8 Simple Habits to Become a Better Pianist 🎹

Hello, welcome back to my channel. Today, I'm going to talk about eight habits that can help you become a better pianist. I've observed these habits in professional musicians that I've worked with, and I've also observed them in university students that I work with in my role as a piano professor. They're also habits that I work hard to cultivate in my own professional life as a pianist. Every single one of these habits can help you improve at the piano, regardless of your level. So let's get started. Habit number one is to set goals and track your progress. It's essential to have a plan when you go into the practice room. Don't be one of these pianists who just goes in and unpacks your music, and then you're like, huh, what am I going to work on? I guess I'll just play through a bunch of stuff. And then you just like play, and then you kind of space out, and you're really not that focused. And at the end of the time, you're like, well, I guess my time's up. I better go. But you haven't really accomplished anything, and you don't even know what you did during that time. It's very important to have a plan and use your time in the practice room well. If you were studying for a test, you wouldn't just open the textbook and randomly read sections of it and say, well, I have a test coming up. I guess I better just learn this whole textbook. Instead, what you do is you focus on what's going to be on the test. The same process applies to learning a piece on the piano. Look ahead to your performance date, and then work backwards from there, setting benchmarks of when things need to be ready. For example, if I have a performance in six months of a piece, five months from now, I want to have the piece completely learned and start playing a lot of practice performances for people. Four months from now, I'm going to be solidifying the memory for that piece so that I have two whole months where the piece is memorized and I'm just refining and practicing my performing. Going backwards from that benchmark, you might say to yourself, OK, in two months time, I want to have the piece completely up to tempo and comfortable where it feels really solid. And then going backwards from the two month period, you could say, OK, in a month, I want to have the whole piece learned with all the correct notes and rhythms, even if there are a few spots that I'm still working out. And then going back from the month, you could say, OK, while I'm learning the notes for this piece, and that means I should be doing three or four pages a week if I'm learning the notes. Now, that's a plan. That is a way to set goals and have benchmarks so that you are able to sit down in the practice room and know exactly what you're going to work on that day. If this idea of setting goals for yourself is new to you, then I encourage you to start by keeping a practice journal where you write down what you've done every day and then plan what you're going to do the next day. Having a written plan and following that plan and adjusting the plan as you go along makes a huge difference in terms of your ability to progress as a pianist. Habit number two is compare yourself to yourself. When you learn a musical instrument, it is so easy to compare yourself to other people. We see other people around us who are at a different level than we are, and then that can make us feel very insecure about our own abilities. It activates our own feeling of imposter syndrome and negative self-talk that we all carry around with us when we compare ourselves to other people. The happiest pianists that I've encountered, both as a professor and as a professional pianist, are the ones who aren't trying to beat other people and who have trained themselves not to compare themselves in a toxic way with other people. Instead, they're focusing on their own progress, their own projects, their own creative expression. And what they can do to progress on their own journey. The great thing about playing music is that it's not a zero-sum game. Everybody can play great and it doesn't take away from anybody else. As a matter of fact, it elevates the whole field of music if everybody is playing to the best of their ability. When I was in music conservatory, there was a phrase that people like to say, which was, everything sounds better through a door. And what that means is when you're going through the halls of the practice rooms and you hear all the pianists practicing, it can sound so intimidating to hear just these waves of virtuosity coming at you through all the doors. But the reason we say everything sounds better through a door is because if you're actually standing in the room with the person, you're going to start to hear some of the flaws and imperfections because you're focusing more just on what they're playing. And also by extension, you sound better through a door. So don't be nervous if you're playing and you're practicing somewhere and you're afraid somebody's going to overhear you. First of all, they're probably not focusing on you because they're worrying about how they come across in the world. But also you probably sound better to other people than you think you do. So if there's one thing I want you to take away from this video, it is to remember everybody's on a different journey. You're on your own journey and your journey is just as valid as anybody else's. Worrying about how you stack up compared to other people will only hold you back because it makes your focus go outside yourself and to other people instead of focusing on the things you can control, which is how you practice, when you practice, what you practice, how you focus, how you take care of yourself, how you start to think about the piano and your preparation. Habit number three, focus on the process, not the outcome. This is a tricky one for pianists and musicians. I think this is hard because what we do is so competitive with ourselves. We always are trying to strive to be better and better at the instrument and we pour hours and hours of effort and time. And therefore there is the feeling that if we've invested so much of ourselves, so much time and effort, there should be some kind of payoff at the end of it. But the nature of live performance is such that sometimes you're going to feel great about how you perform and sometimes you're not going to feel very good about how you perform. And all you can do is try to set yourself up so that you have optimal preparation and the optimal circumstances to perform your best. That means you are well prepared, you are psychologically prepared for the performance experience, and you've practiced performing a lot, you've practiced the piece a lot, and you feel confident, you're well rested, and you're taking good care of your physical and emotional health. After that, it's all out of your hands. I've noticed in my work with my students that the students who are focused on the process and not attached to a specific outcome are the ones who are the happiest. And ironically, they're the ones who progress the fastest and play performances with the most confidence. There is a lot of joy in the experience of practicing, of improving, of refining your skills that are the reward in themselves. If you get too attached to a specific outcome, such as winning a certain prize or having a certain type of performance, that can often make you more tense and more brittle as a performer. And what that does is it makes the stakes seem much, much higher than they really should be. And then that creates all kinds of performance anxiety and potentially negative performance experiences. And so this habit of keeping your eye on your daily progress and enjoying that journey is something that's going to help you succeed so much more than if you are overly attached to specific goals and specific outcomes. Habit number four is to listen to music. And when I talk about listening to music, I mean listen to music in the genre that you're learning. If you're a jazz pianist, listen to a lot of jazz. If you're a classical pianist like me, listen to a lot of classical music. Listen broadly, listen frequently and widely. Listening to a lot of music will help you get familiar with the style and the language of music that you are playing and practicing on the piano. And I think the reason for this is that they get familiar with the language. They get familiar with how a composer writes, not only for the piano, but for other instruments. then you're going to be missing a lot in terms of what you're capable of imagining while you're practicing. In Beethoven sonatas, you're going to want to sometimes imagine an orchestration of the music you're playing and not only imagine what it would sound like on the piano. You want to be able to imagine, well, this could be a flute solo here. This kind of sounds like a string quartet in this section. And then to have that sound in your ears. And the only way to get that sound in your ears is by listening to a lot of music. Habit number five is be consistent. What I mean by being consistent is commit to yourself that if you're serious about the piano, you're going to practice every day. Making a commitment to show up every day and sit at that piano bench, even if sometimes you might not feel like it, is a way to ensure that you're going to make consistent progress over time. It's not what you do on any one individual day that matters. It's the accumulation of many, many days of practice that have the ultimate end result. I have three tips for you to help build consistency into your practice routine. The first tip is to figure out the time of day that you concentrate the best and practice consistently at that time. If you're used to always practicing at seven o'clock in the morning or nine o'clock in the morning and that's built into your schedule every day as much as you possibly can, then you will start to expect to practice at that time and you don't always have to decide fresh whether or not you're going to practice. And that helps eliminate resistance you may have to the idea of practicing. My second tip for being consistent is to schedule your practice time into your calendar and treat it like a rehearsal or a meeting that you have set. And that is a way to teach yourself to honor that commitment to yourself just as much as you would honor the commitment to another person. And my third tip is to start a streak as in practice every single day without missing a day and find a way to visually represent it. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld is credited with the saying don't break the chain. And what that means is he would write a joke every day and then he would put a big X on his calendar and he would see this streak represented in the X's on his calendar and he wouldn't want to break the chain of X's. And that's why he says don't break the chain. Just get started do something every day and over time all of those little actions of showing up at the piano bench and doing your work even if sometimes you just don't feel like it will accumulate. Habit number six is sight read sight reading is the number one skill to level up your piano playing. If you can improve your sight reading you will be able to learn pieces more quickly and you will also be able to do things like accompany people and play collaboratively with people in different situations which is really fun and enjoyable. Now I'm not going to make a whole video right now about sight reading. There are many many sight reading resources out there but I can tell you that sight reading consistently is important. I would advise taking 10 or 15 minutes a day and perhaps using that to warm up doing some some sight reading. Find a level of sight reading that is a couple of levels below your actual playing ability so that you are able to sight read and make it actually sound like music. Don't sight read things that are just way too hard. And then thirdly make sure that you sight read something and spend time going over it a few times so that you are micro learning the piece. The way that I think about it is that the process of learning a piece starts here and then you can go all the way in the learning process to bring it all the way to performance level which is here. Practicing sight reading is going over and over and over with different pieces things at this point in the journey the very first time you look at them. Habit number seven focus on expression not just technique. A lot of times I see students get very concerned about their technique and I understand because technique is something that we see and that we can control we can change it it's very tactile it's very visible. But the thing is technique is always in service to the expression because what are you doing at the piano you're taking notes that a composer wrote you are then turning them back into sound by physically playing them on the piano. So of course your technique needs to be up to the task but it is always in service to what the composer was trying to express. And so what often happens is piano students think about mastering technique in order to be able to play expressively. However if you flip that around and you think to yourself well what am I trying to express here in the first place that will help you understand what technique you need to develop. The way to get there is to ask yourself when you're looking at a piece of music what is the composer trying to say here is the music sad is it happy if it's happy is it happy like going to a party or is it happy like mildly enthusiastic. What's the specific nature of the happiness if this were a movie soundtrack what would the visuals be and how does that go back to technique. Well if I've determined that the music is going to be haunting in nature then that means I'm probably not going to play super duper loud. It'll probably tell me how I want to pedal. Do I want to have long blurry pedals or do I want to have shorter more clear pedals. Then that's what I practice then I have to develop the technique in order to be able to do that really really well. When you practice technique remember that the technique is always in service of the expression. When you're working on technical exercises always remember that these technical exercises are related to something in context in the music. And so I would I would urge you to focus on the music that you want to play the technical demands that that music requires based on what you want to express through sound. And then isolate and hone in on the technical skills that you need to possess in order to bring that music to life. Habit number eight is record yourself and listen back. A lot of people feel really uncomfortable at the idea of recording themselves and listening back and I get it. It's kind of like when you listen to a recording of your own voice. It doesn't sound like the way you think you sound and it can be a little bit upsetting if you're not used to it. When we play the piano or any instrument really there's always a gap between what we think we are playing versus what is actually coming out of the instrument. And recording yourself and listening back will help you narrow that gap. I'm sure you've had the experience of somebody pointing out something on your face like going, oh, look, look here, look here. And then you like try to find it. They're like, no, no, no, not there, not there. You have something here, here. And then you're like trying to find it. It would be much more efficient if you were to just take out a mirror, look and get it off yourself. That's really similar to recording yourself and playing back. You will hear things that you're not aware of when you're practicing. To really benefit from the experience of listening back to yourself, you can record yourself. Just use your phone. Put that on the edge of the piano and then play something. Maybe play a longer passage, maybe a playthrough of something you're working on. Or maybe if you're having technical issues, play that technical spot that's really bothering you. So you get a video of it. Then after you're done playing it, stop the recording and make sure you sit down with your music and something to write with. Listen back to what you played and mark in your music what you want to fix and change or think about in your next practice session. It's also helpful to mark things that you feel like went really well so that you feel a sense of accomplishment. And like you're not only doing negative self-assessments when you record yourself and listen back. And if you're not in the habit of regularly listening back to yourself, I would say try to do it starting once a week. And maybe every Friday you're going to sit down, you're going to play through all your pieces. Then you'll listen back, you'll notice what you notice, write them down, write them in the score. And then practice those things for the week and repeat the process the following Friday. Today we've been talking about eight habits that can help you improve as a pianist. Habits are closely tied to goals. Check out this video right up there for a deeper dive on goal setting as it applies to piano practice. Don't forget to like, subscribe and share this video. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Happy practicing.