PianoTell's 3rd Annual Practice Accountability Challenge - Team 2026 (PACT2026)

Sophia · 2025-12-13T17:40:44+00:00

You are cordially invited to join the Practice Accountability Challenge - Team 2026 (that's PACT2026)! The challenge starts January 1st. This is a team-oriented accountability challenge designed to energize and support everyone's piano practice. PACT tracks any amount of time on your piano practice (that can be 5 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour - that's completely up to you!) There are no PACT police. The challenge is based on the honour system. You get to choose which instrument to use, and what activities effectively and meaningfully support your practice. PACT is meant to be flexible, welcoming, and encouraging. Ideally, everyone thrives and completes the challenge! CHALLENGE GUIDELINES Join this challenge by adding a comment to this thread with your pledge to participate. Signing up is your pledge to engage in activities that effectively and meaningfully support your piano practice for any amount of time, every day, for the whole year. We have no means to distribute a forum award, apart from a pat you can give yourself on the back when you complete the challenge. We'd love to hear about your accomplishments and challenges throughout the year. You may join the challenge at any time, whether it's one day into the new year or the last day of the year - it's all good. Unexpected events happen that derail even the best laid plans. By signing up, you can optionally pledge to report any absences by leaving a comment in this thread. If you want to explain why you've missed a day (make us laugh, make us cry, make us cheer), you may be as dramatic as you want, but only the date(s) that you didn't practice are important to mention and will be added at the bottom of this invitation. 2026 PACTICIPANTS @Jay @KevinM @LauraLang @MandM @navindra @Ornstein @rsl12 @ShiroKuro @Sophia @TC3 @TLH21 @TulipAcid EXCUSED ABSENCES (the E-List) @rsl12 February 11 @TLH21 April 24 @Sophia May 29 @rsl12 May 1 - July 31 @TLH21 August 6

TulipAcid

ShiroKuro

Good point! Beginning of the "school year" and all!

Count me in.

I'm interested as well in what others do in their practice sessions. Do share!! 🙂

I'm preparing for my first lesson in 40 years. Yikes! Nervous! No doubt I'm over-preparing.

I have a 2 week goal -- Prepare some videos for my new instructor, along with some information regarding how I re-started my pianistic activities. Share a few days before my first lesson. However, I don't want to overwhelm him, yet, lessons are only 30 minutes long. I don't want to waste the time...

It will require practicing to ready the 2 works I have in mind for the video (not Last Song, tee hee.) They're in pretty good shape. Would be nice if I could get a complete relatively glitch-free performance on video. (Ha!)

My theory on scales and arpeggios is to focus on the works I'm in the process of learning and practice scales & arpeggios in whatever keys are present in those works. I'll put in just enough work to somewhat exceed the demands of those works. No one will be impressed by my blazing fast multi-octave performances.

Likely, much will change after that initial lesson and the subsequent one during the month!

Anyway, wish me luck!

TC3

TulipAcid I'm interested as well in what others do in their practice sessions. Do share!!

Sure thing!

I'm not a huge practicer -- I have other things I need and want to do! I try to get in a solid hour, maybe more if I have the time, energy, and interest, but rarely more than 1.5 hours. The daily plan is generally:

20 minutes: technical work (sight-reading, scales, exercises, etc.)
20 minutes: repertoire (a piece or two, some good enough to play and share, others to 80% or so just to get something out of it)
20+ minutes: contemporary piano (right now, that means rock tunes for my garage band and the Last Song piece a bunch of us are working on -- recently I've been doing 20 minutes on each of those things, so about 80 minutes total)

I have no shame about taking a day off here and there, esp. with my long-standing RSI issues -- not to mention the fact that's it's just a hobby! So as I said upstream, I'm not really PACTing in an "every single day" sort of way.

Sophia

Simonb I will join this next year!

Yippeee, the more the merrier 🙂

TulipAcid Count me in.

What a great day to start 😃 Welcome, welcome! A tiny bit of background (in case you weren't aware): I am an eternal quitter, never got past the first book. Over, and over, and over. So when I started playing (again) in 2024, I joined "Master of Your Own Destiny" (weirdly named MOYD, which Bart then explained as a play on words about some comedy show, forgot the details) in PW. I loved the idea of making yourself accountable of your practice, and so when we moved across to this forum, after some braintorming, a group of us came up with PACT. It morphed somewhat over the past few years into what you see today 🙂

The rest is history. I have to say it really, really has helped me. Proof: for the first time in my life, I have stuck to my practice and finished all three Alfred books. Sometimes I still struggle with practicing every day, but PACT is always in the back of my mind.

I started with pledging just 5 minutes each day, and this year I upped that to 15. And I'm proud to say that I only missed one day: because we had a power outage and digital pianos don't really perform all that well without power 😅 I'm less proud to say that there have been (too) many days where I did the bare minimum, but, eh. You can't have it all!

Overall I consider myself a casual learner: usually I just pick one piece and practice it until either I had enough of it, or until it's polished enough to record.

Anyway, again, welcome @TulipAcid - you're added to the list of PACTicipants 😃

TulipAcid

Sophia usually I just pick one piece and practice it until either I had enough of it, or until it's polished enough to record.

Um, sounds like me re: enough of THAT already!

Thanks for the warm welcome to the PACT!

I probably won't have difficulty putting in time, what's going to matter is am I focusing enough on the things that I need to do to unlearn bad habits and practice things I might not enjoy that much but are beneficial. There's going to be a balance there ... if it's in service of I BADLY want to play XXX piece well enough for an amateur... I'm all for it. If it's "good for me" with no clear idea of why...

Sophia

Right, that's basically what PACT is about. You pick your own personal goal or plan of action, and then let PACT do the "enforcing" 🙂 Some, like me, just need the boost to play each day, and that is why I consciously report the missed days. But others, like Shiro and TC, are happy to just report their monthly "this is what I did" status.

Good luck with your upcoming lesson! Don't fret too much, your teacher would love to have something left to work with 🙃

TulipAcid

Practicing virtually every day isn't so far challenging for me. What is challenging at the moment is discipline.

It's OK to play something I like as a part of my warmup, but I need to move on to things that will help me progress. So many technical things that seem simple that I'm meh at. For example the Oom pa pa waltz thing.

To the rescue, Schubert's Ländler and Eccosaises. Short pieces all. Like 2-3 staves. Waltzes can be pretty. Kind of need that skill to be 2nd nature to play Chopin nocturnes. So. I hearby commit to picking two at most to use after warmup as technique development.

Generally, I'll play the scale, chords+inversions and arpeggios in the keys of things I'm working on. Or have on my next to learn list. Don't feel the need to do them in five octaves or fast or in contrary motion. 5-10 minutes.

I practice a new tune during the day until I feel diminishing returns. A way to avert that is to break out sections of the tune to focus on. Then I play whatever. "Repertoire," sight-read, whatever. If I'm drawn back to the piano during the day, I might revisit the new tune. Sometimes I put a new tune aside for a day or so and let it cook so to speak. And sometimes those breaks result in unexpected progress. The stuff that seemed tricky became easier!!!

I really need to put my list together for lessons so I'm not caught tongue tied...First lesson is next Tuesday!!!

ShiroKuro

TulipAcid First lesson is next Tuesday!!!

Oh that's exciting!

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