Hi everyone! My name is Jazer and I've played the piano for 18 years. And in this 18 years,
I have made a lot of mistakes. If I could go back in time, I would do things pretty differently.
So in this video, I'm gonna share with you 7 things I would do differently. I want to save
you the months and painful years of figuring out these mistakes so that you have a much nicer and
smoother experience learning piano. I'm going to start from Number 7 and work my way all the way
to the most important thing - Number 1 at the very end. So make sure you watch this video until the
very end. Number 7 is to LEARN MORE MUSIC THEORY. And I think it's really important to learn more
music theory because learning more music theory means you're gonna get a lot better at sight
reading. Because when you learn music theory, what you're learning is a whole bunch of scales and key
signatures, arpeggios, time signatures, etc. And all these things, they just really help you to
see music with quite a different lens. I'm going to use the Mozart C Major Sonata as an example.
If I had lots of music theory knowledge I could first see that the right hand...
...that first 3 notes there. It's just a C Major Triad Chord right and the left hand is...
...it's a bunch of Alberti bases. So that's a C major and that's the 5, 7
inverted okay and the Chord 4. So
Chord 3...1.
So, when you have a good deal of music theory knowledge, you start to be able to
chunk information. And you stop to see music as individual notes but groups of information that
you can then process and play much much faster. So when you see someone
sightread a really complicated an amazing piece and they do it really really well.
They're not. It's not so much that they are really good at
computing and playing many, many individual notes. But it's more that what's happening in the brain
is they have played that particular group of notes or that cluster of notes so many times that in
their minds, it's just they're just performing one thing. So I've never learned this piece officially
before. But before this video I took about half an hour just to study and analyze this piece.
So this is kind of half sightreading and half practice for me. So if you look at this one...
So I want to share with you right, what's going on in my head playing this...
I'm not actually thinking about these notes as individual, like D - B - D - G - B. I'm not quite
thinking about that. I'm more actually chunking it all into sort of one thing but they're just broken
up. That's a G chord right... C chord... the different chords.... G chord again...
even that. So for me to see this happen,
all I see is the A minor chord but it's just got this Grace Note before it.
Right, that's the main bit but it's got a grace note in there so...
So Number 6 on the list of things, I would tell my younger self to do would be not to
only practice it until I get it right but more "TO PRACTICE SOMETHING UNTIL I CAN'T GET IT WRONG".
So this is quite a rookie mistake that lots of people make. That you know they
play something many, many times wrong and they, they sort of, get one time finally
after an hour. They finally got it right and they think 'Oh, awesome! I've finished my job.'
But it's, it's not quite so simple. It's you know, it's if you've got it wrong 99 times and
you've got a correct one time on your 100th time, well statistically when you're on stage you're
more likely to still stuff up because you play 99 times wrong and only 1 time correct right.
So it's quite important to play it many, many, many, many times correctly. So this is something
that I tell a lot of my students - Practice until you can't get it wrong. Okay going to Number 5 is
I would "STOP USING SO MUCH PEDAL DURING MY PRACTICE". I think pedal is really,
really good for certain pieces of music. When you use it in performances, it is very effective. But
when you're practicing, it's better just to not use it and just focus a little more on clarity.
Okay that's very, very important when you take away the pedal, it makes your music
very naked. And that's better, because then you can see which areas you need to improve on.
Because the thing is, if you use a lot of pedal in your practice it covers up a lot of your mistakes.
And uh, you don't really realize they are mistakes until you you know record yourself
and realize "Oh my gosh! I'm not even playing half the notes!" So take away the pedal. It'll do you
many, many wonders. So Number 4 on the list is to "RECORD YOURSELF PLAYING MUCH, MUCH
MORE". Here's a thought that came to me recently. When you are practicing or performing, about 80%
of your brain's energy is spent at trying to get the right notes, the right dynamics, the
right articulation, so on and so forth. And only about 20% of your brain energy is allocated to
listening to yourself. Right, so because only 20% is allocated to listening to yourself,
sometimes you don't realize there are certain parts that are not so clean or maybe
you're not actually playing some notes correctly. Okay, uh it's really important
to record yourself. Because when you record yourself, you can listen to yourself from an
audience perspective. And if you think about an audience member, an audience member spends 100%
of their energy simply just to listen. They're not worried about playing wrong notes. Right so
it's so important for you to record yourself and listen to yourself as an audience.
So that you can spend 100% of your brain's energy analyzing what are the things you're doing well;
what are the things that need better phrasing; what are the things that need to improve. So for
example, something that comes to mind when I'm practicing - this is this trill over here. So
this one here. I currently think I'm not playing it as clean as I can so as I'm playing right now.
I am using about 80% of my energy to get the right notes, get the right phrasing, articulation, so on
and so forth. And this trill is, is for me not so good yet. So what I should do in a second is watch
this video you're watching right now. I want to watch it again, analyze my playing and then try
to refine it later. Okay Number 3 on the list is to FOLLOW THE FINGERINGS I see on the page. So one
of the beginner mistakes that I see many people do is they play with very random fingerings.
Okay so sometimes when I see students play certain pieces, they can play 5 times and 5 of those times
they're using different fingerings. And this is bizarre to me. Right because what you want to do
is you want to establish the same fingering throughout your playing so that you build
the correct muscle memory. And that helps you to memorize the piece faster which means you
play the piece easier as time goes by. Okay, so it's important to use fingering and the other
note is that editors they often have analyzed... So if you use sort of good editions like Henley or
Peters or Pedorevsky, these editions have been edited by very professional pianists. so they're
usually done in a way that makes the whole playing experience more effective. so that's something I
would tell my younger self. I would follow the fingerings a little bit more strictly. number 2
on the list is to PRACTICE MORE CONSISTENTLY. Now I know that sounds quite cliché but this really
is one of the factors that will turn you from good to great. Okay, so if you look on this graph here.
Okay, I'll just let you have a look there for a second. And you can see that if you simply do
1% better every day, after a whole year it gets you to a mathematical value of 37.78.
And if you're simply just 1% worse every day mathematically if you just keep timesing by
itself... 0.99 times... 0.99 times... 0.99. And if you do that 365 times it gets you a
mathematical value of 0.03. Now which one you want to be? Of course, we all want to be better,
right? So you can see how if you simply are practicing and just improving by 1% every day,
you're going to gain huge huge results. Getting down to our final thing now. And
the final thing is to PRACTICE SLOWER AND MORE MINDFULLY. Okay I think too many people
play a little too fast in their practice. It's so much better if you could just slow things down.
Focus on the small details as you are practicing. That's what practice is for. Practice is not for
performing. Practice is for practicing, which means honing down on small little details. So
that when it's performance time, you can do a magnificent job. Just a thought I had recently.
Playing slow and playing fast is actually very similar things because the only
difference with practicing- playing slow and playing fast is the amount of time between each
note gets shorter when you play fast. Right, so let's say we go into this one so um...
Right that's essentially the same thing
as...
The only real difference is that the time between each note gets shorter when you play faster.
So I recommend if you're practicing, let's say this piece, to practice it
much slower and try to make each note sound crystal clear.
The worst thing you want to hear is something like this...
Ah that's gotta be one of the worst things to hear in a concert. So,
okay so make sure you're practicing slowly and with quality.
And there you go that sums up the 7 things I would do differently if I learned piano again.
Which of these 7 can you relate to? Let me know in the comments below. Remember to LIKE
and SUBSCRIBE to this channel for more piano tutorials. I'll catch you in the next one!