How To Learn Piano as Fast as Humanly Possible

This is a quick overview of how I think practice works, and what this tells us about how to structure our practice so that we improve as quickly as possible.

0:00 Intro
0:42 How to Make Muscle Memory
4:00 Prioritise Accuracy Over Speed
4:42 Don't Gamble
5:19 Fix Every Mistake Immediately
6:20 The Power Of Sleep
6:47 Practice Every Day
7:24 Review, Review, Review!
8:05 The Goldilocks Zone
10:09 Staying in the Goldilocks Zone

[petiks]

I think you chose speed over accuracy when typing the text in 4:01

[Accuratetranslationservices]

It’s weird how the brain takes time to “download” a song. What I mean is, I will play piano for a couple hours practicing something hard and I still will not be able to play it at the end of the 2 hrs. Then, I will go do something else, go to bed, live my life, and come back to the piano 24-48 hours later, and sit down and be able to play it right away. It is wild. Like my brain was installing software.

[tratixmusic]

One thing to point out is while it's good to get into the habit of fixing mistakes when practicing, it's not good to have that habit when performing. So another skill that you should learn is how to continue on despite a mistake you made so it doesn't draw attention to it

[ADR]

So practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice does.

[henrikduende]

You need to talk about why if you play it perfect 9 times and wrong 1, your brain will memorise that one misstake and erase the 9 times that was right. WHY?!?!?!

[teleporter]

Thanks for helping me understand, Jesse Pinkman.

[cryptic]

I love how you can apply these tips with whatever else you’re learning and they work just as well. It’s overall good advice

[Fantasticleman]

I love your advice for practicing 5 minutes everyday! It makes a lot of sense because the hardest part is getting yourself to sit down and do it!

[mrmustard]

My jaw dropped when you started explaining this and realise I'd never thought of it... applicable to all instruments as well

[tehedx]

Good points!
One thing that helps me, is to reverse the order. It seems obvious to start with the first chunk (4 bars or something) and gradually add new chunks to the end once the previous chunks are written in the brain.
I like to do this in reverse: start with the last chunk of the piece and add new chunks to the beginning.
The idea behind this is that whatever is new is by far harder than what you already know. When doing it forward, I first spend energy playing the known part and _then_ come to the new part that requires more energy. By then I found out I forgot (again). Have to go over it and do it again.
Easier to put that difficult new chunk first. And _then_ play what you already know, which is rewarding as well.
Anyway, every brain is different. It might work for you :)

[Crikeyz]

I noticed that just practicing for 15-25 minutes then imagining your finger placement throughout the piece for 5 minutes when taking a break is a really good way of removing errors from muscle memory and improving your speed and accuracy

(I’ve only been playing for around a year but the progress I’m able to make while doing it is twice as much as me practicing normally)
Also don’t practice when you’re burnt out if you do you’ll end up worsening your muscle memory or you’ll play for an hour but practice for 5 minutes. You don’t really need to practice hours soon hours a day just try to practice in the morning every day to build a routine

[richarpadilla]

I've see that you are not only a good jazz piano teacher, you are a good piano teacher in all aspects !

[dequentinmiller]

I literally stop playing the piano for 1.5 years and I sat down the other day and realized I knew just about everything that I knew 1.5 years ago still. 😅 This is really blowing my mind. This phenomenon has encouraged me to never stop piano again. Music really is like learning a new language.

[sophiebi]

I've always thought of piano practice as a journey of seeking something internally - we have to overcome our ego and be absolutely honest with where we are. I've made my fair share of mistakes of playing something faster than I could and therefore reinforcing the mistakes.

[zestylemn]

When I used to do piano more seriously, I would play a song starting at a slow speed (80 bpm I think), and increase it 1 or 2 bpm each time, until I was at 110 or 120. If I made too many mistakes, I'd go back down to 90 or 100 and sharpen things up. Stuff like that is how you can spend 2-3 hours on just one song each day.

[NelsonGuedes]

Refreshing to see something more than just "how to learn the names of the notes" on YouTube!

[TimMurko]

Thanks for the reminder of these 'secrets'! Perfect timing as I embark on my self-taught journey back into piano after a 20-year hiatus. Documenting the progress on my channel, and I welcome anyone to join the adventure. Kudos for this insightful video! 🎹✨

[andersjjensen]

As a novice guitar player this was immensely helpful. Can't wait to see how much of your "goldilocks zone tuning method" I can translate to the guitar.

[johnsmith]

Doing something wrong doesn't necessarily create muscle memory, it's about neurochemistry, if you know you are doing something wrong, your brain won't reward you for it and you won't have that action reinforced (and you'll get bad feels like frustration).

When learning something like tennis, you might only correctly serve 1 / 10 serves at the beginning but you won't learn to serve worse and worse until your the worst tennis player in the world. No instead, because you know you're serving incorrectly, you don't reinforce bad muscle memory, the 1 / 10 times you get it right though, your brain will reward you (and you get good feels yay!) and you will gain muscle memory and be able to do it a little bit more correctly from then on.

It's really more about being conscious of your mistakes and making a purposeful effort to correct them. Just as if you gaslighted a tennis player to think they were serving correctly when they weren't they would learn the wrong technique.

[cimbrito]

Never thought that muscle memory can work against me, in building wrong pathways, but it makes total sense. Thank you for this video.