The Secret to Effective Piano Practice (60min Guide)

How about you? How does your practice session look like?

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🕘 Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:34 Jazer's Guideline
0:45 Time to Warm-Up
1:50 Sheet Music Reading
4:12 Slow and Deep Practice
5:40 Have some FUN

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[ElectroHouseProducer]

What an awesome teacher 😫 . He never disappoints. This channel alone is enough for me alongside my piano learning process. Always short, clean and at the point videos. Thank you as always

[chelo]

I am doing 90 to 120 minutes every day. I am in the beginner/ intermediate level, almost two years since I started learning. I am doing the first hour purely practicing pieces that I am learning, all six of them. then 30 or more minutes of technical and that interferes with the dynamics that I am seeing in my new pieces. Thank you Jazer for your help, it is much appreciated.

[abzulooks]

Agree with your point about not spending too long on one piece, I find half an hour is about my limit unless I'm really looking at different tasks (eg memorisation vs looking at detailed sections).

One thing I used to do (and it's a habit I need to re-establish) is working backwards from the end of a piece. This works once you've played things through enough to roughly know where your fingers should go. With each hand: play the last two bars of the piece. Go back a bar and play those two (ie third and second last bars), and go backwards through the piece, a bar at a time, playing two bar chunks. Repeat with both hands together. This is also a really great way to help memorise the piece (once you've played each two bar chunk and it's solid, repeat without looking at the music). Then go back to "sensible chunks" (8 or 16 bars) making sure each section really works before putting everything.

If I'm really disciplined (usually I'm slack) I have each hand memorised before I put them together. (Note: once memorised, I don't keep playing from memory, I put the music back, but it's nice to know it's there).

This helps stop the problem where you learn a piece from the beginning and if anything slightly goes wrong you fall apart because you're relying on muscle memory. It's also very useful if you're taking lessons because it means your teacher can ask you to play from anywhere in the music.

Note assumes usual mix of crotchets, quavers and semiquavers at ~100bpm.

[darrylbrooks]

67 year old beginner guitarist (3 years now) and I'm binge watching your practice method videos. Great stuff that's applicable to any instrument. Thanks

[PJ-nhdc]

I’m self taught on and off for three years and don’t have any formal practice, but I try and practice at least 15 minutes a day. I usually start with a warm up, then go into some technique for 10 minutes. After that I do sight reading and end my session with some fun, maybe try and play something by ear. I usually find myself practicing longer than 15 minutes when I sit down just because the piano can so fun

[elissahunt]

My practice is usually in two sessions. The first session is focused on scales, chords, and technical exercises. I actually enjoy doing these "boring" technique things. My second session is focused on reading and working on my pieces.

Reading music (at least, treble clef) is super easy for me since I've been playing clarinet and sax for decades. But feeling where the keys are on the piano is hard, so I really like to work on playing without looking. Fortunately, I have very good relative pitch.

[MARCOSSG-shph]

I would love to see a 30 minutes guide, you are such a great teacher

[angenalaschka]

I practice 16-20 pieces a day, they're mixed into pieces that I can do, that I'll be able to do soon, and pieces that I've just started. All this is repeated every 3 days and then starts again from the beginning. So I have plenty of time to practice. Your tip about practicing extremely slowly and searching note by note, divided into small sections is super good! Intensively practicing a section from the middle or in between is worth its weight in gold and makes practicing less boring. Thank you. Also improvisation ect. is included. In fact, I almost always practice with both hands together, because for me it's one, one thing in terms of feeling.
Thank you Jazer Lee, you and Lionel Yu, you are a great inspiration and help to me and it's fun to play the piano "with it".
My problem is that I am repeating too many pieces at the same time and practicing some new ones at the same time. In other words, the progress with the new ones is certainly not quite as fast as if I "only" had 5 pieces to practice intensively. But it still works somehow :-) I want too much at once :-)

[thisisourchannel]

Really enjoy your videos. Well thought out and concise. Thank you.
After a year and half of playing I have only started to do daily Hanon exercises and I totally see how they do improve technique and performance. Should have started them sooner.

[AnaGeorgescuArt]

Thank you! This video was really helpful 😊

[slhppmm]

Also, for me it is not so much about the destination as it is about the journey. A mindset that works great for me.
I will never be finished with any piece of music, always something to improve or try. Therefore, as long as I have general progress and enjoy a piece of music, it can be part of my schedule for a long period. I think it is relaxing and giving with that mindset, as one always learn something, also from playing old stuff, as long as one just always is mindfull with a clear goal for the day.

[janebrueton]

Thank you Jazer for more great advice.

[slhppmm]

good guide as always, thanks, I normally have a handfull of pieces I practise, selected to use different muscle groups, in order to exercise different muscle groups and avoid harming muscle groups.
Also I try to pay attention to be as relaxed as possible, no shoulders up around the ears, and no muscle tension in the feets, legs, back, neck etc.
Playing with a soft touch normally makes miracles ;-)

[nancywebb]

I start off doing scales and chord progressions and some finger exercises that you've shown before. Next I work on 2 to 3 new pieces. After that it's polishing a favorite that still needs a little bit of work. I finish with playing something I love to play.

[unclemick-synths]

Good video 👍. My practice often lacks focus so I'm going to use this.

[Namii]

Watching these videos always motivates me. Thank you

[thpiratekingfry]

I do a warm up with scales and arpeggios, then 20 minutes with a method/how to book, twenty minutes on a song at my level "Beatles easy piano", then 20 minutes on something difficult" Handels saraband in d minor". I practice daily, consistency is key to improvement for me :)

[spatel]

Thank you so much for this video! I just had two semesters of piano learning in my college and now I am on my own trying to push my learnings on my own. I was wondering how i structure my practice and this video exactly gave me what I needed.

[ravensby]

Absolutely perfect timing.

I’ve been struggling with what to do for practice. I’ve been simply following the app I use, bouncing around within that to sections on sight reading etc..: then back to the courses within the app. I sprinkle in a little YouTube as well.

I tried a few of your others on warmup and arpeggios but they lacked the notes on screen I’ve gotten used to in the app, so pausing was useless and I was having problem seeing what keys you were actually hitting.

I suspect as time goes on and I keep at it, those kind of videos will become elementary.

[barrymarks]

I am a self taught 60 year old and have been playing piano for 5 years an average of 3 hours a day. My daily routine is at least 1 hour of scales/chords/hand independent exercises (probably too much, but I can't seem to let it go for reasons I'm not sure of), 1 hour of playing/memorizing songs (alternating 6-7 different songs every other day), and 1 hour working on new songs (3 or so at a time) I have made a lot of progress, but considering the amount of time I put in, I don't think I'm making the most effective use of my practice time. My goal is to learn more Jazz and classic rock songs. Your advise?