How to practise a new piano piece (a method that works)
Most people practise a new piece the same way: start at the top, play until something goes wrong, stop, start at the top again. The first page gets very good, the last page never does, and the mistakes in the middle get practised as often as the right notes. It feels like work, but it's slow progress.
The method below is what piano teachers have recommended in one form or another for a very long time. None of it is a secret. The hard part is doing it consistently, and that's where an app that tracks every bar can help.
1. Listen before you play
Know how the piece should sound before your hands touch it. Listen to it two or three times, ideally while following the notes. You'll pick up the tempo, the shape of the phrases, which parts repeat, and where the difficult passages are. On every piece page on this site the player shows the notes falling onto a keyboard as they sound, which is a good way to see the shape of the music before you learn it.
While you listen, notice repetition. Many pieces are built from a few ideas that come back: a minuet's first eight bars are often repeated, a rondo's theme returns several times. If bars 17–24 are the same as bars 1–8, you have less to learn than it looks.
2. Split it into sections
Divide the piece into chunks of four to eight bars, ideally along the phrases you heard. Each chunk is a separate small task. You'll learn them one or two at a time, and you'll start each practice session wherever there's work to do, not always at bar 1.
A good habit: learn the hardest section first, while you're fresh, rather than leaving it for the end of the session.
3. Hands separately
Learn each hand on its own before putting them together. It sounds slow, but it's faster overall, because each hand's notes and fingering get settled without the extra load of coordination.
Start with the hand that has the melody (usually the right), then the other. Playing one hand while hearing the other is even better: in PianoKite, choose Right or Left and the app plays the other hand, dimmed, so you always hear the full music and learn how your part fits.
4. Notes first: use Wait mode
For the first runs, take tempo out of the equation. In Wait mode the music stops at each note until you play it, so you can find every key without guessing. If you hesitate, the key lights up with its name. Two or three runs per hand per section is usually enough to know the notes.
Settle the fingering at this stage, too. If the score you're reading suggests fingers, use them; if not, pick the fingering that lets your hand move least, try it a couple of times, and then keep it. Changing fingering after you've practised a passage twenty times is like relearning it.
5. Hands together, slowly
Now put the hands together, one section at a time, still in Wait mode or at a very slow tempo. Expect it to feel clumsy: coordinating two hands is a separate skill from playing either one. Look for the moments where the hands play together (they're your anchors) and the places where one hand moves while the other holds.
6. Add the rhythm at a slow tempo
Once the notes are reliable, practise in time but slowly. Play along at 50% speed with the count-in. The tempo should be slow enough that you can play the section correctly almost every time. If you're making mistakes at 50%, the notes aren't learned yet: go back to Wait mode for that section.
Count while you play, out loud if you can. It feels silly and it works.
7. Loop the hard bars, not the whole piece
Within a few runs you'll know which bars are the problem. Practise those, in a loop, a few bars at a time, starting a bar before the difficult spot and ending a bar after it so you also learn how to get in and out of it.
This is where per-bar feedback earns its keep. After each run PianoKite shows every bar's score and a review of what went wrong (missed or wrong notes, rhythm, steadiness, hands not together), so you don't have to guess which bars need work. A practice loop repeats a passage until you've played it cleanly a few times in a row, then moves you up a speed.
8. Raise the tempo in steps
Go from 50% to 75% to full speed, and only move up when the current speed is clean. Each step will feel hard for a few runs and then settle. If a speed stays messy, drop back a step for a day.
Not every piece needs to reach full speed straight away. A piece that's clean at 75% is a better result than one that's messy at 100%, and you can come back to it.
9. Practise little and often
Ten or fifteen focused minutes a day beats an hour once a week. Much of the consolidation of a motor skill happens between sessions, so frequent, short practice gives your memory more chances to settle what you learned. A useful shape for a session:
- Two minutes of warm-up: something easy you already know.
- The hardest section of your new piece, slowly.
- One or two other sections that need work.
- A run-through of everything you've learned so far.
- Finish with something you enjoy playing.
10. Know when to move on
When a piece is mostly learned but the last few percent won't come, put it aside and start something new. Come back in a couple of weeks; it will often be easier than you left it. If the piece comes in several versions, learning the easier one completely is a fine reason to move on to the next harder version, rather than polishing forever.
Common mistakes
- Always starting from the top. The beginning gets over-practised and the ending never gets learned. Start where the work is.
- Practising mistakes. If you play a passage wrong ten times and right twice, you've practised the wrong version more. Slow down until it's right.
- Speeding up too soon. Fast and messy feels like progress but isn't. Speed comes from accuracy, not the other way around.
- Ignoring the left hand. It's usually the weaker one. Give it its own practice time, especially in pieces like Schumann's The Happy Farmer, Op. 68 No. 10 where it carries the melody.
- Picking pieces far above your level. One step up is motivating; three steps up is frustrating. Use the levels as a guide, and look for a piece's easier version first.
Try it on a short piece
The method is easiest to get used to on something short. Good candidates: Minuet in G major (short, with clear sections), Melody, Op. 68 No. 1 or Candor (La Candeur), Op. 100 No. 1. For more ideas, see the best easy classical pieces for beginners. If you can't read music yet, the beginner lessons teach it one short step at a time.