I once read a book on time management. The entire book distilled down to this fact: If you have a week to pack for a trip it takes a week. I you have a day it takes a day. If you have an hour, you'll be packed in an hour. The problem with most people, when it comes to practicing the piano, is they allow too much time. Actually THREE MINUTES A DAY is all you need!Very few pieces of music are longer than three minutes, save for a few of the classics. Therefore, one can practice an entire selection in three minutes or less. Assuming you practice once a day, and assuming, like most people, you have about twenty favorite songs in your repertoire, you will wind up going thru each piece about eighteen times in a year. As you can see, that actually amounts to a lot of practice. This practice method is for those who already know how to play well enough to at least stumble thru a piece. It is not for the student still taking lessons.
Get started by asking yourself, what twenty songs would I want to be able to sit down and play if asked to play in public? Put the music in a stack on top of your piano. If the song is in a book, tape an index tab on to that page, or, photocopy the page out of the book. Each time you practice take the top piece of music off the stack and play it thru ONCE ONLY. Do not stop for mistakes. Do not play it a second time. Set the song you just played on the opposite side of the piano. Next time you practice play the next piece on the stack and transfer it to the played pile. Next time, same action. When all of your music winds up in the played stack, start the stack over again. After a few months of this type of practice, you'll be amazed at how good you get at each piece. After a time, you may remove some songs from your repertoire and add some new ones.
The best way to get your three minutes of practice in each day, is to tie the practice time to something else. Don't eat breakfast until you practice. Don't leave the house, take a shower, etc. I like, don't go to bed. Even if one is two hours past their bedtime, three more minutes is not going to make any difference. If you can honestly say you can not find three minutes in a day to practice, then you need a life coach, or a therapist, because, your life is seriously out of control!
If you need to brush up a bit on your piano skills I highly recommend the book HOW TO PLAY THE PIANO DESPITE YEARS OF LESSONS by Ward Cannel and Fred Marx. Library of Congress catalogue number 76-4037. Each lesson in the book can be accomplished in about three minutes. The book, originally published in 1976 is still the best review method I have seen.
I am often asked how long each day children should practice. Most piano teachers I know go with twenty minutes a day, five days out of seven. This is because children today, due to the entertainment media and computers, have a fairly short attention span. There is no benefit in the body sitting at a piano once the mind has drifted elsewhere. I actually further recommend splitting the twenty minutes practice into two ten minute sessions and tying them to other activities. For instance: right when the child walks in the door from school before any snack, changing clothes, etc. The second ten minutes can be after homework, but, before any leisure activity.
