Process of Learning of a New Piece

[sdphins]

Hey guys,

I know this sounds like a stupid question, but how should one go about learning a new piece of music. In other words, what are the steps you take when learning a new piece? Also when you get to a technically difficult section of a piece what is your process in tackling the section do you cycle, hands separate, etc.

Thanks in advance,

sdphins

[ranjit]

In general, there is the initial period where you are listening to the music, reading the score and observing markings. Here, you will also make musical decisions and ideally try to work out interpretive decisions from the get go. I think you should try to play hands together as quickly as possible -- reading skills help with this. Hands separate practice can be used for focusing on one hand in order to solidify technique or memory, but shouldn't be your primary way of learning a piece.

For a technically difficult portion of a piece, I personally try to deconstruct the hand movements and put it all back together, but this may be difficult without some experience.

[sdphins]

Thank you so much for the response and the good advice. I'm also wondering how much time you guys devote per day to practicing repertoire versus technique. Or do you believe that music and technique are inseparable and go hand in hand, if so how does one derive the most technical benefit from practicing a particular piece.

[brogers70]

Thank you so much for the response and the good advice. I'm also wondering how much time you guys devote per day to practicing repertoire versus technique. Or do you believe that music and technique are inseparable and go hand in hand, if so how does one derive the most technical benefit from practicing a particular piece.

I'm not sure it's helpful to know what others do. Maybe it is. In any case, for me it's.....

40 minutes scales, arpeggios, chords and inversions, and trills
40 minutes etudes
20 minutes sight reading
100 minutes repertoire that I've already memorized and need to work on the details of
40 minutes new repertoire

I do it as 12 20 minutes sessions with a break for a stretch or tea between sessions when I feel like I need it.

[ranjit]

I do it as 12 20 minutes sessions with a break for a stretch or tea between sessions when I feel like I need it.

Wow, I admire your consistency. I just plop down at the keyboard for 2 hours at a time without any real breaks.

[sdphins]

Haha, it actually was very helpful to see someone's regimen thank you very much! I as well am very impressed by the consistency lol.

[getsiegs]

For me it usually goes listening a lot and having the piece in my ear, then reading through the music and memorizing the notes, once I know the notes I can afford to look away from the score and more effectively drill the trickier sections until the whole thing comes together.

[sdphins]

Awesome thanks for the advice will take it into consideration.

Also I found a collection of all the advice about practicing from Piano Street on Reddit so here it is if anyone would like it: How To Practice
1.   Sight-read the piece slowly to find fingering issues and difficult passages; you should practice the most difficult passages first, so you spend the most time on them.
2.   Analyze the piece to (a) practice applying theory and (b) memorize the piece easier.
3.   Choose a section of the piece to practice. To determine the appropriate size, play hands-separately no more than seven times. If you haven’t memorized it in seven repetitions, choose a smaller section and try again. If it was too easy, choose a bigger section. Include the first few notes of the next section to make joining them easier later.
4.   Practice the chosen section for no longer than twenty minutes:
a.   Practice hands-separately, using a metronome and going slowly enough to avoid making mistakes. If you practice mistakes, you will just get good at making them. Once you can play the section flawlessly five times in a row, increase the tempo and repeat. Continue until you are ten percent above performance tempo.
b.   All "technique" work has been done during hands-separate practice; putting hands together is a matter of coordination. Again, practice slowly, increase the speed after five flawless repetitions, and work until you are ten percent above performance tempo.
c.   Once you can play the section at-speed hands-together, the real work begins. If you stop now, you will have played the section wrong hundreds of times but right only once. Which version do you think your brain will remember? Practice until you can’t get it wrong; or until twenty minutes is up. Work on phrasing, dynamics, and agogics, as long as the section you’re practicing is long enough for this to make sense.
5.   Move on to something else—a different section of the same piece or a different piece altogether—and don’t touch this section again for the rest of the day. The next day, see if you can play the section in a few tries. If you can’t, repeat the procedure without skipping a step. It will take less time than before. Once you can play the piece perfectly within a few tries after not touching it for a day, the section is mastered.
6.   Once two consecutive sections have been mastered, join them together and practice the combination as a new section. There is no need to do hands-separate work this time; you are just trying to smooth out the spot where the two sections have been joined. This is why we added overlaps when choosing the sections in step three!
7.   Repeat the above procedure until the entire piece has been learned.
8.   Once the piece is learned, work on interpretation, articulation issues, dynamics, et cetera. Record yourself and listen for what needs to be improved; maybe compare your recordings to professional recordings that you admire. Play the piece regularly to keep it in your repertoire. Or you can try forgetting it and relearning it from scratch; after doing this a few times you will never forget the piece, even if you haven’t played it in a decade.
Hands-Separate Tips
Slow Motion Practice: It is possible that the motion you are trying to use, while practicing a section at a slow tempo, simply will not work at a higher tempo. The motion only works at a slow tempo, and if you try to slowly ramp up the speed you will eventually hit a wall. It’s like trying to sprint by just walking faster and faster. One way to get around this is to try playing the section at full speed first, to figure out what the necessary motions are like. Then practice those motions at a slow speed, not the motions that are intuitive at a slow speed.
Rhythmic Variations: Take a sequence of notes that are normally played straight and play them swung (long-short), or reverse swung (short-long); or play them in groups of three, groups of four, et cetera; or try accenting different notes in the groups. Thinking about the notes in many variations will solidify them in your mind.
Chord Attack: For very fast groups of notes, play the group as a chord (this is like playing the notes infinitely fast), then figure out how to “come down from infinite speed” by appropriately rotating the hand/arm and using the fingers until you approach your target tempo from above.
Repeated Note Groups: If a section seems dauntingly impossible, try breaking the piece up into ridiculously small pieces and practicing them in every combination. For example, break up a section of notes into seven groups; each group may have three or four notes in it, or maybe even just one note. Call these groups 1 through 7. Practice them in the following combinations: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 23, 34, 45, 56, 67, 123, 234, 345, 456, 567, 1234, 2345, 3456, 4567, 12345, 23456, 34567, 123456, 234567, 1234567. This will take a lot of time (definitely breaking the twenty-minute rule!) but you will definitely have the section memorized after doing this.
Combining the Previous Two Techniques: Consider a fast passage that consists of a bunch of arpeggiated figures. First, determine the points in the passage where the hand position has to switch. Then, for each hand position, play the notes together as chords. Then, memorize the sequence of hand positions (move my hand here, then here, then here…) using the repeated note groups method where each group is one of the hand positions. Once you have memorized the hand positions (as chords) using the repeated note groups method, break the hand positions back up into individual notes using the chord attack method.
Hands-Together Tips
Dropped Notes: Play the right hand of the section at performance speed, but only add in the first note of the left hand. Repeat. Once you can do this, add the second note of the left hand, and so on until you are playing both hands together. Then repeat, starting with the left hand and gradually adding in notes from the right hand.
Counterpoint Tips
For counterpoint, it is beneficial to learn the entire piece hands separate before going on to hands together, and to occasionally play the piece hands separate even after learning it hands together to keep the individual voices fresh in your mind. For pieces with three or more voices, learn the voices individually, then in all combinations of pairs, then all together, always using the final fingering (even if this means splitting the voice between the hands when practicing just a single voice). After learning the piece, occasionally play the piece voices-separately to retain memory of the individual voices.

[lelle]

I'm not exactly a model of efficient learning. But I often start out by sight reading the piece at whatever tempo I can manage to get an overview of what's going on, identify what parts I can play at performance level or near performance level on sight, and what parts are going to need dedicated work. When I tackle parts that need work, I often split them up into smaller sections of a couple of bars that make sense, phrase wise. Sometimes I even work on only one bar or a couple of beats or notes that contain a trouble spot. When I want to be the most efficient I usually work on the piece in parts in this way, with more work on parts that need work, and almost no work on parts I can play on sight until the trouble spots get good enough that I can start playing the whole piece and focus more on chiseling out my interpretation.

[morwenna]

Wow! I'm impressed! I find it very helpful to read your reactions. Will be following this topic. Thanks everyone!

[lelle]

Wow! I'm impressed! I find it very helpful to read your reactions. Will be following this topic. Thanks everyone!

What did you find the most useful about it? Are you learning any particular piece right now?

[lostinidlewonder]

...how should one go about learning a new piece of music. In other words, what are the steps you take when learning a new piece? Also when you get to a technically difficult section of a piece what is your process in tackling the section do you cycle, hands separate, etc.

"Practice method" is different for everyone depending on how they think at the piano and where they currently at in terms of skill level. For example at the higher levels of practice efficiency your method merely requires you to read a piece multiple times and it will automatically become mastered without any focused efforts (you may be able to play a lot of repertoire immediately with mastery at first read). At lower levels of practice you may face a lot of technical problems which cause you to repeat passages multiple times in different ways until it becomes controlled. It is generally a better idea to work with pieces which do not put you in this situation but it can be difficult to avoid at the early levels.

There are so many tools for practice method I find I am at a loss where to start describing it. When I study pieces with my student I am always going through the process of HOW to learn the piece with them and it is so different for each person. It may be of interest to actually take a piece under consideration and question how one might go about learning it since speaking in generalizations can never really reveal the application of knowledge.