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Piano Practice
What is practicing?
Great Question!
From a practical perspective, my immediate answer is..... repeat your latest piano lesson. This approach will suffice for new students. Play through the technical lessons and pieces that your teacher has provided. For how long? Presumably your lesson is 30 minutes, 45 minutes or 60 minutes. Carefully play through each exercise or piece dividing up your time to match these timeframes. For longer times, practice sessions may be divided across the day. A parent will need to manage the younger students. Please play every day of the week!

Recently, I was somehow (?) watching “Dance Moms”, I know right? Well, something resonated; the main character, Abby Lee Miller the owner and head teacher of the Abby Lee Dance Company INSISTED that parents attend all practice sessions. Abby’s view was that parents, students and the teacher work together as a team. 

As we mature, piano-wise, practice becomes incredibly intricate. More mature concepts should be applied. We will discuss some basics of these in this article. 
Practice times apply as already stated. They may of course be divided into separate sessions on a given day. They may be divided between scales or technical practice, new pieces and repertoire* pieces. [*An accomplished collection of pieces available for performance or for personal enjoyment]

Some tips!
•    Don’t avoid difficult or challenging etudes (studies)
•    If time is an issue, review / revise only the difficult portions of pieces
•    Even without access to a piano you can still practice in your mind or think about note names (where are they on the musical staff?)
•    Practice slowly (I will write separately on this in the future)
•    Make notes after your lesson, sit in the car and do this, parents can help younger students
•    Prepare your music (please see below)
Preparing music for practice!

Let’s take the example of AMEB Series 18, Through the Steppes, by Sergei Bortkiewicz (1877 - 1952) [to avoid copyright issues I have recreated just a couple of bars of this using MuseScore]

I will work to complete this piece in its entirety for future articles.
It is a canon, and yes, we will look at canons in a future article. This is because, Canon’s present fascinating learning opportunities. For the moment though, the following concepts apply to any music or study.
As mentioned already, don’t shy away from difficult passages. Play these slowly and carefully. Separate hands, as necessary. Please do not rush, there are no advantages to rushing through difficult passages of music.
Specifically, in music preparation mark up your pieces with fingering and accidentals. Yes, accidentals. Your teacher should have already guided you with dynamics and rests and much more!

Fingering: the music and teacher will have already guided you regarding the most efficient fingers to use. Normally however, the fingers are only printed once in any given piece. May I suggest that where passages repeat and if not actioned already, copy and mark in the fingers yourself. Hopefully your teacher has marked any other fingers as required. Be motivated to write in any fingers yourself thus allowing practice to commence from any bar in the music. This practice allows you to jump in anywhere on the piece quickly and efficiently to revise passages. Please see the example BAR 8 below where I have written in the appropriate finger.
 

Accidentals: Sometimes in a single bar, an accidental appears more than once. I like to mark this additional sharp or flat to save confusion when practicing. Writing in a sharp # or Flat b symbol saves making unnecessary mistakes and subsequently avoids unnecessary frustration. This provides one less thing to think about, especially if we have many pieces and are mainly reading with little memory of the piece. This action will make practicing more pleasurable. An example of this is below, ustilising the reference piece; Through the Steppes, by Sergei Bortkiewicz . BAR 8 [I will complete the piece in its entirety at some stage so we can discuss the concept of a Canon]

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