Piano Lessons Tulsa | Piano Practice Strategy

This content was created for Curtis Music Academy

The next thing that I want to talk about in this upcoming edition of the Curtis music Academy podcast is something that I actually haven’t talked about in a long while and I’m going to go through this probably for every instrument that we teach. So what I’m going to talk about in this podcast for about 10 minutes is the best practice tips for the piano. And this one is specifically for the piano like I mentioned, but I would like to do one of these for everything that we teach here at Curtis music Academy. So I’m going to do what for what to practice, what you taking vocal lessons when you’re taking drum lessons, when you’re taking guitar lessons. 

 

And like I said with this Whitney is for piano lessons Tulsa, so I’m actually looking at a couple of different articles online. I’ll give you some information on what they talk about, kind of compile and summarize what we hear at Curtis music Academy in piano lessons Tulsa. Think of the top 10 best practice tips to remember a number one, like we’ve talked about a million times before, the best practice tip for any instrument, but specifically the piano. I guess in this case is setting a clear goal. So what you have to do is accurate his music Academy, we’ve set up a structure called the diligent Dewar, and we’ve talked about this at time, but this structure really allows all of our students to be able to set that ultra clear goal. 

 

And what we do is we talk about what do or does differently than a happy hoper. Now a happy hoper is our example of someone who simply hopes to play the piano. In this case, they hope to learn more music. They hope to do all of these things, but they’re not actually doing them. They’re not actively working towards it or doing that. So that’s what we are going to talk about right now is setting a clear goal in piano lessons Tulsa. Now, this clear goal needs to be something tangible and something that you can actually reach. Now, what you would do jury to school is a different story, but you need to set it setting goals.

 

 It really is incredibly important when you’re taking any lesson, but especially piano because it tells you where to going. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s really, really difficult to start. So the next thing I don’t talk about is warming up. Now warming up is incredibly important, but now that kind of people talk about it. So in any instrument that you’re playing, it’s even vocal. It’s really critical. The warmup, for example, in piano, if you don’t warm up properly, you’re going to start playing the keys rapidly and stuff like that. You are going to be in a ton of pain and that’s because you might get something like tendinitis or carpal tunnel and circle points out that you should much rather spend 10 minutes warming up than being in pain for a very long time in piano lessons Tulsa.

 

 So when you warm up your test to just do your scales, it also is really effective at getting your, getting your mind in the right place. So when you’re taking piano lessons Tulsa, that’s really important that you don’t sit down and just start to be incredibly distracted by everything that’s going on. It’s going to be incredibly on effective, if that’s even a word, dis effective, whatever you want to say. It’s going to be really difficult for you to focus and go about doing what you’re supposed to do if you don’t have your mind in the right place. So we want to make sure that we’re warming up to kind of put our mind back into music reading and things like that instead of on the things of the day. So that’s one thing that warming up can do. Now in addition, warming up, it’s also important to set aside and make time for the fundamentals. So it’s really easy to slip into this autopilot mode where you start learning all of the new things that you want to learn. You know, picking up the new songs, doing all the fun stuff, and for getting to go back to the fundamentals and the reasons why you had to take piano lessons Tulsa in the first place. 

 

So it says you’re supposed to take 15 to 20 minutes of your practice time to go about and do things like scales, like, like reminding yourself what the notes are and where they are. You know, doing so we want to focus on a ton is making sure that you’re setting aside time for those fundamentals and the things that we don’t want to learn because skills are really critical to all other parts of music and this is songs and things like that are all based on scale. So if you can remember those scales, it’s going to be really easy to play to solo in the future or something like that. You just think about if you’re building that work from the beginning and just focusing on those fundamentals when you can, it’s going to help you a ton in the long run.

 

 So next thing then I want to talk about the next practice strategy for learning. The piano is taking the time to actually slow down. So one of our instructors, Steven always says that the best practice speed is to practice at the speed of no mistakes. So even if it takes you going really, really slow, you know like 50 60 beats per minute, we want to make sure that you’re doing that. That way you can practice the pace of no mistakes. And this means going as slow as it takes for you to get it right. It’s really easy to go again through all the pilot and speed it up, but if you slow it down and you can play it perfectly, it’s going to be so much easier for you to play perfectly when you go faster, so little by little you should be speeding it back up to the speed that the songs should be played up. 

 

There’s no shame in starting at a level that is really, really slow because when you use things like a metronome, you have to start, you know, it’s so much easier for you to play it at that slower speed. Like I mentioned, it’s one of the most important things that you can do for retaining and holding on to that knowledge that you have and it helps you perfect the work and it’s, you cannot perfect a song when you play it at the max speed that you can.