The up-and-down nature of motivation is natural when you are learning something new, but it poses a significant challenge when you rely on it as the foundation for your practice routine. Consistency beats motivation when it comes to piano practice. You shouldn’t have to feel motivated in order to practice. Your practice routine should be…
There are mistakes that seem to have a memory of their own. You correct a passage, manage to play it right a couple of times, and then, as if nothing had happened, the wrong note or the uneven rhythm creeps back in. This is one of the most vexing phenomena in the early stages of…
Slow practice is easy in theory, but when you actually try to do it, it’s not that simple. You sit at the piano, you tell yourself you are going to go slow, and by the third measure you are speeding along. Your hands are ahead of you, the rhythm is sloppy, and you are back…
You might think the most difficult things about playing piano are reading sheet music or coordinating the left and right hands. However, the biggest hurdle of piano practice as a beginner is actually sustaining enough concentration to make a short passage sound a little better than it did 3 minutes ago. The average beginner will…