I get thirty minutes a day and I mostly play the bits I can already play, how should a short session be structured?
Half an hour most evenings. What actually happens is that I warm up vaguely, play through the piece I am working on from the top, stumble in the same two places, go back to the beginning because that is satisfying, and run out of time.
I have been doing roughly this for a year and I am better than I was, mostly at the first two pages of everything.
I know this is not real practice and I do not know what real practice looks like in thirty minutes. Every plan I find assumes two hours.
What does a short session actually contain, and how do people stop playing from the top?
@session_structure · 3w ago
Thirty minutes is plenty. The problem is not the length, it is that you are performing rather than practising, and playing from the top is the clearest symptom.
A structure that works in half an hour, with the times as a guide rather than a rule:
Five minutes, warm up with purpose. Not a vague noodle: something technical that relates to what you are working on. Scales or an exercise in the key of the piece.
Fifteen minutes, the hard bits only. This is the session. Take the two places you stumble, isolate them to a few bars, and work them properly - see the next answer for how. You are not allowed to play the parts that already work.
Five minutes, join them up. Play from a few bars before each difficult spot through to a few bars after. This is what actually integrates the work, and it is skipped almost universally.
Five minutes, play something for pleasure. Anything. This matters, it is why you sit down tomorrow.
The rule that makes the whole thing work: never start from the beginning. If you want to run the piece, run it at the end of the week, once, and treat it as a performance rather than as practice.
Reply
Report