Recording CD's for Students

Sooooo . . . I've started a huge project. Over Christmas vacation I found a great deal on a recorder I've been looking at for a while on Amazon.com, the H2 Zoom. This week I've finally got it figured out, and I spent time in every lesson today recording performances and saving them to a folder for each student. At the end of the year I'll burn all files a student has recorded onto a CD for a record of their year. I'm very happy with the quality of the sound we're getting with this recorder. It's very noticeable that students are much more serious about "doing it right" knowing that we are putting their performances on a cd. It's a miracle!

Practicing in Sections

In 2 weeks, 20 of my students will be performing in our state piano contest. It's my hope they all pay attention to how they are practicing the last few weeks before contest. I've been recording them and trying to iron out those last few problems, writing post its and reviewing their challenges with them every week.

In this post I'm going to review the main points I seem to be going over and over, hoping they will sink in. When you approach a difficult piece the only way to do it is - Divide and Conquer!

Stopping mistakes before they start. When you practice in easily digestible sections from the very start, you are cutting your learning time in half by not making huge mistakes from the beginning.

Setting Daily Goals. Make a goal to focus on one problem section a day and get it down really well. Be reasonable with yourself and limit your focus to 1, 2, or 4 measures at a time. Play as many repetitions, slowly, with your best concentration, as the section needs to improve. Mindless repetition just for repetition's sake won't help you improve. Review what you've done the next day of practice and then move on to fix the next section that needs attention.

Three Times in a Row Perfectly. You will know each section well if you will make it a rule to play it 3 times in a row perfectly (including no pauses!). Remember, a pause is a mistake! Fix it right away, otherwise you will keep pausing at the same spot. Keep it smooth!

Sectional practice gives you safety spots, or good starting points. A safety spot will be your salvation in a performance if you somehow lose your way. Practice starting at the beginning of every main section. These are your "safety spots." The more difficult the piece, the more safety spots you need, even every 4 to 6 measures. If you can do this you know the piece very thoroughly.

Don't skip hands separately! If you can't play the piece or section hands separately, you don't know the piece well enough to perform it in a contest. Even up to the day of the performance, practice hands separately, LH first. It is common to think you know the piece, only to have the memory fade during a performance because you didn't know the LH well enough. Then practice hands together.

Start slowly, then build tempo. When learning, the perfect tempo for you is the tempo at which you can play with NO pauses or mistakes. Above all, get the fingering first, along with playing the notes and rhythms correctly. You are not playing correctly if you have a sloppy fingering that doesn't work well. You will pay for sloppy fingering in time you'll have to spend later to unlearn it and then relearn the correct way. Your teacher coaches you on fingering; her advice simply is the best way for your hands to move fluently around the keyboard.