Piano Video Lesson: Productive Tip for Practicing the Piano: The 80/20 Rule

Hi. I'm Robert Estrin and you're watching living pianos.com here on YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me. The question today is does the 80/20 rule apply to piano? And the short answer is yes, but with a qualification.

And what is the 80/20 rule? You may have heard this before. The 80/20 rule is, for example, in the piano, how it applies, is spending 80% of your time on 20% of the score. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the 80/20 rule doesn't apply to the piano exactly, because I would say it's more like 90/10. Really, you'll learn a piece of music and then you spend 90% of your time on 10% of that score. There's just a very small amount that really requires all your time and effort.

And you know, of course the temptations always go back to the beginning and play the parts you know, because it's fun and you want to work on those parts to make them better and better because there's no end to how good you can play something.

But really laser focus on the small sections, sometimes you have to spend 98% of your practice time on 2% of the music. Other days you can have a more fluid type of practice where you're covering more substantial parts of your piece. Particularly when you're getting ready for performance, you want to be able to get the whole sense of playing a program, playing half a program, playing complete pieces and all of that, but certainly in the formative parts of learning music, you want to laser focus your attention and that's how to be productive. I see so many people who spend hours and hours and hours of the piano and don't seem to accomplish what they want to be able to accomplish and this could be one way to increase productivity tremendously.

So in your practice, don't just keep going through the things you can already play well, although you can always refine further. Put your attention where it's really needed and put the time in and early on, you may feel like, Oh, I'll never get through this piece if I spent all this time on this little part. Maybe it's a four or eight measure phrase, you're thinking, my gosh, if I spent an hour, hour and a half on this, I'm never going to get through anything.

Here's the epiphany you will have. Spend that time on the front end on some of those hard sections and you will be rewarded because you'll find that almost all piece of music have repeats of different motifs and technical challenges. And by solving it or really delving into those head-on, you're going to be able to accomplish so much more as you go further with the learning of the piece.

So yes, the 80/20 rule applies and maybe even more extreme than that. I'd love to hear from all of you and how you feel this applies to your practice and keep the questions coming in. I love the fact that you have subscribed. If you haven't yet, you're welcome to. More content on Patreon. Again, I'm Robert Estrin here at livingpatterns.com, your online piano resource. Thanks again for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/productive-tip-for-practicing-the-piano-the-80-20-rule/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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