How to get through the "grind" in the final stages of learning a piece?

ranjit

I really struggle to focus on practicing on pieces that are mostly learned, where you need to focus on evenness, small memory slips, consistency, and difficult sections. How should one deal with this?

MRC

ranjit I really struggle to focus on practicing on pieces that are mostly learned, where you need to focus on evenness, small memory slips, consistency, and difficult sections. How should one deal with this

There is something else you need to focus on, more and more as you progress towards the moment where you might perform the piece: deepening and refining your interpretation. For me, this is what makes the last stages of working on a piece the most interesting. Working on all the things you mention - evenness, memory, consistency - stops being boring if it is done with the aim of finding a way to tell a more captivating, moving story.

Usually, the more I work on a piece, the more new expressive possibilities I find in it. Sometimes working on technique - playing slowly, playing a legato passage staccato, playing a forte passage pianissimo - can inspire some change in interpretation. Or the other way around: a change in phrasing can lead to a change in fingering.

If you feel the need to repeat a difficult passage a lot to make it cleaner or to get it memorised, don't grind through those repetitions mechanically: try all sorts of different ways of playing it. Play a rapid passage languidly, try all sorts of rubato in a passage that's usually in strict time, or take a passage that usually has a lot of rubato and use the metronome to force you to play it without all that freedom. Add accents in unusual places, use different phrasing, invert staccato and legato.... You can be as extreme as you like - nobody is judging you - but in the midst of all this messing around, you may actually find moments where you say to yourself "hey, it actually sounds better that way!". Or you may at least decide to keep a subtler version of some exaggerated idea you cooked up. If you're being creative, you shouldn't get bored!

PianogrlNW

Mark the parts of your score that need extra time and attention. Recording yourself makes it very clear where those areas are in your score. Work on each one 5-8 minutes only and rotate through several of them twice in a day. Don’t do this daily as you should take breaks; otherwise it becomes drudgery. This approach works for me as it helps me focus on only the areas that need work and I don’t end up playing the parts I’m satisfied with. I find that I can fix these problem spots fairly quickly (1-2 weeks) using this approach.

pianoloverus

If you have the luxury of choosing only pieces you really love, you may find it easier to do whatever work is necessary to bring your playing to the level you desire. And try to choose pieces that are really great enough that you won't lose interest in perfecting them. Some pieces can have great initial but somewhat superficial appeal so that eventually one becomes less motivated to perfect them.

Josephine

Maybe it's fun to book one (online) lesson with a very good teacher/ concert pianist at that stage of a piece.

thepianoplayer416

When learning a language, people would practice new words & phrases with "spaced repetition". After learning something, take a break. Come back later and repeat. The break would give your brain time to absorb the material and the repeat would reinforce learning. Depending on how often you repeat the same pieces you can keep it in memory for a while.

Remembering the notes is 1 type of memory, getting the sequences in your hands require muscle memory. After playing for a while, I've come to the conclusion that some pieces are easier to remember than others either the sequence is simple or has a lot of repetitions.

The way I learn my pieces is slow practice. Take the tempo down to 50% when I can repeat at least 5x without mistakes. Take it a few BPMs faster. A piece that I haven't played for a week or longer, slow practice would be helpful instead of trying to play the first time at full speed.