How to get better at piano

Hands separately, for longer than you want to

Piano asks each hand to do something independent, and the difficulty of a passage is often entirely in one of them. Practicing hands together means the easy hand gets the same attention as the hard one.

Work the difficult hand alone until it is genuinely automatic. Most people stop hands-separate practice as soon as the notes are learned, which is well before the movement is reliable. Automatic means you can play it while thinking about something else.

Then hands together, slower than either hand alone

Combining two automatic parts is a third skill, not the sum of the first two. Expect to drop the tempo substantially when you first put them together, and do not treat that as a setback.

Work in sections of two to four bars

A section should be short enough that you can repeat it many times in a few minutes. Repetitions are what change anything, and long sections produce very few of them per session.

This is also how memorisation actually happens. A piece memorised in small overlapping sections is far more robust under pressure than one memorised as a single continuous run, which tends to fail completely at the first slip.

Slow enough to be accurate, every time

The tempo to practice at is the fastest one where you play accurately with no hesitation, three times in a row. If you are making mistakes, it is too fast.

Raise it about ten percent when you have earned it, and drop back when a step fails. The reasoning behind those numbers is in how to practice slowly and speed up.

Practice the joins between sections

Sections learned separately create weak points at their boundaries. You can play section A and section B and stumble in the gap.

Fix it explicitly: practice the last beat of one section into the first beat of the next, and nothing else. It is a small drill that removes a problem which otherwise persists indefinitely.

Fingering is a decision, not a detail

A passage that keeps failing is often a fingering problem rather than a difficulty problem. Once a fingering is in your hands it is expensive to change, so decide it early and write it down.

Test candidate fingerings slowly. The one that feels easiest at slow tempo is almost always the one that holds up at speed.

Learning from a recording

If you are working from a video rather than a score, the same principles apply and the practical problem is different: you need to hear one passage repeatedly, slowly enough to see what the hands are doing.

PhraseLoop lets you mark the section and loop it at reduced speed with the pitch unchanged, so you can watch and listen to the same four bars as many times as you need without rewinding.

Short daily sessions

Thirty minutes a day beats a long weekly session by a wide margin. Difficult passages improve noticeably between days, which only helps if there are days between your sessions.

When accuracy starts dropping within a session, stop working on that passage. Continuing past that point practices the tired version of it.