Ten times in a row!

Pallas, I haven't viewed the videos yet, but interesting hypothesis on the difference between home and lesson playing, and the reason why slow practice is useful. For me, at least, nerves at the lesson are likely to always be a nagging presence, but I've long thought that not knowing the piece deeply, i.e., beyond muscle memory, is a big part of the problem.

It always takes me a few minutes to adjust to the piano in my teacher's studio, but at least it's an acoustic. The bench is usually not adjustable, either, which a a pain.

Pallas Can you practice on different pianos somehow?

Pallas If you have any friends who have pianos, or public pianos, those could be useful too. You just need to play your piece once or twice on a different piano to see how you can adjust.

ranjit Strongly agree with this. I make myself continue for at least another measure or two and stop intentionally. Otherwise I'm developing the "crash & burn" habit of performing ...

Pallas But now I have a new hypothesis: I have learned my pieces ONLY with muscle memory, and my muscle memory is deeply encoded to my own piano.

This really rings true for me as well. It's not just the piano, either. It's the environment. Even the light in one room rather than another can make a piano feel very different. That's a problem that I suspect a lot of hobbyists such as myself suffer from: playing on the same piano in the same space 99% of the time. If that's right, then it makes sense that playing on lots of different pianos in lots of different places is the cure.

Animisha Yes! I used to do what you did previously. 10 times in a row was too tedious for that, so I'd settle for 3 more good attempts than failed attempts. I'm still intimidated by 10 times, but now I've increased to 5 times, (using BartK's counter system, and on just the area close to the mistake. On the last repetition or perhaps right after the last one, I'll play with the rest of the section to make sure it's still fixed in context.

Animisha

I was very busy, so I didn't play. Yesterday I started practicing again, and I focused on the first ornament only, and I left the second ornament out completely. I first played only the ornament, very slowly, to get that movement of the hand back as muscle memory. Then I played a few bars including the ornament slowly, and then at the correct speed. Then I played the entire A section, but with the second ornament still removed. It feels like I can play the first ornament again now. But I'm a little bit afraid to try it now. Today I will focus on practicing the second one the same way. But I think I can skip the second one if I have to, because that part also sounds nice without the ornament.

I'm glad it helped you as a warning sign, I learned from this as well!

iternabe what is the trick to avoid reading notes wrong in the first place when learning a new piece?

There is no trick. It happens to everyone, even teachers as you can see. You just have to be careful and always look at the notes while playing. Many times after playing misread notes incorrectly for a while I looked at the music and had this "wait a second..." moment. Of course, it helps to have a teacher who corrects you (that happened a lot too).

In this case playing B instead of A doesn't sound wrong because it's still a harmony note and that's probably why this teacher didn't notice.

iternabe I've noticed a wrong note after coming back to a piece I worked on for more than a year! All I can say is that it happens and it sucks-- you can fix it but it's hard to rewire your brain. Lessons are good because hopefully your teacher/coach notices, has happened to me a couple of times.

iternabe I think it's just naturally bound to happen, no matter how diligent you are in reading the sheets. Try to minimize it, accept that it's a part of learning/playing, and fix them when you discover them

I find that I can be learning/playing a piece for MONTHS, and never notice an obvious wrong note...until I listen to a recording or a performance. For me, 99% of the note errors I catch after first learning the piece come from hearing someone play it the right way.

Gombessa For me, 99% of the note errors I catch after first learning the piece come from hearing someone play it the right way.

In general I agree but you have to take recordings with a grain of salt.

Sometimes even the pros play it wrong (but usually on purpose). For instance, in the Rach Elégie that I'm playing now at measure 90 there is a G-flat in the right hand against a G-natural in the left hand. That seems wrong but this is what is what Rach wrote and he himself plays it like that in his recordings. But the editor of the first edition thought it was a mistake and changed it to G-natural and now most pros play it like that.

There are quite a few "corrections" like that in the repertoire, most famously the so called Schwencke measure in Bach's C major prelude, but it's far from the only one.

iternabe I had a theory that if I make a mistake in practice but realizes it right there, my brain can sort of reject it from being committed to permanent memory (at least to some extent). But if it's a mistake that remain unnoticed, then it will become ingrained subconsciously. So this could have been my worst nightmare.

This happened to me recently. I was relearning a piece that I had memorized and then partially forgotten so I was playing from the score again, and I noticed I had learned and memorized a wrong note!

I fixed it. At first playing it right sounded wrong. After enough repetitions I got the right sound in my head. Then if I played it wrong by not paying attention it sounded wrong so I could correct it. Enough iterations of this and my subconscious mind was retrained.

It's harder to correct a memorized wrong note than to learn it correctly in the first place, but it can be done. Also, this is a piece I learned and submitted to an ABF recital, and if anyone noticed the wrong note they never said anything.

When I work on a piece for a long time I make changes to the way I play it, even if all the notes are right. It's a similar process of noticing that something could be better and working to improve it. Again, the subconscious mind can change and learn.

Hopefully this is reassuring...

iternabe I've had that happen twice for recital pieces.

The first time was "Arietta" for and ABF Greig recital. I never even realized the note was wrong, as it sounded fine to me. I checked the score after getting a comment on it and sure enough, it was wrong. I checked the score and sure enough he was right.

The second time was the recital we just had on Piano Tell. I listened to some teachers playing YouTube recordings of my piece as I wanted ideas for interpretation as I fine tuned the piece for final recordings. I realized they were all playing a note flat that I hadn't been. Even though I was playing from memory at that point and not reading from the score, I circled the flatted note on the score and I think just the act of doing that made the flatted note something I remembered to play correctly from then on.

BartK Twice in the last year, I've discovered scores with mistakes in them. One was a Burgmuller piece where the repeat was written in the wrong place. The other was a Bach prelude where only one trill was shown in a particular section of the score in an ABRSM book I started with. After hearing recordings of it, I discovered the trill should have also been played in several following measures. Luckily I had the same piece in a Henle edition where it was noted correctly.

Heh, ok then, now I don't feel so embarrassed to share mine ^_^ I was practising Fascination for the recital, and my husband kept saying something isn't right... and of course I kept insisting I was following the score. Turned out that I was so tuned in to the recurring A, that I completely missed that this was a B:

I kept playing an A (same as in the bar below) and I didn't even notice it. When I made a mental correction, it actually sounded a little odd at first. I couldn't believe how I could have been so blind and deaf! Yeah, mind melting moment right there!