Most of us lead busy lives. If you're a student, there are exams and assignments.  As an adult, it's even tougher - work commitments, raising children, everybody and everything demands your time.  Unfortunately, piano practice adds to that list.  So let's be realistic.  Most of us aren't striving to be world-class performers - we have moderate, personal goals and would like to improve as quickly as we can with as little practice each week.  Sound about right?

The key to consistent progress is consistent practice and there's no way around that, but if we practice efficiently, we can make the most of each minute we're sitting at the keyboard.  As a minimum, aim for 3 practice sessions per week and try to devote 20-30min for each session.  If that seems very manageable, then practise more. If it seems too much of a commitment, aim for 10min practice every second day. Regular amounts of practice will see you improve, even if it's only 10 minutes at a time.

Technical work involves playing scales, broken chords, ear training, etc. For most of us, it's a struggle to diligently practise our scales and other exercises. But if I can show you their importance and relevance, then maybe this would motivate you a little more.

Here's a simple analogy. Let's say you're a athlete, training to compete in the 100m sprint. In preparation for the event, you'll need to do more than just run 100m every day. Sure, that will help, but it'll take more than that to win the event. There's weight training, proper diet, exercises and a lot of other activities that contribute to your success as a 100m sprinter. The same applies to playing and improvising songs well. Scales and broken chords strengthen our fingers, improve our coordination, provide evenness in our playing and internalises chord structures. Ear training helps us to identify chords upon hearing them which is essential for playing by ear, music composition, transposition, etc.

Practically speaking, start off each session with a few minutes of scales and broken chord exercises. For beginners, aim to learn 2 major scales each week. Focus on correct fingering, evenness and smoothness, rather than speed. Practise hands separately, then together. Broken chords help improve your grounding of triads and their inversions, and prepare you to execute some fancy runs in the future.

Now you've warmed up and are ready to practise your songs. But, don't just play songs from start to finish, stumbling past the same mistakes each time. Break your song into verse and chorus, and break that down further into smaller 2 or 4 bar progressions. Practise these progressions repeatedly until you can vary the inversions of each chord without hesitation or gaps in your playing. There's so much more I can say, but hopefully, this will give you a start to proper practice techniques. Any questions.. please email me!

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clement williams
Posts: 2

how can I join
Reply #2 on : Tue January 10, 2012, 19:40:01

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I heard a guy the other day he was teaching I love what he taught I need a solid program I've been conned rip off it's crazy I need a slid program

Fam Pei Ling
Posts: 2

Ear training lesson
Reply #1 on : Sun November 20, 2011, 21:11:07

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How can I train my ear? Is there any good ear training programme that u can list for me?
cuz i m scared that buying it on9 is a scam.. thankyou so much...