How Often Should You Practice Piano?
To get good at anything, you need to have a structured pattern for your practice sessions. Because humans are creatures of habit, this also applies to your piano practice sessions. Keep yourself motivated with an online resource. Pianoforall is a great online resource to keep yourself structured an motivated.
In order for you to further develop your piano skills, you must practice regularly. To improve rapidly, you need to do regular exercises with your hands to get the muscle memory going.
This will help you do certain things in a natural way as if you were born with the skill, but it only comes through regular practice.
The Most Effective Way
For your practices to be effective, you need to have a structured pattern when it comes to learning the piano. As a beginner piano player, you will find that regular practice will help make it easier for you to play a certain technique.
It will be better to have shorter practice sessions two times a day than having a long session three times a week. Regular practice sessions will help you overcome those difficult techniques much quicker and much easier without getting tired too quickly.
The problem with many entry-level piano players is that they are in a hurry to master a technique, and they end up spending too much time on it. They might think that they will improve the technique by practicing like that, but in reality, they are holding themselves back.
Shorter, more regular practice sessions will improve your technique by improving your memory muscle and making it more natural. This way you will learn to play the notes and chords in a more natural way and prevent frustration when you struggle.
The best way to learn the piano is to start slow and perform the technique correctly from the start. As you get better, the speed factor will come, and you will soon be more fluent when executing the technique.
This is especially the case when new piano players must learn the scales up and down the keyboard. You might feel a bit frustrated when you just start, but with time, you will find that slow is better with the piano.
More Often Is Better
It is also important to know that learning a musical instrument is like learning a new language. You must speak the language often to become fluent in it. This is the same with the piano – if you practice regularly, you will learn faster.
When it is said that you must practice more, it simply means that you must do it more often, not necessarily longer. For beginners, it is better to practice 15 minutes two times a day to prevent your hands from becoming tired.
If you practice like that, your hands will be able to become more flexible and become used to the exercise. This way, you will not get frustrated when practicing with tired hands that can not keep up, and that causes you to make errors.
To explain it better, let’s use an example of a marathon runner who runs too hard too quickly. This will cause the leg muscles to get too tired to take you the full distance you want to run.
When your fingers get tired, they will fumble and cause you to make an error and not execute the technique the way you want to. When you are learning to play the piano, for a few months or a year, you will get frustrated with this type of thing.
That is the reason why young people give up after only a year or two and regret it when they get older. This is why it is important to get used to the exercises before you increase the duration of the practice sessions.
Set Goals For Yourself
When you start learning to play the piano, you need to set goals for yourself that you can keep up with. Your goals must be such that you will be able to achieve them with minimal amounts of frustration.
Even if you are receiving private piano lessons, you must practice everything you learn from your teacher on your own. This will give you time to spend with the piano and get your hands and ears used to the sounds and movements.
In the beginning, you can start out with only a few minutes that are set aside for just piano practice. However, you will not know enough to keep yourself busy for a long time.
The time you spend on practicing the piano will increase gradually over time when you learn more skills. This is when you need to set feasible goals, for instance, to practice for 20 minutes per day with two 10 minute sessions.
You can keep this up for a month and then make it 30 minutes a day with two 15 minutes sessions per day. When you get to the third month, you will have learned enough to keep yourself busy for more than 15 minutes at a time.
This way, you can divide your time between scales and chord practicing for the first session and other progressions for the second daily session. As you go on, you can add the songs in every session so your fingers and hands will get used to the positions.
It is quite easy to learn a certain piece of music with a practice session of 15 to 20 minutes per day in a short time. That will include the easy to intermediate pieces you need to learn for your grades.
By the time you get to the more difficult pieces, your practice sessions will be much longer, but you will be used to that. With a gradual increase over a period of 6 months, you should be able to have two practice sessions of 30 minutes per day.
Summary
As you can see, it is quite important to be patient when it comes to learning to play the piano. However, it should not all be about learning but also about having fun, and that is where the goals will help you a lot.
Hopefully, this information will help you have fruitful and effective piano practice sessions and answer the question, how often should you practice piano? Let us know in the comments how often do you practice?