I had meant to share this on PW a long time ago but never got around to it! My friend shared these videos by Dr. Molly Gebrian, a neuroscientist who is also a professional musician. The videos are about 45 minutes total (about 15 minutes each) and are extremely interesting and informative. They are about the physical processes that happen in your brain during the learning process and how to use that to optimize any kind of learning (surprisingly, long breaks are key!). I'm including a screencap of her ideal practice schedule from the third video.

I haven't been able to follow the schedule exactly but learning all this explains how I'm able to go a long time without practice and still somehow make progress! (I am a binge practicer, sometimes I am tired/sick/busy and don't touch the piano for weeks or even months, and sometimes I'm at it for 5-6 hours a day-- mostly when the pressure's on with a looming deadline like right now 😂).

From my friend:

Here are the videos from Molly Gebrian that have changed my life. It’s all about the neuroscience behind how we learn, and the third video is the pot of gold - that’s where she talks about the actual practice schedule she uses to achieve results. I have been using her ideas for a few years now, with unprecedented, amazing results! (It works for memorizing too!)


The Schedule

This is the schedule for whatever section you're working on. It doesn't mean take a break from piano, it just means take a break from that section. Be ready to mark up a calendar!

I'm very interested to hear if this helps anyone! I've been working on a major chamber music piece for 9 months and have 6 weeks until my workshop, and have mapped out a practice schedule for various sections. The piece is way too long for me to be able to practice the whole thing in one sitting anyway, so breaking it up is ideal! 🙂

    Want to add, we are pianists and not string players like Dr. Gebrian and we (obviously) have a lot more notes to learn. She's able to get something to performance level in a few weeks but most of us (at least amateurs) are not capable of that. I think of the schedule as cycles of preparation.

    I used her modified schedule during my initial learning process but I feel like a key part of learning a major piece well is also to start early and give myself a lot of lead time! For example, if I practice a piece for 10 hours but spread it over a month, I will make much more progress than practicing 10 hours in a single week.

    Right now I’m at the point where I know most of the notes but not necessarily fluently, so I’m working on getting things solid and accurate (with slow practice) and committed to finger memory, where if I’m playing my fingers just know where they’re supposed to go next. Since I’ve been working on this piece for so long, it’s half in my brain already. Not yet getting the hard stuff up to speed though. This is such a satisfying stage of preparation because it no longer takes several minutes just to stumble through one page and it’s starting to sound good! Hopefully with the help of her schedule, I can get everything up to performance level in the next 6 weeks🤞

    Fascinating videos which explain to a large extent what I have come to understand about my ability to learn and the time it takes. I totally agree with the need for sleep to consolidate learning.Also explains why resting a piece of music for a number of days or weeks often makes learning easier after the break.

    Thanks, twocats , for posting.

      keff you're welcome! It makes so much sense based on our own experiences, right? But it's very cool to see the science behind it.

      Turns out that when my sister and I made fun of our mom for saying that she used to prepare for exams by going to bed early, she was doing the right thing all along!

      I want to watch the third video again and then may make a schedule to start learning the harder variations within Mozart's sonata in A major K331.

      I have started to use Dr.Molly's schedule with the first movement of Mozart's piano sonata in A, starting at variation 2. I am now in day 2 of the schedule. When I reach my first variation 2 rest day I will enter the schedule with variation 3 and so on.

      Progress report no.1. Have reached day three of Dr.Molly's schedule practising variation 2. Tomorrow is the first rest day for variation 2 and will be the first practise day for variation 3.

      Variation 2 contains some trills which I always find difficult but I am now learning how they fit in with other notes. There are two or three g sharps which I keep missing. Because the schedule requires a new piece to be played everyday for the first three days I guess my progress is no different (up to this point in time) from a practise regime which requires playing a new piece every day. However the schedule does in theory promote faster progress on the whole of the sonata first movement because I can start the third variation tomorrow.

      Oh wow, I missed this, I’ll take a look, thanks two cats!

      Please see post under members' recordings if you would like to hear my attempts at using this schedule.

      I tried this a year or two ago with a Bach fugue and some sections of Chopin’s 4th Ballade. While I found it helpful, I think the most important thing for me was having a schedule to follow. I was a lot more purposeful in my practice, instead of leafing through books each day to figure out what I wanted to work on. It felt like the exact schedule wasn’t as important as just having a plan with some breaks built into it and following it.

      I’ve recently started learning the harp, and once I advance past the basic repertoire, I’m interested to see how this schedule works for that instrument.

      Yamaha C5X

      I still need to make time to watch the videos (I'm posting this mostly to remind myself!)

      But I wanted to say something about this:
      "For example, if I practice a piece for 10 hours but spread it over a month, I will make much more progress than practicing 10 hours in a single week."

      This is super, super interesting! In my day job, I'm a linguist and I teach a foreign language to uni students. I always tell my students that they will have better results if they study 10 minutes every day than if they study for 70 minutes once a week. It's the same principle you're describing.

      But! At the same time, there's something that happens we do an activity very intensely for a set amount of time. For example, language learners often report significant gains from short intensive programs where they have class every day for four hours, for eight weeks. This kind of mimics the level of input you might get from going abroad and immersing yourself.

      And I have always told my students that they may see the true fruits of such intense study not immediately, at the end of the program, but a few weeks afterward, after some resting. And I always tell my students that sleep is the single most important thing they can do to progress, whether they're doing an intensive program, or they're studying abroad.

      One of the things that happens with these kinds of intensive language programs is the development of fluency -- students become better able to convey their ideas through spoken language, they often report their first experience of dreaming in the language etc.

      So I have always felt that there is something qualitatively different that happens, in other words, that you can't experience the same kind of learning over the same amount of time, that something different happens in those condensed periods.

      So what is the corollary with piano? I'm not sure, because I've never experienced an intensive piano study that mimics these language intensive programs...

      Still I can't help but wonder whether there's something similar with music learning. So first, as has been discussed here, consistent (daily) practice, not super long, with lots of good quality sleep, is going to be essential.

      But what about the bust of intensity? What would the learning gains be from a week of being totally piano-focused and spending more time then you normally do, both at the keyboard and also mentally, studying the score or some similar non-keyboard musical study. And not really doing anything else.

      I would imagine that alternating between intense study and more "spread out" study would be beneficial, but in what ways. I'd love to know.

      I wonder if Noa Kageyama has ever written about this...

        ShiroKuro you definitely need to watch the videos and you may even want to share them with your students! It applies to all learning, not just music 🙂

        I will watch them! (just as soon as I finish watching this stupid thing I'm binge watching this week. 😅

          ShiroKuro hahaha the way you said it is making me want to guess what show it is! 😂

          Ok I’m back to this thread and going to watch the videos. But too embarrassed to say what my junk binge was! 😅

          I have 5 weeks left until my chamber music workshop and so much more work to do! But the schedule is helping me to be ok with not being able to practice the entire four movement piece every time I practice, and to be ok just working on 1.5 difficult movements right now. In a few days I'll swap to the first two movements. I'm not following the schedule strictly, but the spirit of it.

          Am not keen on Apple Calendar to track the schedule. If there is an all day event already standing it obscures my event that I type in to show which piece of music I am meant to be practising. No doubt it is my unfamiliarity but perhaps I should import Google Calendar as Dr.Molly advises.

            keff Am not keen on Apple Calendar to track the schedule.

            I use Google Calendar with the Business Calendar 2 app (such a great app, like it much better than the Google one) on my phone. When I was setting up practice schedules I created separate calendars where I could toggle to view to only see the schedule when I was about to practice, and I used different colors to indicate different sections. It worked really well for me! I hope you find a solution that works for you.

            I am pleased with my progress using the Dr.Molly Gebrian 'spaced' practice schedule to learn the first movement of Mozart's sonata in A K331. I have reached the end of the first three alternative days of practice on variation 2 (that is six days of practice in all, perhaps 30-40 mins each day) and have made a one take recording, accepting the mistakes and hesitations that are still taking place. I will post the recording into Members Recordings later today.

            As I see it the advantage of a spaced schedule is that it creates time to practise additional music and not become stale practising the same thing. Having rest days doesn't seem to slow down progress.

              keff As I see it the advantage of a spaced schedule is that it creates time to practise additional music and not become stale practising the same thing. Having rest days doesn't seem to slow down progress.

              Yes, the efficiency benefits are amazing! And I no longer feel bad about stepping away from a piece for a bit, knowing that my brain is still working on it in the background.

              I'm also more motivated to not skip a day of practice if I'm tired, knowing that I get that day's learning as well as that night's benefit.

                Andrew Huberman's podcasts have been a fantastic resource.

                This is probably the most relevant to piano learning. He even references learning instruments multiple times.

                The Bulletproof Musician blog is like a drug for me. I can't stop reading it. Here's one of the most insightful articles there:
                https://bulletproofmusician.com/the-two-most-efficient-and-two-least-efficient-memorization-strategies/?highlight=Memorize