AVOID These 8 Practice Mistakes!

foreigner hello everyone, I'm Josh and welcome to Josh Wright piano TV. Thank you very much for joining me today in today's video. I wanted to discuss eight

practice

mistakes

to

avoid

. These are

mistakes

I have made in my life. These are mistakes I see students. of all ages and abilities do and I hope this video can serve as a good reminder to each of you to

avoid

these, maybe you are currently doing some of these. I know it's very easy to fall into the trap of any of these mistakes, even if I've been playing the piano for years or even decades, we'll jump to number one practicing only at one tempo or mainly at one tempo, you could say oh, I did my slow performance to warm up and now I'm just practicing fast because that's what I'll have to do in my performance.

I think it's a big mistake to only

practice

at a medium fast or fast tempo. Too fast half is what I meant, so almost up to tempo and then full tempo. I personally find that it ranges from a very slow then full tempo and then some medium tempo practice in between, especially when I'm in the learning phases and am gradually taking things to the temple, medium temple practice is crucial as well. That's tip number one, make sure you change. around Tempe all the time in your practice sessions you will find that it gives you a new perspective and will help you notice things that you may not have noticed, whether technically or musically.

Number two, never play other instruments. I see this is a big mistake. Many students are so comfortable on their own piano that they are completely baffled by playing a different instrument. Now everyone is in a different financial situation and in a different geographical situation, so I know that some of you will not have access to any instruments. another instrument, you may only have a digital piano and live so far away from anyone else that you don't have access to play on other pianos, that's fine, but any chance you have if you travel stop by a small local piano store and play . their instruments, if you go to church, maybe you can stay after church and play in most churches, they have pianos, maybe you can play your piece before or after church or during the week, if you can get one key to enter the building, you can play for friends on their piano, um, or you can even play on digital pianos too.

I just recommend, whenever possible, trying to get some exposure to acoustic instruments, especially grand pianos, because they have a different mechanism. You can have the highest range of Yamaha and you. or nu3, I think it is, or N3 N2, those are very nice digital pianos, but you still don't get the exact feeling of pressing a key with a whole gun, moving the handle, moving the hammer up, feeling the real hammer hitting that string, feel the very slight vibrations of the piano. These are all small sensations that add up to a big experience and it is very helpful to play many different instruments.

We bought my daughter a small Yamaha acoustic upright piano for her room. I noticed that she even practiced. that from time to time really helps my technique a lot, you would think that would help when you have a Steinway here, but I noticed the difference or change between these two, my wife and I saved for many years to be able to afford these two pianos. This is what we do for a living, so we thought it was important and we can also play the two piano repertoire, but I love this piano so much, I love the way it sounds.

I like it. I used to like the action in that one even more than this one. getting too close or whatever, this one presented me with some problems, but we worked them out with a couple of local piano technicians who are just brilliant and I've noticed, although this is all tuned exactly how I like it, both of them. with the sound and with the action if I practice on that piano then I come to this piano I play better or if I play this piano and then I go to that piano I play better because I am always challenging myself to feel different Sensations I remember a friend told me that Key was studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music at the same time Daniel Trifonov was there and changing practice rooms every 20 or 30 minutes, which could be, you know, rumors.

Don't know. I didn't see it myself, but it was a great lesson for me to always be challenging yourself with different instruments and if you look at these famous concert pianists, they have to adapt to a new piano as they are some of the best pianos in the world. . They're performing in a lot of these settings, but they're always adapting to other instruments, so any chance for you to play different instruments is very important. Mistake number three: having only one or two exercises or methods of practice strategies, so many people just practice slowly with their hands alone and together and that's it, and then they just wander around during their practice session trying to get it up to Tempo um or if they're a little more experienced, they could be doing some creative methods like finger staccato or high fingers or long short practice Rhythm long short long short Rhythm practice or short long short long but don't let it stop there continues to develop more and more practice methods like five seven nine rhythms the Night method which I've talked about um on this channel and in my free webinar if you check it out at the link below there are 10 of my favorite tips that I use all days in my practice sessions and in my teaching, so these are things I keep if you haven't checked.

Check it out, it will give you some new ideas so you don't always go back to the same ideas over and over again. Mistake number four: isolating yourself from outside help. It's always tempting to say: I'll figure it out. It will come out eventually, but I can't even tell you that even now, even this year. I texted one of my piano teachers. I have taken lessons with her several times on the new repertoire I am working on. I'm not doing a week. lesson I don't need her to hold my hand like I may have needed when I was a teenager, but these are things that, uh, seeing a teacher and not isolating yourself from outside help, are things that are very important for your development.

I play. for my wife all the time and she's my biggest fan, but she's also a pretty harsh critic because I ask her to be one. I tell her what she doesn't like about it, so I'm working on the Sony Chacón bakbu right now, which is wonderful. piece and she said: I like a lot of the things you're doing, but I didn't really like your articulation here, you need to be lighter here, maybe you need to watch your breaks instead of pedaling through them to keep the textures consistent. on the first two pages and those were ideas I'd never had and hadn't heard much on recordings either, so when playing for people you trust you have to be careful who you listen to, there are so many voices on YouTube.

There are so many teachers out there that you have to choose who you are going to listen to and trust a person. I think I've trusted too many people in my life and it's had some negative effects, but I have a core group of four people. that I really listened to my wife and then my three teachers, Susan, Dueling Meyer, Sergey bobayon and Logan Skelton, and I have really continued to trust them with all my piano needs and it really helps me a lot. I am very lucky to have each of them. them in my life you can also listen to recordings, which is one of the best ways to get inspiration.

Record yourself. You are your own teacher every day, so recording yourself can almost put you in the third person as if you were your own student. That's very useful. perform for friends and then also watch online instructional courses or videos like this one. I have many online courses. I'll link to them below if you need extra help, so just some ideas so you don't cut yourself off from outside help. Mistake number five on this one. I'm so guilty of forcing things to happen, you need to slow down, think about things logically, both physically, how I move my hands and also musically, where is this phrase leading?, where is it dying?, where is it going?

Can I take the time? How is the balance between my hands? Are you forcing a glitch? So is there a point where you can rotate a little more efficiently? Is there a place where you are stretching prematurely in anticipation of a passage? I know that anticipation is one of the biggest stresses. setting an intention, uh, because we're preparing and then we're going to tense our hand for something that hasn't even happened yet, so thinking things through, not forcing them to happen, and practicing slowly is one of the best environments to discover ways to reduce the tension and not forcing things to happen, mistake number six, this one is interesting.

I don't think I've ever mentioned it, uh or definitely not, in any detail on this channel. It is fighting against your instrument. Every piano is a little different. Some instruments are heavier. Instruments are lighter and let me tell you, a lighter instrument is not always better. I like light actions because it is very demanding to play really virtuoso works in a heavy action. I'm not saying I love heavy stocks, but I would prefer to take an ultra stock. light action or really heavy action um for beautiful lyrical work. In fact, I'd take the heavy action for a lyrical work now if I'm playing chopinitudes or list studies or the Rachmaninoff concerto or something really fast.

I would prefer to have the ultralight instrument. but I really like to be somewhere in between. I like to be in the middle of the road to Lighter Side with my favorite pianos, that's my favorite kind of action, but I mention all this because you have to adapt to the instrument you use. If you're playing the Scarlatti Takata and the instrument doesn't repeat, either that gun doesn't bounce fast enough or it likes the repeat spring. I have a whole series of videos that Hiram Weeble and I call preparing a new Steinway. Check it out and it explains how to make the repeat stronger or weaker on a piano so it repeats faster, but there are drawbacks if you make the repeat jump too hard, as you can see in those videos, so how does the piano at your playing and you have to be able to Embrace that I like to think I know this is an inanimate object but I like to think of this as my friend I know it sounds very cheesy and silly but when I play I am fighting this and I am forcing the things happen.

I'm working too hard, my playing won't be as good as if I really accepted the piano for what it is and wasn't thinking all the time. I wish this had a lighter action or I wish this was echoed better or I wish this piano part was a little softer or a little louder, so you have to accept it. That being said, have your piano technician fix whatever needs fixing on your own piano, but this is primarily for performance opportunities or venues. when you're playing an unknown instrument mistake number seven is forgetting to film mistake number seven without mistake number seven is not having a long-term perspective trying to force things to be done today and basing it on your self-esteem or how you think about yourself or how you perceive yourself uh based on today's results don't think about the progress and the journey this is a trap I have fallen into many times and something you don't want to have in your life because it is destructive it can have bad effects in the long run term, so make sure you always think about things in the long term.

If you're learning a new piece and something doesn't feel comfortable, take it slow and try to find creative ways to practice, as we've mentioned in others. The points in this video seek advice from a teacher or a friend who has more experience on the piano or online resources, whatever they are, but keep that long-term perspective. I have a student who is retired and recently retired and is a great pianist. He is a very accomplished musician. Earlier in his life he played other instruments and conducted but he decided to take up piano about a year ago and his progress is tremendous and at one point he was just doing some basic Schmidt exercises that just help develop finger independence and basically , it is not extensive. studies with a million exercises, about 160 short one-measure exercises that you can transpose to each key, and he said, you know, my hand didn't really want to do this exercise or this group of exercises, but I thought, "Okay, I have two weeks until I see Josh again.

I'm going to take this one day at a time and hope something happens in a few days with some perseverance and he said yes, after two or three more days of taking things slow, my hands began to acclimatize to that and it was much more comfortable. I can't even tell you how many times it has happened to me. I remember when I first learned Chopin's Winter Wind Etude I was quite young. As I played it in different competitions over the years, my tempo, all the technical difficulties, naturally the temple became faster, the technical difficulties became easier, it was incredible without putting in hours and hours and hours of effort just for speed. drilling. um, of course, I was practicing for hours and hours. but I wasn't just tryingof doing it faster or trying to force the technique to improve similarly on other really difficult pieces.

I remember there were some places in the third Rachmaninoff concert where I was very nervous going into the performance, but it actually turned out to be really good at the performance and it was because I was very patient with things, so try not to have a perspective In the short term, make sure you have a long term perspective and be patient and let things happen naturally. Mistake number eight is practicing. extremely, uh, doing extremely long practice sessions or if you don't do extremely long practice sessions, but even if you're there for an hour without taking a break, it's a big mistake that I notice and articles have been written, if I remember correctly, they said kind of like your brain can only focus on something for a short period of time, so you should change gears every five minutes.

I think that's excessive, but I wouldn't do it. If you're delving into something for more than five minutes, you could be working on a one-page passage for hours, but doing the same thing over and over and over again without thinking, my numbness, uh, drilling is not beneficial to your practice, so that always change it. Even if it's just changing gears, it was fine. I was really in tune with the voice at that point bringing out the melody over the accompaniment. Now I'm going to focus on the form. Now I'm going to focus on the rubato. I'm going to jump to a different passage, okay, now I'm going to jump to a different piece, okay, now I'm going to work on some scales because I feel like they're a little weak or, oh, this arpeggio is really bothering me in this piece and That brings up another point, many students say how much technical work I should do.

I don't think you know that 15 to 30 minutes of technical work every day is a bad thing, but nevertheless, once you have basic technical skills, I'm a big fan of using your repertoire to further develop your technique because you're killing two birds. In one shot, you are learning a great repertoire and continuing to develop your technique instead of isolating four octaves up and down on parallel scales, of course you can contrast movement in all sorts of different ways, you can check out the list of technical exercises that they're wonderful, but having said that, I don't like to spend a lot of time doing that either, so I went off on a bit of a tangent at the end, but um, they're things I wanted to mention in this hands-on video.

I hope today's video was helpful. If you don't mind, please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and share this with anyone you think might benefit. I'll leave some links in the description below, one of them is to that free webinar containing 10 of my favorite practice tips to take your game to the next level. I'll leave a couple of links for my paid courses and finally I'll leave a link for my equipment kit, all the equipment I use in the studio, the lighting, these microphones, everything I use, as well as some books, theory books and others books and recordings that I personally like and that have helped me in my career. everyone listed in the description below, if any of you have any requests for future videos please let me know.

My email is Josh joshrightpiano.com. Have a great week, good luck in your practice sessions abroad.