicing for x hours but rather with specific goals for progress in your music. Tbh, it's very possible for a 2-hour practice session to be more effective than 6 hours, it's all about how you budget that time.
2. I usually switch up what I'm working on every 15-20 minutes, unless something has really gotten under my skin.
3. It also helps to understand that playing time doesn't equal practice time. Sometimes it's nice to just sit down and play through things, which can break up the monotony of tedious sections.
4. breaks are essential. I take a few minutes every hour to stretch, drink some water and refresh myself.

To be honest, if you can meet your goals with less practice time then there's really no need to demand more time of yourself. If your goals are particularly lofty or you're not satisfied with the progress you are making, then try mixing up your routine, taking breaks, and asking your teacher for practicing advice

Well said!

[bernadette60614]

Not a teacher or a professional, but I think some of it may have to do with when you begin your studies.

My piano teacher (who also performs professionally) routinely practices 5 hours a day and would ideally like to practice 7 hours a day.  She began studying piano at age 4, attended a high school music conservatory and continued onto advance study in college, now studies with a concert performer.  I'm speculating she built up a level of stamina over time.

Now, this is her career.

I spend 5 to 10 hours a day on my career..and I think she would find it impossible to imagine that someone could spend 5 to 10 hours a day doing what I do.  I know that not all of those hours are "peak" hours..some of them are prep time, some of them are concentrated work, some of those are "work", but they are more low focus.  I'm going to speculate that someone who practice 5 to 9 hours has a similar rhythm to their schedule.