Remember to warm yourself up everyday.
Dancers warm up for their practice with yoga so that their body is flexed and prepped for the difficult position or movements. This is equally important for a pianist. We use our body to achieve musical means. Start your practicing sessions with stretching, taking deep breathes, tuning your mind to focus on improving physical skills and enhancing senses. Otherwise, you find yourself having muscle cramps on fingers/arm/shoulder, mind wandering away onto your shoplist or to-do list, or you are repeatedly playing the wrong notes. And you find yourself develop a bad habit, in opposed to your ultimate goal in practicing – developing good habits.
Skills are habits. But not all habits are skills. Why? Skills are good habits. It helps you succeed in bringing out your best performance. In fact, if you connect your good habits piece by piece, you form a good performance. On the other hand, if you have lots of good habits mingled with some bad habits, you will give a mediocre performance. If you have only bad habits, you can’t even finish performing. Bad habits are the last thing you want to develop from your practice session. And the first thing to do in your practice session is to sort out your bad habits and replace with good habits that work with your musical ideal. If you teach your fingers what to do throughout the practice, they know exactly what to do. But if you ignore them, they have no sense of direction, and they screw each other up instead up working as “a team” to achieve your musical means. You have to lead them, plan them, and train them like how you would train a dog not to pee on your carpet.
So, if you have a good practice session, the good habits become your second nature. It helps you a long way to play any other pieces with ease. Imagine, not just one simple “twinkle twinkle little star”, but also the whole Mozart’s theme and variations with full musicality. Try it today and you will find out that you can do it.
Dancers warm up for their practice with yoga so that their body is flexed and prepped for the difficult position or movements. This is equally important for a pianist. We use our body to achieve musical means. Start your practicing sessions with stretching, taking deep breathes, tuning your mind to focus on improving physical skills and enhancing senses. Otherwise, you find yourself having muscle cramps on fingers/arm/shoulder, mind wandering away onto your shoplist or to-do list, or you are repeatedly playing the wrong notes. And you find yourself develop a bad habit, in opposed to your ultimate goal in practicing – developing good habits.
Skills are habits. But not all habits are skills. Why? Skills are good habits. It helps you succeed in bringing out your best performance. In fact, if you connect your good habits piece by piece, you form a good performance. On the other hand, if you have lots of good habits mingled with some bad habits, you will give a mediocre performance. If you have only bad habits, you can’t even finish performing. Bad habits are the last thing you want to develop from your practice session. And the first thing to do in your practice session is to sort out your bad habits and replace with good habits that work with your musical ideal. If you teach your fingers what to do throughout the practice, they know exactly what to do. But if you ignore them, they have no sense of direction, and they screw each other up instead up working as “a team” to achieve your musical means. You have to lead them, plan them, and train them like how you would train a dog not to pee on your carpet.
So, if you have a good practice session, the good habits become your second nature. It helps you a long way to play any other pieces with ease. Imagine, not just one simple “twinkle twinkle little star”, but also the whole Mozart’s theme and variations with full musicality. Try it today and you will find out that you can do it.
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