How To Divide Up Your PRACTICE Sessions! Tips and Strategies

Hello everyone, I'm Josh and welcome to Josh Right Piano TV. A question I've been answering a lot via email. I feel like I should have it on autoresponder. How do I

divide

my

practice

sessions

? There is no particular way to do it. It's either right or wrong to do this, but today I wanted to give you some summary ideas on how you can break up

your

practice

session efficiently. How many pieces of repertoire should you perform at once? How much sight reading should you do each day? and how much time you should dedicate to the technique.

I've covered some of this stuff before on this channel in the videos called the practice regimen as well as some videos in my VIP masterclass series and if you want to watch it you can click. link below, but I just want to lay out some very clear guidelines if you have an hour, two hours, or more than two hours each day, how might I advise my own students to break up those practice

sessions

, so that if you have an hour a day and you're not a super advanced pianist and I'll explain why I use that as a side note in a moment.

I'd probably be doing 15 to 20 minutes of technique a day and then I'd be doing ten minutes of sight reading a day. day and then I would spend the rest of

your

time on repertoire pieces and if you are only doing one hour a day, I personally wouldn't have you as your private teacher if I were your private teacher doing more than two repertoire pieces with only one hour a day , the reason for this is that if you take too many pieces from the repertoire you end up spreading yourself too thin and it takes too long to cross out those pieces now, if you are doing something like Faber's Piano Adventures I might ask you to do two pieces a week, by the way, I love their all in one adult course, even if you're just a teenager, i highly recommend also linking it in the description below in case you want to check it out, i use it. with a lot of my adult students, maybe two, maybe even three pieces of that a week and then a piece of repertoire that's a little more challenging for you, maybe a Bach minuet, if you're a, you know, beginner. late or early intermediate, okay, the reason we want to create momentum, no matter how many hours a day we practice, we always want momentum in our practice sessions, so don't cover more than if you're doing a method book, a couple of pieces from the method book and one more piece, or if you have run out of method books and are only studying the standard repertoire, no more than two pieces in the remaining 30 or 35 minutes, if you are doing one hour a day, if you're doing two hours a day, I would probably increase the technique to 20 minutes a day minimum probably no more than 30 minutes a day of technique.

Now a lot of people don't agree that there are some schools that make you practice an hour a day of technique, but I want to make sure that we are balanced when I am doing this approach, most students, I would say 80% of that I see or more, that's just a ballpark figure, they always progress technically faster than they do with their reading and learning abilities, so I have some students who can play their scales at 132 or 144. but now they are playing a intermediate repertoire, you don't need scales on 144 for most intermediate repertoire, that's actually a little excessive, but I like to develop that technique a little more than your repertoire skills or your sight reading skills because then when you go a To tackle those sight reading tasks or repertoire tasks, you have all the tools in your tool bag to be able to tackle them without too much difficulty, so if you say you're doing two hours in a day, I would do 20 a 30 minutes of technique, I would probably still do 10 minutes of sight reading, maybe you could increase that to 15 minutes, now you have an hour and 15 minutes left.

There are some

strategies

I would recommend, you can still do two pieces at a time. That leaves you an hour and 15 minutes, which is about 40 minutes with one piece or 35 minutes with the other, or you can increase it to three pieces and you could do 40 minutes with 135 with the other and just two pieces a day and then. have them on a rotating schedule, so let's say you are playing some Bach Beethoven Chopin, so the first day you play Bach and Beethoven, the second day you play Beethoven Chopin, the third day you play Chopin and Bach, that break on the other days is actually quite beneficial.

Many people think that it is harmful, but it is not if you go very deep in your practice sessions. Similarly, you could do something even more extreme, like doing 50 minutes with one piece a day and then what would be 25? minutes on the other piece and then do it on a rotating schedule. I don't know if I would recommend that much because then you're just hitting each piece really hard every three days, but that's a method now if you're going beyond two hours, how should you

divide

your time? I would do 30 minutes a day of technique. If you think that's excessive, you can limit yourself to 20 minutes a day, but you could be a little more creative with how you do it. your technical regimen, so if you were just doing scales before, maybe you do scales and triads and once those are complete, you move on to our ped Geo and 7th chords.

By the way, I like to group them together, so I usually advise students to do scales, triads and inversions obviously and then arpeggios and 7th chords and inversions at the same time, if that's still not enough you could do other workbooks like Charity or Filipe or There's so many Pitch Nough or Tau Sig or Doe Kanani or Brahms or Liszt Etudes or Hannon or Chair or Schmidt, so those are all great overall workbooks in my studio. I teach with Hannon and Schmidt to start. We could do some cherni, some of the more advanced cherni as they improve and a little Filipe if his hands are big.

I don't really like doing Philippe if his hands are small because they stretch you out, it can cause tendinitis and all that kind of bad stuff, but you can improve your technique by using other sight reading books. I love the software called Piano Wonder. I'll link to it below if you're having trouble knowing what to sight read and then with the pieces in your repertoire, let's say you're doing three hours a day again, we're taking these same concepts that we want to delve into. these to create momentum, okay, so if we have, let's say, two hours and 20 minutes left, if you are doing three hours a day and you have done 40 minutes for the technical knowledge reading, then you can do it, let's see, I have to do quick math in my head here you could do I think it's 5050 forty or something like that or 5050 thirty probably messing that up in my head fifty fifty forty or you could and you can take a fourth piece and put it on your rotating schedule or at that point if you're doing three hours a day, you can play each piece every day, but again I like to go deeper with certain pieces throughout the week on certain days, so I could do an hour on my hardest piece and then I could rest with my easiest piece . for twenty minutes, so you're at an hour and twenty minutes and then you do an hour on your medium piece and then you can put that on a rotating cycle which brings me to the last point of today's video, which is the one you want to build momentum with. .

Your repertoire options. A lot of people email me and tell me that I've been playing the piano for three months and I'm playing the third movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and the Campanella and three Chopin etudes and, first of all, I'm stuck. That's idiotic. I shouldn't play those pieces after three months of playing. Secondly, those are all great repertoire pieces, so I would recommend this. We've looked at this much more in depth in my VIP Masterclass series, but choosing three levels of pieces if you're going to work on three pieces from the repertoire, so if you're working more than an hour a day and choosing three pieces from the repertoire, I would recommend a piece that is very fast and that you can do with your fingers and possibly even memorize. a month or less, two weeks should be something like that, if you can get it perfect in less than two weeks it's probably too easy for you, but a month or less is a good amount, like between two weeks in a month to really get something perfect, it could be one of Tchaikovsky's seasons if you're an advanced player if you're an intermediate or early advanced player it could be a Bach minuet if you're a completely new beginner maybe it's one of those disgraced pieces that only takes you two weeks to master it, okay, so you have a piece that takes two weeks to a month to master, the second piece that I would choose takes you one to three months to master and then the third piece can take three to six months.

I sometimes make an exception just for advanced students that can take six to twelve months to complete and could be a difficult concerto movement or a complete Beethoven sonata. I don't recommend working on pieces that can't be achieved to a really solid level in a year. because that shows me that it's probably too difficult for you, a lot of people say: "oh, this is a long-term project, this is fun if you use it just to tackle a certain part of the technique, so if you're just working on the Chopin double third etude because you want to get better at double third and you're doing a few bars of that a week I'm fine with that, it's almost more technical exercises, but if you're trying to prepare for a recital I don't recommend taking more than. a year because you might burn out.

I've seen a lot of students burn out. One of the most tragic examples is that he was one of my favorite students I've ever taught. An amazing guy could play all his scales in 160 and he said he was doing it. very good with a couple of shells too. He is a very advanced performer and he said what are the three most difficult Chopin etudes and I said probably Winter Wind opus 25 number eleven double thirds and then opus ten number two the chromatic said I'm going to work on all of those I think I said I think it's a terrible idea because you're going to burn out because you're not going to have any momentum working on three extremely difficult pieces at the same time at the same time he did it and he quit two months later.

He was very sad because he had advised him not to do it and he became discouraged, he thought he was a terrible pianist and he is not. I still struggle with that very specialized technique. I can play Rachmaninoff's third concerto or Scarborough or these things and I still have trouble with it because it's something very specific that Chopin is aiming for there, so if you're playing a difficult etude, if you're playing a long concerto, if you're playing a full Beethoven concert or Mozart Sonata or a Bach dance or whatever, make sure you balance it with shorter pieces that you can gain momentum with.

I hope today's video was helpful, we covered a lot, but I hope it covers all the bases for these questions. that people ask me how I should divide my practice, how many pieces I should work on at once and not fall, especially if you are an adult student, don't fall into the trap of maintaining your repertoire. I taught a guy one time and he said, "I'm working on 40 pieces right now," and I thought, "You're not making any progress with any of them, it's probably that right." The pieces you did two or three hours a day immediately saw progress, so don't take on too many things at once.

Go deeper instead of deeper rather than broader is what I usually recommend to students. If any of you have any questions, please let me know. Don't forget to subscribe if you are not already subscribed to the channel. I will provide all those links in the description below. I hope you all have a wonderful week and good luck in your practice sessions.