Experiment Log: Deliberate Practice on the Piano

The promise of deliberate practice pokes at a fundamental question: does nature or nurture determine performance? Can the right approach allow us to transcend far beyond our innate capabilities?

This debate rages on, in academia and beyond. While I don’t agree with the most ardent of the “practice is everything” crowd, I do believe the average person far overestimates the role of innate talent (and therefore underestimates their own potential).

But what the hell do I know? While I am a deliberate practice fanboy, I have to admit I’ve never tried it. Oh the horror!

Well no longer! I will use the piano as my laboratory to explore deliberate practice first-hand. The results of this experiment will inform the design of a school that puts deliberate practice at the core of teaching kids to learn how to learn. For more on this, check out the school vision and my attempt to design a deliberate practice curriculum.

Part of the deliberate practice approach is breaking down complex skills into their component parts and developing those “micro-skills” with focused practice.

Below I’ll keep a log of what micro-skills we’re developing each week for the piano.

Takeaways (So Far)

Updated 4/17/19

  1. The brain is amazing. It’s fun to directly experience how quickly your brain can develop. One day your fingers simply can’t seem to do something. You practice it for a while (and struggle like hell), go to sleep, and then voila! Suddenly your hand can do something new!

  2. Beyond focus and pushing beyond your comfort zone, I’ve discovered some nuances to the deliberate practice approach.

    • An oft-cited example of deliberate practice is musicians focusing on the one difficult part of the song rather than just repeating the whole thing. I locate these trouble spots either by just scanning the music or playing it once through. Then I typically narrow my practice to a measure or two around the trouble spot. Once I master that, I back up a measure or two more. If I’ve practiced the piece before I often will play it once through at first just to see where my practice has “stuck” or not. Once I feel like I’ve got the trouble spots down, I’ll try to play the entire piece.

    • In a particular piece, I might have trouble with the fingering, the rhythm, and coordinating the pedal. At first, I’d try to work on all of those at once. It would eventually work but was slow. A better approach is to break-down the piece so that you’re focusing your practice on one challenging aspect at a time. So if there’s a spot where there is a tough hand move, I’ll just practice that move really intently without worrying about rhythm or the pedal. I just repeat that sequence of movements until I’ve got the order down. Then I add back in the rhythm. Then I add back in the pedal. So I’m tweaking how far I push outside my comfort zone.

    • Caveat to above. You can break down things too much. For example, at first I wouldn’t worry about tone (hard vs. soft) and just work on getting my fingers to play the right keys. Then I’d go back and add tone. The problem is that the first step builds a habit of how to play the key which I then have to undo. So now I play the keys with the right tone from the beginning.

  3. You can have too much focus! I was so intent on the difficult, grinding approach to deliberate practice that I overdid it. It’s helpful to take short breaks - take 30 seconds to stand up, stretch, and reset.

  4. Motivation! At first this was all something new and I had no trouble staying motivated. Then after a while the grind of practicing got to me - I had to really will myself to practice some nights. Part of it was that some of the practice as monotonous - think endless scales. Part of it was that I was waiting until late in the day to do it when I was tired already. On the first, I think one under-appreciated aspect of curriculum design is motivation. Generally you’d want the curriculum to optimize for efficiency of learning - i.e. improve my piano playing as fast as possible. But if that requires extremely boring exercises, it might be worthwhile to mix in some fun stuff just to keep engagement up. So I bought a book of pop songs to mix in if I’m feeling drained.

  5. Time of day. I moved my ideal practice time to the morning. One, it helps with motivation. Second, I found that the concentration I needed for more difficult piano playing lagged late in the day. At the beginning, when I was doing more basic scales, it didn’t matter so much as it was mostly just practicing physical skills. Now that the practice requires more mental energy, I notice that I’m less productive if my practice session is in the evening.

EXPERIMENT LOG

Setup: Every week I meet with Josh, my piano teacher, for an hour. At home, I aim to do one hour of deliberate practice, four days a week (many weeks I’m only hitting ~3 hours at home). We’re using the Faber Adult Piano Book 1.

Musical Background: While I’m not quite starting at zero, I’m pretty close. I took two or three years of band in school. I played saxophone and was not very good, relegated to 5th or 6th saxophone (where you basically just play a single note over and over). I practiced on my own maybe twice. As for the piano, I tried to self-teach a couple of times and got nowhere.

WEEK 1 (Faber up to pg 19)

Micro-skills: Hand and finger position on keys. Playing a single finger while other fingers stay at rest on keys. Basic control of fingers. Being able to have multiple fingers go down at the same time. Reading music by finger number. Note recognition/recall of middle C through G on staff (using flashcards).

Notes: We used a ball exercise to demonstrate how my hand should look. I got my first five flashcards for note reading. At the beginning, my fingers were extremely clumsy - it was like my brain couldn’t actually control each of them. I’d try to play one finger and play a different one. I’d mishit a lot and play multiple keys. I couldn’t push one finger down while resting the other four on the keys. I had a lot of involuntary finger movement (e.g. my pinky was jumping all over when I played other fingers).

By the end of the week I had developed some finger dexterity and could reliably play the finger I wanted to play.

WEEK 2 (Faber up to pg 32)

Micro-skills: Consistent tone when you play a key. Being able to count and hold a rhythm. Use of a metronome app to reinforce rhythm. Introduction of reading notes while playing (rather than just finger numbers). Note recognition/recall of 10 notes on staff (using flashcards).

Notes: This week I switched to a new home piano with weighted keys. I found it frustrating that I couldn’t reliably play a consistent tone. My original keyboard was so easy to play that I thought I had developed that skill when in fact I hadn’t. My 4th and 5th fingers generated a weak tone. So I focused on developing strength in those fingers so that I could make a good sound. I used the five finger exercise a lot to just focus on generating the right tone with each finger. I played my first scale and at first it was again like my hands were not being controlled by my brain - it was a total mess. I focused too much on practicing and playing faster - I had to slow it down - Josh told me that improving speed was not the goal yet.

By the end of the week I was playing both the scales well and a piece with both hands playing (they mirrored each other).

WEEK 3 (Faber up to pg 37)

Micro-skills: Relaxing my fingers but still playing a good tone. Playing a smooth style called “legato”. Playing hard vs. soft. Practicing one measure at a time and then extending. Trying to play by ear. Using the pedal. Reading notes with less finger number help. Recognizing notes on the staff and connecting that with the keys on the piano (using flashcards).

Notes: In my eagerness to generate a good tone with my fingers, I had developed a bad habit of straining my hands. I was banging so hard to try to get a tone that didn’t sound weak and lame. Josh caught it and worked with me to strike a finger with strength but then relax when the finger was down. I also found that for one particular song I struggled to maintain the rhythm. It was like in my head the piece was supposed to sound one way (which was different than how it was written) and I couldn’t break from it. I used the metronome app a ton to get the rhythm right. I found an issue with the way my pinky bends out - when I played it I often brushed the key to the right. I tried moving my arms/hands a bit when I played it but wasn’t able to fix it.

By the end I was playing legato well and was holding rhythm better. To develop playing by ear the book gave me the beginning of Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and then you had to guess the notes to finish it. I found this really hard but by the end I thought I had the right notes.

WEEK 4 (Faber up to pg 45)

Micro-skills: Hand placement to fix my pinky issue. Consistent legato playing. Consistent tempo. Reading music “slurs”. Playing “echos”, accents, and “ritardando”. Moving my hands up and down by octave. Playing pedal while playing both hands.

Notes: To fix my pinky issue Josh adjusted my arm/hand position - he tucked my elbow in closer to my body. Josh identified a problem I was having playing legato between my 4th and 5th fingers. We discussed my rhythm issue - I need to count aloud more and then use the metronome app to check how well my counting is holding rhythm. I count one or two “empty measures” before each piece to get this right. Moving my hands up or down on the keys was difficult - you’re looking at the music but also trying to look down at the keys to see where you should put your hands. Before this my hands didn’t move off the keys they started on. I can do a very basic move but I can see this is going to require a lot of practice!

I also hit my first piece where I was supposed to read notes on both the treble and bass clef simultaneously so that I can play both hands. In this piece, both hands mirror each other, so you really just need to read one set of notes. But I can see how I’ve got to "zoom out” my eyes so that grok both clefs. I definitely can’t do it yet.

By the end my rhythm was much more reliable. My pinky issue also seemed to be mostly gone. It took some time to coordinate control of my foot on the pedal while also doing stuff with my hands, but by the end I could do it. Josh told me I guessed wrong on the final notes on Row, Row, Row Your Boat, but we didn’t have time to go over the right answer. I’m very curious!

WEEK 5 (Faber up to pg 53)

Micro-skills: G-pentascale. Better pedal coordination. Consistent tempo. Playing third and fifth finger simultaneously. Be able to quickly recognize interval between notes on sheet music. Playing music with quarter rests.

Notes: I was mistiming the pedal and had to practice. Used the metronome a ton to calibrate my tempo. Being able to quickly recognize the interval between consecutive notes took a lot of practice - particularly when the notes jumped between the clefs. I could see how this will require a lot of repetition. I ran out of material that Josh had assigned so I practiced from the Faber pop book to practice some more sheet music reading. One exercise we did had me play the third and fifth fingers simultaneously - I couldn’t do it at first (particularly in forte). My fourth finger always came along for the ride. Lots of repetition here to get that working.

By the end my rhythm was pretty spot-on. The pedal problem was gone. I could read the intervals on the stuff I practice a lot but don’t think I can do it reliably elsewhere. My third and fifth fingers can play together! Good job fingers!

WEEK 6 (Faber up to pg 59)

Micro-skills: D-pentascale. Playing 3-note chords (triads). Music theory behind major scale. Playing black keys. Moving hands on the piano. Playing music with half and whole rests.

Notes: I was waiting for when chords would be introduced and it was this week! Wow, my fingers again seem unable to coordinate that! It’s funny though, even as I’m struggling, I now have this confidence that the fingers will cooperate - just need some repetition and sleep! Along with playing a chord I was also introduced to a wrist movement you do when playing a chord - it felt pretty unnatural at first.

Josh also introduced me to the music theory behind major scales: Whole Whole Half Whole Whole Whole Half. You start with C because it’s all white keys, but now we’re hitting scales where the black keys get involved.

Josh and I also discussed practice strategy - he introduced me to just working on hand movements with no regard to rhythm. It was a very effective way to just get the hand move down pretty quickly. Then after I had the hand move down I’d try to play it with the right rhythm.

By the end I didn’t make much ground here - because our practice schedule got shuffled and I was out of town, I only got one practice session between our two lessons.

WEEK 7 (Faber up to pg 64, 4/10 lesson)

Micro-skills: A-pentascale. Playing 3-note chords with right wrist movement. Identifying all the major scales. Playing Staccato.

Notes: We went through more music theory since I hadn’t had much practice time since the last session. Josh introduced how to identify major scales and play the triad chord from them. I did a lot of repetition on playing chords - some with black keys. Lots of work on getting the wrist movement for a chord down. Playing black keys as part of scales took a bit of repetition - at first I was mishitting a lot. The black keys are thinner!

Hitting songs with more hand movement and I’m working to figure out how/when to look down from the music. That requires that you memorize some parts of a song so that you can keep playing without reading the music. I’m marking up the sheet music with where I look down and things I need to memorize. The more I practice the less I need to look - I can sorta feel my way there.

In one song I’m finding it particularly hard to go from playing one or two fingers on my right hand to then playing a triad. I’m clumsy in the transition from playing single notes to the chord. I fix it during one practice session and then the next day the problem is back again!

I’m spending more time refining how I approach the practice of a piece. I’m marking up trouble spots on the music more so that I can focus my practice there.

By the end of the week I was consistently playing songs with chords. I was also executing more difficult hand moves. The D and A pentascales were feeling more engrained and easy to play.

WEEK 8 (Faber up to pg 67, 4/19 lesson)

Micro-skills: Playing 3-note chords with right wrist movement. Using wrist movement on long notes. Repeats. Ritardando.

Notes: More practice on getting the right wrist movement on chords and other long notes. Lots of practice reading sheet music and trying to quickly recognize a move of a second vs. third vs. fourth. Had to do a piece with a couple of left hand moves in just a few measures that gave me a lot of trouble.

Coordinating both hands is a challenge - in one piece I just have to play a long note in the RH while playing quarter notes in the LH and that coordination took some work.

WEEK 9 (Faber up to pg 74, 4/25 lesson)

Micro-skills: Eighth notes. Crescendo and diminuendo. D-pentascale. Pick-up notes.

Notes: Counting and playing eighth notes is the focus. Had a lot of trouble again on a two hand sequence in French Minuet. It required that I coordinate both hands, but not mirrored and not a chord. Brain really struggles to process that.

Hand moves are still giving me a lot of trouble.

——below needs updating——

WEEK 10-11 (Faber up to pg 81, 5/2 lesson)

Micro-skills: G-pentascale, E-pentascale. Non-triad chords - Csus4. Fermata.

Notes:

WEEK 12 (Faber up to pg , 5/16 lesson)

Micro-skills:

Notes:

WEEK 13-14 (Faber up to pg, 5/21 lesson)

Micro-skills: More flash cards.

Notes:

WEEK 15 (Faber up to pg, 6/3 lesson)

Micro-skills:

Notes:

WEEK 16-17 (Faber up to pg 95, 6/13 lesson)

Micro-skills:

Notes:

WEEK 18-19 (Faber up to pg 101, 6/28 lesson)

Micro-skills: G-flat and B-flat pentascales. Playing a rhythm with one hand and melody with the other.

Notes: Josh noticed I was straining my hand when playing a fifth so I did a bit of work on that. Musette!

WEEK 20 (Faber up to pg 107, 7/8 lesson)

Micro-skills: Rhythm with eighth notes. Playing faster. Developing ear for triad vs. sus4 chords. Keeping beat when sight reading.

Notes: Trying to do a new approach - rather than playing the entire song slow and then increasing speed of the entire song, I’ll work the hard parts of a song faster and faster first. This is really just an extension of the idea of focusing on the hard stuff - there are lots of parts of songs I don’t need to practice at higher speed and by playing the entire song I’m doing that and wasting practice time.

A lot of time was spent with Musette. Starting with my metronome at quarter note = 50 bpm. Then ramping it up - 60, 70, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100. Amazing how it just overwhelms my brain at higher speeds - I’m a mess at first. Finally and a couple hard sessions I get it.

One issue that keeps coming up is that I don’t maintain rhythm when eighth notes are mixed in. I play the eighth notes too fast. Spent a lot of time with the metronome to correct this.

This core idea of playing rhythm with my left hand and melody with my right is extremely difficult for me. I get it and then come back to it and it’s a mess again.

Also working on feeling rhythm by measure rather than each note. Using a Mozart piece to practice swaying by measure to keep that overall feel - got it pretty easy and the piece improved a lot. Also fun to do.

For sight reading my goal is simply to keep counting regardless of how much I’m butchering things. Getting better at it.

WEEK 21 (Faber up to pg 111, 7/18 lesson)

Micro-skills: Playing sharps and flats. Playing one-hand at different volume than other. Strengthening all the pentascales.

Notes: Started experiment #2 here. Scales with sharps and flats improved surprisingly fast. Working on mixing up scale work to strengthen my recall and recognition of those patterns.

background on My School project

This post is part of a series on developing a new type of school. Click to see the other posts on this school project. If this is new to you, I’d suggest starting with the vision for the school. If you’d like to get notified of new posts, sign up below.

My Deliberate Practice Experiment

In my previous post, I laid out the project I’m undertaking to build a curriculum around the idea of deliberate practice. While there’s a lot of conceptual material on deliberate practice, I have yet to find a hands-on, practical guide on how to deploy it given a skill you want to learn. If you’re interested in trying deliberate practice, the info below might come in handy.

Before I could build a curriculum for someone else to use deliberate practice, I want to experience deliberate practice myself. I am looking to answer the following questions: What are the necessary ingredients to do it “right”? What sort of gains would you see? What are the challenges? Is it just a faddish thing?

In this first step I’m trying to isolate the learner experience - I don’t yet want to tackle the teaching side. So I wanted to pick a skill where I felt there was an established deliberate practice approach that I could leverage. Given my research on the subject, it appeared that either sports or music were the best places to start (see here for why).

I also needed to be able to find a coach nearby that a) fit the deliberate practice approach and b) didn’t cost a fortune.

I chose piano. I’ve always wanted to learn it and there are plenty of teachers around.

The next step was identifying the right teacher. How could I find someone who would employ deliberate practice as their approach?

I started with Google - maybe there was someone in the DC area who was both an expert piano coach and a vocal advocate of deliberate practice. Some googling revealed that while some piano teachers used deliberate practice, none were nearby. Damn! I guess I need to actually do some work.

I developed the following plan to find a teacher:

1) Build a group of teacher candidates that seemed qualified and were nearby.

2) Send them some questions on their approach to see how well it fit a deliberate practice mindset.

3) Winnow the group down to a few - do a trial lesson.

4) Pick a coach.

1) Build a group of candidates

I used three methods to build my list: Thumbtack, Google search, and a site called Musika.

I reviewed a whole lot of profiles. Many teachers seemed to specialize in teaching children - no big surprise there. A lot of teachers were more general music teachers, teaching piano, guitar, drums, etc. A lot seemed to do it “on the side” - this seemed to be typical of the music store type rosters.

I honed in on those who a) specialized in piano, b) taught as their primary job, c) had a lot of experience and piano training, and d) had experience teaching adults.

After reviewing a bunch of profiles, I ended up with eight candidates (6 Thumbtack, 1 Google, 1 Musika). The Musika one quickly dropped off as while you can browse profiles, you can’t actually contact the teachers. Instead, their service matches a teacher for you. That wasn’t a great approach given my goals. One of the Thumbtackers was unavailable. I was down to six.

2) Evaluate their approach

I didn’t want to come out and say “do you like deliberate practice?”. They’re trying to land a student so they might be more apt to embellish their interest in it. Instead I created some questions that would reveal if they utilized deliberate practice or something like it in their teaching approach. Here’s the note I sent:

Hello,

I'm an adult beginner with basically zero experience on the piano. I'm planning to take weekly classes and do one hour of practice at home each day. I have an electronic keyboard at home that I'll use.

My goal is to improve my piano playing as quickly as possible given those time constraints.

I'd like to understand more about how you structure your lessons or curriculum. Specifically I'm looking for answers to the following questions:

1) Can you describe how you sequence lessons and why?

2) What are the key skills that excellent piano players have that I need to acquire?

3) How would you direct my at home practice time?

4) Are there any broader learning philosophies that you follow?

Thank you!

Best,

Roman

I received a range of responses. Three said that answering that would require too much time and I should call.

I called one and she didn’t seem able to articulate her approach beyond “every student is different”. I tried to dig in a bit - although every student is different, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a common set of skills to learn and order to learn them in. I still didn’t gain much clarity on her approach.

When I mentioned my goal of learning as fast as possible she seemed to think I was looking for some sort of faddish “get good fast” scheme. She seemed to dislike the very idea of examining the teaching/practice method in order to speed up learning. Needless to say, she was crossed off the list.

A few people responded with more detail and a couple were enthusiastic that I asked these sorts of questions. They had details on their approach (three used the Faber method), why they used that approach, and how they’d use my practice time. One went into some detail about the importance of learning the right habits of hand placement and technique. Based on those responses I winnowed the field down to three.

I sent a follow-up:

Hello,

My goal in learning the piano is two-fold and the 2nd reason is probably very unusual. I work in education and I want to master the type of practice termed "deliberate practice" so that I can utilize it when teaching others. So my 2nd reason to learn piano is to have some hands-on experience with trying different practice techniques.

This article does a good job applying the principles of deliberate practice to the piano:

http://www.portlandpianolab.com/deliberate-piano-practice-part-2/

I'm curious your thoughts on structuring practice around these principles?

Thanks.

Roman

I wanted to see how tolerant they’d be of my unorthodox goals. One of the three had heard a bit about deliberate practice and was supportive of the approach. The other two were happy I was taking practice so seriously and were open to these ideas. I decided to arrange a trial lesson with all three.

3) Trial Lessons

I ended up doing three trial lessons in about a week. Two of the lessons were really interesting as the teachers used the same method (Faber) and covered the exact same material. So I had a chance to contrast teaching styles. The first was good, while the second, named Josh, was excellent. Looking back, if I hadn’t arranged a trial with Josh, I would’ve been satisfied with the first and not realized how much better the teacher could get.

What made Josh so good? It was evident he had broken down piano playing into smaller skills that had to be mastered and had developed techniques to do that. Three of these skills were emphasized in the first lesson:

  1. Wrist/hand/finger placement - he used an exercise where I held a ball in hand to show me how my fingers should look.

  2. Finger control - when you play piano you want to have all five fingers above the keys and be able to use any single finger without the others moving. This is surprisingly hard! There are a lot of involuntary hand movements - sort of like if you try to do the Spock “Vulcan salute” that you can’t - some fingers move together. I found that when I played my middle finger the pointer finger liked to jump all over. Sometimes up, sometimes down. My pinkie was also really clumsy. Josh did a great job of emphasizing this and identifying practice techniques to work on it.

  3. Reading music - Josh used flash cards here to build quick recall of reading notes.

Josh also built my practice plan as the lesson proceeded - identifying areas I had trouble with where I needed to focus my practice time.

The third teacher had built his own curriculum, which I was impressed with. However, upon visiting him it seemed he specialized more in teaching kids and in more instruments, with piano just being one.

One thing that jumped out for me after going through this is how important a music teacher is versus trying to learn on your own via YouTube or a book. I had twice attempted to learn piano before on my own - once with a book and once with software. Neither time did I have any appreciation for the physical skills I needed to develop - the way to sit at a piano and how your hands need to work. Continuing to learn on my own would have created some bad habits and likely placed a fairly low ceiling on how far I could progress.

4) Pick a coach

Recall Ericsson’s quote from Peak:

As defined, deliberate practice is a very specialized form of practice. You need a teacher or coach who assigns practice techniques designed to help you improve on very specific skills. That teacher or coach must draw from a highly developed body of knowledge about the best way to teach these skills. And the field itself must have a highly developed set of skills that are available to be taught. There are relatively few fields—musical performance, chess, ballet, gymnastics, and the rest of the usual suspects—in which all of these things are true and it is possible to engage in deliberate practice in the strictest sense.

What is a “highly developed body of knowledge about the best way to teach these skills” for piano? From my limited sampling this seemed to be the Faber method. I wanted to leverage this highly developed body of knowledge, so I was down to the two teachers who used Faber.

Josh was the clear winner. If you want to read more about him, check out Fells Point Piano.

One other outcome of this was that I realized my home equipment was not up to par. I needed a new keyboard with weighted keys - my existing keyboard had no “touch sensitivity” - you couldn’t differentiate soft versus hard playing of the keys (piano and forte in music lingo). Josh recommended the Yamaha P-45, which I bought. I also bought a piano bench that allowed me to sit at the right height relative to the keyboard. This is another example of the type of stuff I totally missed when trying to self-teach!

Going forward, I’ll practice for one hour every weekday (to mimic what I imagine the time commitment would be in my school). That breaks down to one session with Josh and four home practice sessions each week. I’ll add updates (including performance videos!) to my deliberate practice experiment log as I progress.

background on My School project

This post is part of a series on developing a new type of school. Click to see the other posts on this school project. If this is new to you, I’d suggest starting with the vision for the school. If you’d like to get notified of new posts, sign up below.