How many hours do you practice for a one piece? (to get to recital level play)

[pascalxus]

I know most people will practice multiple songs and excercise per day.


But, Has anyone ever logged the number of hours they practice, just on one piece until it gets to performance level speed / quality.  Could you list the number of hours you practiced just for that piece, the piece and speed at which you played it?  Especially for some things like a Bach invention or a mozart sonata like KV 545?

[brogers70]

I'm not trying to be obnoxious, but how will knowing this help? It takes as long as it takes, and as long as it takes depends entirely on the individual. It's taken me about a year of working on Beethoven Opus 2 #1, working on it 30-45 minutes/day, to get it up to tempo, memorized and reasonably solid. Some people would manage in a few weeks, others might work for years and never feel comfortable (e.g. people who try it as a "reach" piece long before they are ready). It is all so variable based on each individual's level that I don't see how sampling a few respondents will tell you anything useful.

[pascalxus]

>>  but how will knowing this help?

The reason I ask: I'm trying to get a feel for the typical progression speed.  I feel that my rate of progress is really slow.  For instance, it took me 10 hours of practice on KV 545 just to go from 50 BPM to 70 bpm.  At this rate, it's gonna take me 40 hours just on one 4 page piece, to get to the performance play speed / quality.  It would be great to know if my experience is typical or unusually slow.  if it's unusually slow, I may lack talent, in which case, I'll refocus my piano practice on easier pieces.

[ranjit]

"Performance standard" is difficult to measure, at least for me as a student. Whenever I think I've got something to performance standard, my teacher points out a million things which make me realise I'm nowhere close.

Let's say, to play K545 on a public piano, from memory at tempo without stopping, probably about 1 week or around 10 hours. A Bach invention might take 2-3 weeks or upto 30 hours.

This is not to play it to concert standard though -- I still can't play anything at that standard.

There's no point measuring yourself in this manner, because ease of learning and speed of learning can increase significantly with experience. Nothing in the pieces you mention poses a problem for me speed-wise, for example.

[lostinidlewonder]

If you are a professional performer it is quite important to know how long something will take. One should get better at knowing how long something will take to learn if they have deadlines to meet and/or are interested in efficiency of their learning. Complete mastery of some works often will take many years of knowing a piece but it shouldn't be too difficult to estimate how long it takes to play something at a good standard.

However my answers for myself or anyone elses personal for themselves really doesn't help you know more about yourself.

[brogers70]

>>  but how will knowing this help?

The reason I ask: I'm trying to get a feel for the typical progression speed.  I feel that my rate of progress is really slow.  For instance, it took me 10 hours of practice on KV 545 just to go from 50 BPM to 70 bpm.  At this rate, it's gonna take me 40 hours just on one 4 page piece, to get to the performance play speed / quality.  It would be great to know if my experience is typical or unusually slow.  if it's unusually slow, I may lack talent, in which case, I'll refocus my piano practice on easier pieces.

A suggestion I've heard is that you should work mostly on pieces that take you a month or two to feel like they are at your own performance standard, but that you can also be working on some larger or more difficult pieces that will take you 6-12 months to get to that standard. It's really hard to know if your experience is typical or really slow - it depends on how long you've been playing, how good your teacher is, what your goals are. Talent really isn't the issue.

[frodo3]

For instance, it took me 10 hours of practice on KV 545 just to go from 50 BPM to 70 bpm.  At this rate, it's gonna take me 40 hours just on one 4 page piece, to get to the performance play speed / quality.  It would be great to know if my experience is typical or unusually slow. 

Brogers70's suggestion sounds great to me:
"A suggestion I've heard is that you should work mostly on pieces that take you a month or two to feel like they are at your own performance standard, but that you can also be working on some larger or more difficult pieces that will take you 6-12 months to get to that standard."

Your taking 40 hours to get K545 1st mvt to your desired performance play speed / quality is very much in line with his suggestion.  Assuming you practice 10 hours a week on that piece, it will take 4 weeks. 

To be in line with brogers70's standard, you do not need to know how long it takes someone else to learn a piece or how talented you are. It's great that you are able to estimate that 40 hours will get you to your desired level of performance for this piece. I would complete your 40 hours on this piece and see where it stands at that point.  Good luck. 

[frodo3]

I know most people will practice multiple songs and excercise per day.

I just reread the original post.  The following is just an illustration showing the math.

Example, you practice 20 hours per week total:
20 hours per week - total practice time
-6 hours per week - on exercises
=14 hours per week - on pieces

Say you are learning 4 pieces at 1 time , this leaves an average of 14/4 = 3.5 hours per piece a week or 30 minutes a day on each piece.  I would not suggest learning any more than 4 pieces at a time unless some are easier pieces for you.  In the case of working on 4 challenging pieces at the same time, I think you can bend brogers70's rules a little and learn these 4 pieces over 3 months instead of 2.

3 months = 13 weeks.
13 week times 3.5 hours/week = 45 hours for K545 Mvt 1 - which is more than your 40 estimated hours.

So you should be fine with the K545 movement 1 if you can practice 30 minutes a day on this piece. Of course, you can put it on the 6-12 month schedule per brogers70's schedule, but this probably is not needed for this piece since you say you can learn it in 40 hours total.

Sorry for all the math!

[roncesvalles]

I don't think learning is always so linear.  Often there are technical hurdles in learning a new piece that can make progress slow, and these hurdles are often the sort where you can play something at a moderate tempo but things break down when you try to play a piece at its designated tempo.  So it feels like you're making only tiny progress, but once those hurdles are surpassed learning can accelerate.

I'm an adult learner, and at times my schedule has been such that I haven't been able to have a teacher.  Having a teacher is the most helpful thing when you're learning a difficult piece.  K545 was my first sonata, and, like you I could play it slowly, but playing the first movement allegro gave me all sorts of issues.  What I did was put it on the backburner and learned more attainable pieces, while practicing the parts I had problems with on a daily basis.  It's really a cornucopia of intermediate technique, with trills, cantabile playing, scales, passagework, tremoli, and arpeggios, so there can be a lot to work on.

The most frustrating part to me were the scales in the piece, because they have to be fluid and smooth, and subtle dynamics really transforms them from sounding mechanical to sounding beautiful.  I'd thought my scales were ok, but they weren't.   What was the most help for me was rhythm practice.  At first do one rhythms, which is a long note followed by a short note or vice versa.  Then do two rhythms, which is a long followed by two shorts, or two shorts followed by a long.  What helped the most for these passages were 5-rhythms with four short notes followed by a long note.  So if you're having issues with the scales near the beginning play the following:

ABCDE (fingered 12312) fast, holding the E a moment
then FGAGF (34543) fast, holding the second F a moment
then EDCBA (21432) fast, holding the A a moment
it just falls where it should, so then you can do the same thing starting on G, do that, do F, E, and get down to the D.
I practice it with a slightly detached nonlegato.  With this kind of practice you can also hear where you might be uneven.  Start a little slow but work up to tempo.   When I first started this method I had two issues.  The first was unevenness in thumb crossings especially on the descent, so I had to slow down and focus on dynamics, and bring it back up.  The second is fingers 345 which have the top notes of the figures.  They are very interconnected fingers and weaker, so it took a bit of practice to get them fluid.  Once I could do the 5-rhythm fast I knew I could actually play the passage at tempo (and beyond), and it mostly becomes an issue of putting it all together, i.e. getting rid of the long notes in the 5-rhythm.

[pontiman]

I know this doesn't answer your question directly, but one thing I have found helpful is to have 2-5 pieces that I am working on at the same time, often putting one "to bed" for several weeks/months if I hit a wall, and then picking it up again.   For example I may take a piece and work through the fingering and phrasing and practice several sections over the course of a week or so, but then put it aside if another piece I am working on is going better.  When I pick up the piece I put aside it is much easier than starting from zero.  Obviously once you can reasonably get through a piece, if you are readying it for a performance,  then you focus on just that piece.  The point here is sometimes you devote hours to a piece and it's just not for you (right now) so move on and perhaps pick it up later.

[truecam]

If you are a beggininer-intermediate then in my opinion if you take longer than 5-6 months to learn a piece then you would probably benefit more from playing something easier. At the higher levels though pieces typically contain way more depth and so can constantly be improved so I don't think it really matters as long as you are having fun.

[bwl_13]

I don't exactly know a specific amount of time, there's always more to be done and returning to pieces after a few months you'll notice some musicality that developed even though you haven't been working on it actively. I just noticed this with my Scherzo, which I've been working on and off for about a year. I just took maybe 1-2 hours to get it in my fingers (not as much as I wanted) and had a surprise lesson yesterday on it where I discovered it sounded way better than the last time I played it for my teacher maybe 2 months ago. The memory was a little spotty in some sections rhythmically and there were definitely some slips, but the musicality was much stronger. It felt like this piece wasn't improving no matter how many hours I put into it, but weirdly the break from it really brought some things together. It was so drastic my teacher didn't notice the slips or the slight deviations from the written rhythm because the other aspects were more convincing.

However, I realize this is a little different when you're still trying to get things up to tempo and learn the notes etc. I think it changes person to person and it changes how much you practice in general and how good you are at practicing, but I'd hope a student of mine could get the K545 up to a reasonable tempo in maybe 1 month or 2, even with some unsureness.

I learned, memorized and got to tempo my Rachmaninoff in about a month, but getting it clean and musical has taken me a lot longer. I'm performing it next Thursday so we'll see how ready it is by then, but it's weird how this changes based on the piece and your connection to it.

As a general rule, I like to have a piece I'm performing at an acceptable performance level in the practice room a month or so before a performance. Funnily enough, it's in that last month that I notice way more things that need to be worked on and I have yet to have gotten to perform a piece with little to no flaws before the performance.

Finally, I'll touch on your 40 hour mark. This adds up with the timeline I outlined in my original addressing of the K545. If you're practicing 30-45 minutes on this piece daily for a month you'd get to about 40 hours, and that's a reasonable rate for someone at your level in my opinion. Your teacher can help you with measuring this as well, since they know your playing and what level the piece is at.

[tripwall]

There's always a challenge to tackling a new piece, but as a general rule of thumb, if more than a couple of weeks passes and your progress seems to be grindingly slow, that's usually a sign you're playing something too high above your skill level. If you're in the right spot so to speak, the integration of new material into your own repertoire bank should just sort of flow.

[lelle]

There's always a challenge to tackling a new piece, but as a general rule of thumb, if more than a couple of weeks passes and your progress seems to be grindingly slow, that's usually a sign you're playing something too high above your skill level. If you're in the right spot so to speak, the integration of new material into your own repertoire bank should just sort of flow.

That's a good point. I spent a couple of years trying to master a few pieces that were too hard for me at one point then I switched to pieces of a more appropriate level and was quite surprised to see I had basically "learned" a rough version in a couple of weeks. How long do you feel the total process from starting to integrating into your repertoire should take?

[pianistavt]

That's a good point. I spent a couple of years trying to master a few pieces that were too hard for me at one point then I switched to pieces of a more appropriate level and was quite surprised to see I had basically "learned" a rough version in a couple of weeks. How long do you feel the total process from starting to integrating into your repertoire should take?

This is a great thread, some insightful observations...

As someone said, learning is not linear - it can't be calculated as the author was trying to do.  One reason being, the subconscious mind works on "learning" in the background.  Hopefully we've all experienced this.

I'm not in a place where I care how long a piece takes - I play/practice for the enjoyment of it.  I understand that those who are planning for a recital 3 months from now need to gauge if they will get there, but if you're 22+ and playing for 6+ years, you should have a feel for this, right?  If not, your teacher should be able to help..
 
I take a long time to bring a piece to "performance level".  I see that in comparison to my peers, my standards are higher, that's one reason, another is that I work on a large number of pieces at anyone time - I'm spread thin, but this is my personal choice.  And maybe I'm a slow learner - I'm okay with that.

In assessing a piece's difficulty, many think in terms of technical demand only.  And there are others, perhaps more seasoned players, who are more focused on bringing a piece to a high musical polish (though I rarely see this discussed in this forum).  Overall, there are 3 difficulty challenges:  learning, technical demand, musical demand.  In gauging how long something will take, all 3 should be considered.

What works for me is to be working on pieces on a variety of levels, i.e. a variety of timelines.
1) difficult new works that I want to explore and have no intention of ever performing (Stravinksy - The Shrovetide fair)
2) difficult new works that I intend to perform and may take a year+  (Prokofiev sonata 5)
3) difficult works that I worked on years ago that I can bring to performance level in less time
4) less difficult works
5) easy works

Though I'm an "advanced" pianist, I've recently decided to play some easy pieces - just for the enjoyment of getting something completed quickly.  For example, Bartok's Sonatina.  Really delightful piece.  No technical challenges for me, but I'm sure I'll spend lots of time on the perfecting the tone, balance and musical lines.

[liszt-and-the-galops]

I know most people will practice multiple songs and excercise per day.
But, Has anyone ever logged the number of hours they practice, just on one piece until it gets to performance level speed / quality.

I usually practice 1 hour/day except on weekends, where I practice 1.5 hours/day. In terms of getting pieces to "performance standard," I don't think there's a very specific definition for that. What I consider "performance standard" is basically "it sounds good to me, I have most/all of it memorized, and it's at/almost at tempo." Others may consider it to be "It sounds perfect to me, I know the entire song like the back of my hand, and I can play it at ~125% tempo." For me, it varies from 1 month to 6, though others will almost certainly have VERY different answers.