Viva Blog

Frequent questions about practicing

Why Practice? 

Let’s use a sports analogy.  Basketball players must consistently work out in the weight room, run miles a day, and shoot hundreds of free throws a week in order to be physically and mentally ready for each game.  Musicians use small muscles (embouchure, fingers, etc.) that need a constant regular workout as well.  Especially at young ages, musicians’ muscles are developing very quickly with regular practice, so improvement is very obvious. 

When to Practice? 

Ideally, the practice should happen every day.  In our house, we are happy with 5 days a week for our young children.  The bottom line is that we as parents need to help our children get in the habit of practicing, just like they brush their teeth and do their other homework. 

How Long Should My Child Practice? 

I am a big fan of the “10 minutes rule”.  10 minutes of practice a day (for beginners) is better than nothing, and 99% of the time 10 minutes turns into 20 minutes!  

Beginning students = 10 minutes/day* 

Middle school students = 1/2 hour a day* 

High school students = 45 minutes – 1 hour a day* 

 

How to Practice 

The sooner a child learns how to practice, the better! The best tip I can give to parents is this: 

Muscle memory and tempo are mutually exclusive.  That means everything must be practiced VERY SLOW in order for the skill to be successfully “programmed” into the body.   

This is very difficult for young children, especially when they are learning to play a song that they recognize. If mistakes are happening, it is more than likely that the piece is being practiced at a tempo that is too fast. 

Students shouldn’t always start at the beginning of a piece each time they sit down to practice it. Work should be done on small “snippets” that give them trouble; practicing them slowly then speeding them up.  Hard sections should be broken down into small bits, perhaps even to the point where they are playing single notes.  These sections should be repeated many times until the music becomes easy to play. Then the student should put the piece back together and gradually bring it up to tempo. 

Sometimes practice happens without making sounds.  Students should take time to figure out the fingering of passages note by note. Any time a mistake occurs, your child should feel free to make a note in the music with a pencil. 

Practice with a metronome is huge and leads to tons of improvement!  Students should set it at a slow count at first, then gradually increase the pulse until they arrive at the final tempo. 

A digital recorder or phone is a great tool to use when practicing. Students can record themselves playing so they can hear problems, particularly regarding rhythm and notes. This is a lot of fun for them to do, so encourage it! 

Practice sessions should end by playing beautifully a piece that the student knows well, or anything they want, really. 

By the 5th or 6th grade, your child should begin taking ownership over their learning. They need to understand that what you put in is what you get out. It is the parent’s job to get their child to that point by ensuring that practice happens daily.  Kids don't always understand this at a young age, but parents are doing them such a huge favor by not allowing them to quit.  At the very least, children will grow up knowing what it takes to truly achieve something, and how to motivate themselves to do things that they might not always want to do. 

Regular practicing is a path towards self-discipline that goes way beyond music — it's a skill that has hugely positive ramifications for personal fulfillment and lifetime success. (How "tiger mom" is that?) But the trick is that self-motivated discipline isn't exactly first nature for most kids, so it's up to families to help create positive, engaging and fun ways to practice as a path towards self-motivation. Having a goal for each practice session is essential, whether your child is practicing for five minutes or a couple of hours each day. As a parent leading practice, your aim in a session of five or 10 minutes might be to help your child really work through just one or two bars of music. That also makes learning a big chunk of new music less intimidating. 

Monitor 

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BONDING TIME

Just as you don’t give your children the option of failing to brush their teeth, bathe, eat or get dressed, so doing practice is not optional, even if that means you remind your child to do it every day for a decade. You are the parent: you make the rules. No one ever reached adulthood and said “I wish my mum had let me stop learning the piano”

Think long-term.  In other words, don’t plan to ‘try’ piano for six months to see if it’s a good fit – if you want your child to learn to play the piano you need to be internally committing to at least three years of lessons and practice.  Then you can reflect on how things are going. This isn’t about being a tiger parent, it’s about being realistic about what’s involved in gaining musical skills.