How to Improve Your Piano Playing Skills
Starting to learn piano but finding it hard to improve? Been taking piano lessons for some time now but feeling no progress? Or maybe you have some piano experience but you need to improve your playing skills?
In this article, we'll be showing you how to improve your current piano skills. The article takes into account people who learned playing by ear, using instructional materials such as books and DVDs, or using lessons from a professional teacher. So, if you feel that a certain step has already been accomplished, go ahead and skip it to the next step. Dive in and enjoy!
1. Manage your learning and practice time.
Dedicate a time slot to sessions or training and be committed about it. Try not to allow anything to deter you from yourpractice. Commitment to practice is crucial to improving your abilities.
- Use schedules if your time is so full that you cannot dedicate the same time slot periodically.
- Use reminders on any device you usually carry with you to remind you of your sessions.
2. Plan your practice.
Although this is not necessary later, at first, when you're learning new things, it's important to know what you should be learning in the next few sessions so as to be able to measure your progress. This is supposed to help you keep track of your knowledge and skills progress, not be a tool to disappoint you if you didn't make the progress you hoped for in the time you expected. If you feel some particular concept took a really long time to master, don't worry. The important thing is that, in the end, you do master it.
Many of the steps and tips to follow will either depend on, or greatly benefit from a proficiency in reading musical notation (sheet music). You can do this as follows:
- Learn to read piano music if you haven't already done so. Make sure you understand most of the concepts of musical notation. If you want to improve your overall piano playing, you'll need to learn about more advanced musical notations such as dynamics, tempo, key and time signatures, clefs, etc. Knowing only how to read the notes themselves and their intervals won't be enough.
- Learn to sight-read piano music. This will improve your ability to translate what you see and understand on the musical sheet into beautiful piano tunes.
4. Improve your finger placement and speed on the piano keys:
- Learn some finger stretching exercises to use before you start playing.
- Learn proper piano finger placement if you haven't already done so. Placing your fingers correctly on the piano keys is crucial to developing more advanced abilities.
5. Practice the different scales using proper finger placement.
Start by practicing going up the scale, then down, then up and down. Do each one at least five times using proper finger placement when practicing a certain scale.
- Try to practice two or three scales before each session. Do this whether a "session" is a lesson with a teacher, or some free time slot you assigned to learning and practicing the piano.
- Try to practice using sheet music that contains finger numbering on them, especially at first. This way you can be sure that you are playing correctly.
- Practice with increasing speed. Set your metronome on a slower speed and when you have mastered one speed move it up to a faster speed. This will develop muscle memory. When learning a new song, or a new scale, start by playing it slowly but obeying the timing of the piece. Then, start speeding up, keeping proper time intervals between the notes. For example, if practicing a simple C Major scale, you'll start by playing each note (C, D, E, F, G, A, B) as a whole beat. Then start playing each note for half a beat (not leaving the other half beat as a rest), then quarter, and so on. Once you made a mistake, start all over again. Practice this for half an hour a day until you feel you can do it without making any mistake.
- Practice proper chords finger placement. You can find many resources on the internet detailing proper fingering for each chord. Sometimes you'll find more than one optimal finger placement; this is a matter of preference, so follow whichever makes you more comfortable while playing (especially while progressing from one chord to the next).
6. Memorize and practice musical scales, especially the most prominent ones.
Learn all the Major, harmonic minor, melodic minor and chromatic scales. Master the scales and practice them. Also, if you're playing a specific style (such as blues, jazz, etc.), learn the scales of that style.
7. Memorize and practice chords.
Chords are multiple notes played together at the same time (on the piano, pressing multiple keys simultaneously).
- Begin by learning the most prominent chords.
- Learn the different inversions of a chord. Try to learn when and in what progression each inversion is used.
- Practice chords by playing progressions. Start with simple ones such as the C-F-G progression. Once you've mastered those, go to more complicated ones.
8. Improve your musical aptitude (commonly called musical ear) by practicing listening to musical pieces and trying to infer their notes.
Do this as follows:
- Start with simple and slow songs. Try to find the notes of the song first by trial and error on the keyboard.
- Try to name the notes using only your ear after that, and writing them down.
- After you've finished a section, try playing the notes you've written down, see how close you were.
- You might create some grading system and try to test yourself. Don't worry if you get only few notes at first. Just learn from the mistakes you make. Bit by bit, you'll some day be able to write down the whole song with great accuracy.
9. Improve your musical "mind playing".
Mind playing is when you play a song or a piece of music in your mind. This can be done as follows:
- Look at a sheet music and try to play it in your mind. At first, you'll find difficulty doing so, so play it tone by tone. At the very beginning, you might use some sort ofrecording device and read the notes by humming and recording. With progress, you'll start recording larger chunks of the sheet before pausing to read the next chunk. Then you'll be able to sight read whole passages, melodies, and even pieces in your mind.
- After that, actually play the piece and see how close it was.
