Tip number two for practicing the piano: Listen to your pieces.
Students have endless recordings available to them, right at their fingertips. They can listen to many different performers/teachers/other students playing and/or talking about the very same pieces they are practicing. I didn’t have such a luxury when I was growing up. YouTube and Apple Music didn’t exist. I basically only had the opportunity to listen to my teacher play for me. (I was lucky enough to have a teacher who could play any piece I could ever aspire to play, which was amazing)! Before, you had to remember how your teacher played a particular part when you were practicing. Now you can record them (if your teacher is ok with this, of course), and listen back as many times throughout the week as you find helpful. Or you can find someone else’s interpretation to inspire you.
It’s always good to listen to as many different interpretations of the same piece as possible. It allows you more freedom in learning the piece. You set out to learning a new piece with a vision of how it should sound in the end result. Maybe you think it should sound exactly how your piano teacher played it. But maybe slight changes in certain areas will feel more natural to you.
It doesn’t always end up exactly as planned. This is completely normal! Sometimes what works in our imagination doesn’t quite work in our fingers, so it’s important to know that there are other ways to make the music sound good. Giving yourself this freedom isn’t easy for everyone. Some people like to play something exactly as they heard it. And that’s ok, too, if you can pull it off!
This newfound freedom doesn’t mean you go and create something completely different from what is written, but music isn’t so rigidly structured that you can’t take some liberties in how it sounds when you play a piece. Have a little fun with it!
Chopin- étude op.25, no.9 (Butterfly)
One of the dreaded black key études! 😅 Thankfully this is just a practice video (please keep that in mind)! It only took me about 25 takes lol… and it’s still not nearly as good as I was hoping for. Totally blew by the ritenuto, too. Oh well!! This is why it is good to record yourself, well before the performance stage- it shows you where you’re truly at with the piece! 🤓