Music Video Lesson: The Power of Granular Practice

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. Today such an important subject. The importance of granular practice. Now this is an amazingly productive tool for you and I'm going to show you and break it down and I'm going to use a very simple piece of Schumann and then a more complex piece by Liszt to demonstrate how this can save you vast amounts of time in your practice.

Let's start and tell you how this works. First thing I'm going to do is play for you just the beginning of the last movement of Schumann's Kinderszenen, scenes from childhood, the poet speaks. I'm going to just play the very first opening bars. Then I'm going to explain how you can break this down into a granular level so that you can digest the music more thoroughly and more easily.

A beautiful chorale type writing. Now you might be tempted just to play it a few times and absorb it, which you very well may be able to do. The problem with doing that is as you continue to play through the piece, the difficulties of absorbing the music compound themselves.

That's why sometimes breaking things down to the most essential elements can really help. Now of course the obvious thing to do is to play hands separately, naturally.

Now you could do that a number of times and get it, but you know what? If you break it down even further you have the benefit not only of saving time, but having that one moment in your life where you do break it down to the granular level to really understand it more thoroughly instead of just learning the feeling of the notes and where the hand goes. So how do you do this? Well you take the melody, it's very easy to learn, isn't it? So you learn just that melody, it's very tuneful. So it's hard to forget it once you play it. So that's the easy part. The hard part, believe it or not, is the simple part because it doesn't have such a tuneful thing to remember. So you just play that alto line and memorize that.

Now that's incredibly simple, but to take the moment to absorb what's going on there, because when you play both parts at the same time you're not really concentrating on how many D's there are, where it changes to E.

You take that time. It doesn't take very long at all, but that little bit of time really makes things click because you understand it on a deeper level. Then when you put the two parts together you're concentrating on both the melody and the alto line.

Naturally, you can do the same thing with the left hand part, learning the parts independently.

And it has tremendous benefits. You understand the music as if you are each instrument in an orchestra.

So you're not just playing chords anymore, you're playing individual lines. You're hearing these lines, the bass line you're hearing.

And then you can listen for the alto, the tenor line.

You'll probably notice that it's very simple at first because both lines are going the same direction at first. The first two measures are really easy because they're in parallel motion until here.

So when you get to the third measure you might want to just notice what's going on in the third measure in the two independent voices.

The top line is pretty simple.

And the bottom line.

So if you independently learn those lines, putting them together is a much easier task and you're likely not to forget it because you paid attention to it for once. Otherwise you could play this a hundred times and never really notice the lines and what they're doing. You're just kind of feeling the notes and feeling the chords.

Then it's easy to put it together because you've got the parallel motion of the sixths at the beginning and then the second part that you've learned.

The other benefit of this is when you've done this, when you put it all together you're actually hearing all four lines almost like your own four piece quartet. You're like a choir. You're actually singing each of the lines in your head. You're hearing the individual lines not just the sonority of the chords. And it helps you to remember where the notes are going because you've learned each individual line. Well let's take a more complex example now. Let's go to some Liszt. I've been learning the Mephisto Waltz which is such a great piece by the way. I've known it to hear it for years and I never even read through it until just a couple of weeks ago and I've been memorizing it like crazy and that's when I came up with this tool. I mean I've known about this tool and I use this tool and I thought I've never shared this tool. I break things down. I treat myself like a baby when I practice. Truth be known. I give myself little tiny bites of music and I chew them up, digest them and go on to the next little tiny bite, bite after bite after bite after bite and I digest tremendous amounts of music. I've already memorized what nine or ten pages of this thing and I haven't even had a lot of time to practice. But when I do practice those little baby bites. So how does this work? There's a section in here that goes like this if I can play it.

So what is going on there? Sounds really complex. Well the right hand fortunately has the same form as your phrase twice in a row and it's mostly chromatic.

Except right here.

You have a whole step.

So it's the same thing twice in a row, not too hard. So what about the left hand? Well you've got this thing going on and you might wonder what is all this? Well here again breaking it down and if you just play the lower line first. Descending half steps from E and then look what happens here descending half steps from G.

Well that's pretty darn easy to learn. You just have four half steps down from E, four half steps down from G. Well what about the chords? What are the chords doing? Well that's easy because the top note keeps going up by half step and the bottom two notes remain the same.

And then here it's the same thing except now we're on a different pitch. Instead of starting on G sharp you're starting on B.

And once again the top note keeps going up by half step.

Isn't it interesting how you have the same line on top, the same chromatic line on top and different chords on the bottom. But if you break it down you realize it's really quite simple. What's going on here? The bottom is going down by half step.

And the top is going up by half step.

Where are we? And then you put it together.

And then finally you put the hands together.

Now if I had just played over those eight measures again and again and again and again could I eventually have gotten it? Yeah sure. But would I really understand it on this granular level? Probably not. Maybe eventually it would occur to me oh yeah look at this I can analyze it after I've learned it and played it a bunch of times and go oh my gosh look at this the left hand is going down by half steps and this is doing this. Why not analyze it first? It makes it easier to learn. Break things down to their most essential elements so you understand them and you know the lines, the separate lines even within each hand and it makes it so much easier to digest music and you can increase the productivity of your practice exponentially. Try this out for yourself and let me know how it works here at LivingPianos .com, your online piano store and ring the bell, thumbs up and subscribe if you'd like more videos like this. Again Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-power-of-granular-practice/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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