- Edited
Please see post under members' recordings if you would like to hear my attempts at using this schedule.
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 Chopinโs 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 wasnโt as important as just having a plan with some breaks built into it and following it.
Iโve recently started learning the harp, and once I advance past the basic repertoire, Iโm 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...
I will watch them! (just as soon as I finish watching this stupid thing I'm binge watching this week.
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
ranjit 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
Great article, thanks for sharing ranjit!
I'm going to give this a try, of sorts--I find myself rapidly morphing schedules to something that suits me better, but that's okay. What's not clear to me is what constitutes "different" material. At one point she says you practice something, some section, and then put it aside for a time before coming back to it, and that it's okay to work on something else. Is she saying that you can just put together a bunch of chunks and practice them, one after another (or in any order)? That the only difference is that you don't practice them everyday, except for new stuff, which you practice for three days straight? This is more or less how I practice already, but I don't keep it on a calendar.
Twocats, it seems as if that might not be different enough for your brain to categorize as 'different.' I guess you'd have to be on the lookout for similar material, as in the recap in a sonata.
Stub if there was a repeat/recap I always think of it as being free! In my case, I've broken up my pieces into 3 big chunks as I do final preparations for my workshop: 1st movement; 2nd movement + half of 3rd movement; second half of 3rd movement + 4th movement. So big chunks. I think you need to figure out how much you can work on in a practice session and go from there.
Edit: I've been working on this piece for 8 months and am finally getting it under my fingers, so the "big chunks" of my current schedule are the final push to get it to performance level. When I started working on it, one section might have only been couple of pages.