Learn faster, perform better: my notes on practicing smarter

What I kept from the book, and how my practice looks now.

I read Learn Faster, Perform Better by Molly Gebrian, a book about what neuroscience says on practicing an instrument. It changed how I practice more than any method book. These are my notes, the stuff I actually kept and use.

Every session needs a precise goal

Not "work on the Chopin". Something you can check. "Bars 12 to 16 at 80 bpm with no stop." "Left hand jump in bar 30 lands without looking."

This goes for warm ups too. Scales, arpeggios, Hanon: if you run them on autopilot you are just moving fingers. Give them a target. Even tone on every note. Thumb passing without accent. Something.

Name the problem before fixing it

"It does not sound good" is not a problem you can fix. Figure out exactly what goes wrong. Is it the fingering? The jump? The rhythm after the jump? Then decide how you will fix it before you start playing.

Most of my wasted practice time was playing a passage again and again hoping it would fix itself.

20 minutes max, then a break

Focus drops after about 20 minutes. Past that you are repeating things without really learning them.

The break is not lost time. During it your brain is still working. It collects what it needs to strengthen the new connections you just made. So stopping is part of learning, not a pause from it.

During a break you can:

watch or listen to someone play,
practice something completely different,
do nothing at all.

Keep similar things apart

If you learn two things that look alike, like two endings of the same piece, the new one messes with the one you just learned. The book suggests about 6 hours between them. Morning for ending one, evening for ending two.

Space the sessions out

For something new, the schedule I follow now:

Day 1: 3 short sessions
Day 2: 2 sessions
Day 3: 1 session
Day 5: 1 session
Day 7: 1 session
Days 8, 9, 10: 1 session a day
Then spread it out more and more

Lots of short sessions with gaps beat one long session. Every time you come back after a gap you have to remember, and remembering is what builds memory.

Block practice only at the start

Repeating one passage over and over is fine when it is brand new. After that, mix things up. Block practice makes practice easy and the performance hard. Interleaved practice makes practice hard and the performance easy. I wrote a whole article on this because it changed a lot for me.

Practicing for performance

Pick 5 passages as a base. Then use one of these:

Interval timer. Every 5 minutes, stop what you are doing and play one passage in performance mode. Once, no restart.
Time constrained. Every 3 to 5 minutes, switch to another part. Even if the current one is not fixed yet.
Random mode. Pick a random section of the piece and play it like on stage.

The Repertoire trainer does the random mode for you, that is why I built it.

Add variability

Playing the passage the exact same way every time makes it fragile. Change something:

a style or an emotion: happy, angry, mysterious, lazy,
a constraint: one hand only, eyes closed, every other bar played in your head only,
subdivisions: two eighths instead of one quarter, four sixteenths instead of an eighth,
standing up.

It sounds silly. It works. When something unexpected happens during a real performance, you have already played the passage in weirder conditions.

Mental practice

Play the piece in your head, away from the piano. Hear it, see the hands, feel the keys. If you cannot do a passage in your head, you do not know it as well as you think.

Focus outside, not inside

Think about the sound you want, not about what your fingers are doing. "This phrase goes up to the high note" works better than "curve the fourth finger". Focusing on the result lets your body handle the details.

Give your memory hooks

Do not memorize notes one by one. Find clues in the piece:

the overall feeling,
the dynamics,
a story you tell yourself,
the form: what repeats, what changes,
the chords and harmony,
any structure the notes can hang on.

The more ways you know a passage, the more backups you have when one fails.

Play without sound

Turn the volume of your digital piano all the way down and play. You find out if you really know the piece or if you were following your ears. And you practice without audio feedback, which is closer to what happens when a note goes wrong on stage and you need to keep going.