Today you’re going to learn how to cut your piano practice time in half and double your results using accelerated learning techniques. We’re going to go through how to work smarter, not harder, and get more from each minute of your piano practice time.
Also, I’m going to discuss the crazy thing I learned from accidentally recording my piano practice session. The results from this absolutely shocked me and I’ll get deeper into that in a bit. Â
Furthermore, I’m going to go through what I call the “Eyewitness Fallacy” and how what you think you’re doing when you’re practicing isn’t actually what you’re doing. How do you solve this issue? I’ll let you know a bit later in this article. Â
Digging even deeper, I’ll tell you how you can make small changes to “Leverage Points” in your practice routine to get big results and how to use the 80/20 rule to get more done in less time.
My goal for you today is simple – help you maximize every single minute of your practice time. First, let me tell you about some problems beginners have.
The Problems Most Beginners Have
The first problem that everyone faces is not having a lot of practice time. We’re busy, have a lot going on, and the solution isn’t necessarily to find more practice time, but to make the most out of each minute of practice time we have.
The second problem most beginners have is that they get “stuck” and think the solution is just to practice more. We’ve all been there – practicing something over and over again but we can’t seem to get it. I’ll show you shortly how to solve this problem and use different strategies to get around it.
Another problem is the lack of motivation. Today we’ll also go through goal setting systems you can use to get results faster and stay motivated longer.
Imagine if you could…
Imagine what would happen if you could double your results and cut your practice time in half. Wouldn’t it be worth it to learn the skills necessary to make that happen? Think about how that would manifest over a year of time of practicing. You could essentially get two years worth of results in just one year of practicing.
From there, you’d be even more motivated to get results, which would lead to you practicing more and getting even better results. Then, instead of 2x the results you could be getting 2.5x, 3x, or even 4x the results. Imagine how much faster your progress would be! Coming up in this blog post I’ll teach you the system you can use to make this happen.
Back to Elementary School
Think back to elementary school for a minute. At some point you had to learn vocabulary words. When you first started learning them you probably tried to learn them by repetition. You’d say the word, say the definition, and move on to the next word doing the same thing over and over. It’s very monotonous and boring, but can you learn words that way? Yes, but it’ll take you a long time and often times you’ll forget the words a couple days after the test.
What if you would’ve thought of a different way to learn them? What if you worked smarter?
You could’ve used flashcards, gone through 5 words at a time, repeated each of them 3 times, and then moved on to the next group. And the next group. And the next group. You could’ve also used an acronym to help you remember them or a flow chart, and instead of taking 3 hours to learn them, maybe you learn them in 20 minutes.
Not only do these methods help you learn the words faster, they implant them deeper into your memory. Â
For example, if you’ve ever learned the order of the planets, you’ve probably learned some sort of acronym. The one I learned was “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas.” To this day, I know the order of the planets just because of this acronym I learned back in fifth grade. Why? Because I used a different form of learning. Â
With piano we’re going to use the same type of things. We won’t be using acronyms, but we will be using accelerated learning techniques.
Let’s Break Down Learning a Song
For each song, you have sections. For each section, you have to do a few things:
- Learn how to play the notes
- Speed up your playing
- Memorize the notes
- Put expressiveness into your playing
There are strategies that allow you to complete each of these steps. We’re going to go through a few things today that will help you like:
- Goal setting and song mapping
- 3 accelerated learning techniques
- Biggest mistakes
Lessons from Accidentally Recording My Practice Session
One day, after I recorded a song for my Zach Evans YouTube channel, I accidentally recorded my one hour practice session that followed. What I found out absolutely shocked me. I couldn’t believe how much time I wasted during my practice session.
I went through the video, watched myself practice, and split it up into good practice time and bad practice time.
Good practice time I defined as practicing correctly, slowly playing hands separate, gradually working up to hands together, actually practicing the hard parts that needed work, and practicing with intent and focus. Â Â Â Â Â Â
Bad practice time included repeatedly playing through parts I already knew, practicing a difficult part way too fast when it wasn’t ready, or trying to play hands together when the section clearly needed more hands separate work. Â
After taking a stopwatch and timing good and bad practice, here were the results:
- Total practice time: 56 minutes
- Efficient practice time: 19 minutes (34%)
- Inefficient practice time: 37 minutes (66%)
The worst part about this was that I thought I had a good practice session. I walked out of the practice session and thought, “Oh yea, I got a lot accomplished today” but this is dangerous because I wasn’t getting any feedback on how the session really went. We call this “The Eyewitness Fallacy.”
The Eyewitness Fallacy
There’s a psychological principle that basically witnesses at the scene of a crime, even though they’re trying to tell the truth, when interrogated later, their mind will shift what actually happened. They think they’re trying to tell the truth, but it’s not what actually happened.
This is similar to our piano practice. What we think we’re doing when we practice is not what we’re actually doing. Once we can solve this gap and implement a system to make sure we’re always practicing efficiently, with fail-safes in place as well, we’ll make progress much faster.Â
Song Mapping
With song mapping we’ll create a chart that gives us a pulse on exactly where each section of our song is. To do this, we need to follow two steps. First, we break the song into sections. Second, we create a master list.
I like to use Google Sheets to break down songs and create this master list. When breaking the song into sections, each will be between 2 and 16 measures long, with most being around 4 measures. If it’s a very difficult section, make it a smaller section because it’s going to be very difficult to learn. Â
In this video example, I break up the song “Clocks” by Coldplay into different sections.
Going back to the spreadsheet, I make a column titled “Sections” and then I’ll break up the song into section A, section B, section C, and so on. Then, I’ll add columns for the four steps I mentioned previously – Learn, Speed, Memorize, Expressiveness.  Â
If you learn every section from this sheet, you’ll know the whole song. All we have to do is cross off each box from our sheet once we learn each part. So, you’ll cross off the “Learn” box for section A, then the “Speed” box for section A, next the “Memorize” box for section A, and so on going through the entire sheet over time.    Â
Every one of the boxes of our sheet is basically a tiny sub-goal to completing your goal. You’ve probably heard that goal setting is really important and you should break your goals down into smaller goals. This sheet gives us a really efficient way to break down our goals into sub-goals.
When you practice these sections, you’ll make little notes in the boxes as well so you know exactly what you need to practice. This sheet will give you a “pulse” on where you’re at with each aspect of learning the song you’re practicing. Once you have your song mapped out, you can set your goals.
Goal Setting
This will literally take you two minutes, but will save you so much time. It’s a leverage point for you. Don’t take my word for it, just try it out one time. I promise if you try it out you’ll see how well it works.
With goal setting we take each section and decide what we’re going to work on for that day. For each goal we also have a strategy to achieve that goal. After, we have the results, what actually happened that day. Â
Going back to our Google Sheet, we create a tab titled “Goal Sheet” and this is where organize everything.
We’ll have a cell with our block time, typically with blocks of 5, 10, or 15 minutes. I prefer blocks of 10 or 15 minutes. If you’re practicing 30 minutes per day, using 10 minute blocks, this lets you practice three different sections per day.
I like to put each day of the week in one column, with room below each one for the number of blocks of time I have. If using 10 minute blocks with 30 minutes of practice time per day this gives me three rows for each day of the week.
Next we’ll create columns titled Section, Goal, Strategy, and Results next to our column of the days of the week. Going back to our master list tab, we want to see which sections need the most work. If we don’t do this, we’ll slip into the habit of playing the sections we already know because they’re more fun and easy. This is how we avoid that.    Â
In our goal sheet, we’ll add the first three sections we need to work on to Monday. Our goal for each of those sections will be based on the notes we had added to our master list while learning the song. If you had made a note that your left hand needs work, your goal could be to learn left hand.  Â
Now that we have goals for each section, we’ll move on to our strategy for achieving each of those goals. We may use the “Added Note Strategy” or the “Rhythms Strategy” for example. I’ll discuss those strategies a bit later so don’t worry about them just yet.
For our results column we’ll record what happened. Maybe you learned your left hand part or you were able to play at faster beats per minute – type that in the cell. Then we go back to our master list and update it with the current progress of each section.
In your goal sheet you can also add a notes column and keep track of any relevant details related to your practice. Maybe one of the strategies you tried worked really well for a certain section – log that so you know for next time. So, when you move on to the next day you’ll know exactly which strategy you should try out. You might even add notes on things that didn’t go well, so you know what you need to improve on. Go through this every day so you know specifically what you need to work on and which strategies to use to get the results you want in the quickest time possible.
Next, I’m going to go through some of the actual practice strategies you can use to get better results in less time.
Strategies for Better Piano Results
I’ve mentioned how using different practice strategies can get you better results, now it’s time to go through a few strategies that I find work best.
Strategy 1 – The Added Note Strategy
The added note strategy works best in the learn and memorize phase. You can also use a variation of this that’s called the reverse added note strategy. Let me demonstrate this added note strategy for you now to show you how you can use it to improve your piano skills.
Let’s say you’re just starting out with a song and trying to learn the first four bars. You’ll start by just playing the first two notes. You’ll repeat playing those first two notes four times. Then, you’ll add another note and play just the first three notes, practicing them four times as well. You’ll progressively add more notes until you can play the whole section. Â
This is a very good way of learning because instead of trying to learn everything at once, you’re breaking it down, just learning a few notes at once until you have them down rock solid. You also don’t have to apply this concept to an entire song or even an entire section – you could just use it on a measure at a time.
Furthermore, you can use the added note strategy on the left hand parts as well.
For the variation of this, the reverse added note strategy, you play the last two notes in a measure, then the last three notes, then the last four notes, and so on.
Using both of these strategies just ingrains them further into your fingers, solidifying your abilities, and making you even more confident. Â
Strategy 2 – Chunking
Chunking almost isn’t even a strategy – it’s something you basically do all the time with other strategies. This strategy is best used in the learn and speed phase. There’s also a variation I’ll talk about called “Overlapping Chunks” and I’ll go through why the chunking strategy is GREAT as a combo strategy as well.
All you do for the chunking strategy is break down your sections into small chunks and learn each individual chunk. Your first chunk might just be four notes. The best part is that these chunks can be any length you want. When we separated our song earlier into sections – A, B, C, etc. – that was basically chunking. Â Â
Let’s say you’ve broken up a song into different chunks and you’ve learned each of those chunks individually. To learn the transitions between chunks we’re going to use the “Overlapping Chunks” strategy. For this, you’ll take the last four notes of one chunk and combine them with the first four notes of the next chunk. This becomes a new chunk for you to learn.   Â
When I say that chunking is a great combo strategy, I mean that you can basically combine this with any other strategy you’ve learned. We actually did this with the added note strategy. You could’ve used it for the entire section or you could split it into smaller chunks. Â
Strategy 3 – Style Variations
This strategy is very good in the polish phase and, surprisingly, the speed phase. I like to use this strategy for getting out of “stuck” places and overcoming plateaus.
Using this strategy, you’ll play a song in four different styles. The first is loud, playing the section very strong, without getting injured or going crazy. You’ll repeat this four times. Next, you’ll play the section really soft, running through the section four times. After that, you’ll play it staccato, which is going to be harder. Normally you have that safety of your hands staying on the keys, but when you play staccato you have to lift your hands off the keys. This makes it more challenging, but also, when you play legato, the fourth style, it’ll be much easier.
If you want to, you can combine this strategy with other strategies. For example, you could take the first measure of a song, use the added note strategy and use variations. This is a bit more advanced, but using it can really drill in a section for you. Â
The style variation strategy does a couple things for you. First, it gives you ideas for how to play different songs, giving you a full range from staccato to legato. Second, I like this strategy simply for that fact that it does help me learn songs better and it’s actually a strategy I use for speed.
Next, I’m going to discuss some of the biggest mistakes I see people making when trying to learn piano. From there, I’ll tell you how to get all of the strategies, including the rhythm strategy, for learning piano faster.
The Biggest Mistakes Piano Players Make
It’s important to understand the following mistakes people make because if you make them too, the strategies I mentioned aren’t going to work how they should.
“I’ll Just Remember It” Syndrome
What people do a lot of times is fall into the trap of NOT writing down their goals. They think they’ll remember which sections they need to work on or which specific parts they struggled with, but the problem is they don’t stick to it. The days they’re really motivated, they’ll stick to it, but we all know that motivation doesn’t last. So, you have to write down your goals every single day – don’t just try to memorize them.
Not Using a Stopwatch (Eyewitness Fallacy)
Many people refuse to use a stopwatch to track the amount of time they’re working on different techniques or skills, but over time it’s easy for this practice time to diminish as motivation wanes. I know this because I was guilty of this too. That 10  minutes I thought I was going to spend on a particular technique ended up slipping to maybe 8 minutes or 6 minutes – I would shortchange myself without even realizing it.
This goes back to the concept of the “Eyewitness Fallacy” where what we think we’re doing isn’t what we’re actually doing. We need a mechanical thing, in this case the stopwatch, that we know will keep us on track, otherwise we’ll fall into bad habits.
Sloppy Practicing
If you’ve seen any of my other videos or lessons you know that I firmly believe if you’re playing the wrong notes or practicing the wrong notes you’re literally getting worse at piano.
Now, I’m a speed fanatic, I love to play songs fast, and I know that when I play a song fast it makes it sound cool. However, the trap I fall into is trying to play too fast when I’m not ready. This just makes my practice sloppy.
Instead of sloppy practice which can result from trying to play too fast, I recommend slowing things down to make sure you’re playing the notes correctly. Even slow progress and little steps forward are better than sloppy practice where you’re literally taking steps backward.
Here’s What I Want You to Have…
After reading this blog post, I want you to have three things:
- A bulletproof goal setting process and rock-solid focus
- Accelerated learning techniques
- “Break Through Plateau” confidence in yourself
I hope it’s been helpful for you and if you need additional support, reach out to me.
