Music Video Lesson: How Much Should You Stick To Routine in Your Practice?

Anything that engages your mind is ultimately the most productive practice you can do.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin with a really insightful question, which is how much should you stick to routine in your piano practice? Years ago I made a video about how to make your practicing more enjoyable, and it really was kind of a guide to how to organize your practicing to make it as productive as possible. I described how you should have an appetizer of scales for warming up, then a main course of memorization and refinement, and then you could have dessert of review pieces, something of that nature. I'll have a link for you in the description here. But what I'm going to talk about today is something quite different, and it's the flip side of this. All too often I find students, they get married to their routines, and they love their routines so much that they don't realize that they might be missing out on discovery.

Truth be known, my practice is anything but organized in so far as I don't necessarily stick to a regimen in what I do. In fact, sometimes I find a specific area that needs work, and I'll spend an inordinate amount of time on one specific problem maybe ten times more time than I spend with anything else in the practice session.

It could be a very small section of music, or sometimes there's a certain technique that you're working on, or there's a part of the music that you're discovering new possibilities in the score, or a new way of approaching the keyboard, or you're getting a different sound out of the piano. And you might think, but I've got to get to the scales, I've got to get to my new piece, I've got to do my review, all those regimented aspects of practice. But you know what? Anything that engages your mind is ultimately the most productive practice you can do. So don't fall into the habit of routine for routine's sake. If you're doing routines and you find yourself just doing the same thing, almost to the point of mindlessness, just going through the motions because you think it's important, well you may be getting some physical benefit from strengthening your hands, spending the time with it, or it could be even helping you to play over pieces so you don't forget them. But the real practice is that of discovery. Remember practicing is a mental exercise, it is a thought process. So if you find yourself spending way too much time on something but you're getting some there with it, go for it because you'll find this. After spending a tremendous amount of time on something small, it will translate to other aspects of your playing. So you can get tremendous benefit sometimes from spending a tremendous amount of time on something that's seemingly very small, but it all relates to everything else you do on the instrument. So routines are good so you don't forget important aspects. Work on your sight reading every day or at least every week. They're all major areas that you want to cover. You don't want to forget your review pieces by neglecting them for a week or two. But ultimately what engages your mind, go off on those tangents and don't feel that something's wrong if you spend a whole bunch of time on one thing so long as you're accomplishing something. Keep your practicing interesting to you and you will accomplish even more in the work you do at the piano.

Just for all your questions again, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource with lots more content to come. You can subscribe right here with a thumbs up. I appreciate it. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-much-should-you-stick-to-routine-in-your-practice/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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