If you're wishing for faster piano progress this video is for you. Today I want to share with you
5 Bad Piano Habits that I see beginners make all the time. Some of these may feel
a bit common sense but I'm actually going to go deeper into why these are actually
big problems if you don't fix them for the long term. I'm gonna count them down from number five
to number one so make sure you stick to the end. Before we get into what these five bad piano
habits are, make sure you like and subscribe to this channel to stay in touch with more of
these free piano lessons and tutorials. Mistake number five is: Always practicing hands together.
What I just did is something I see beginners make all the time,
which is they always practice hands together. And because they do that, they're not able to isolate
where the problematic areas are. Whereas instead if you were to work on them hands separately...
...before you then put it together.
Much much better! Your brain will thank you tremendously. Now I get why you love
practicing hands together. It's because, well, that's how the original music sounds. But if
you actually want to improve your playing of those parts, you need to help your brain
by separating your hands. Master each hand really, really well before you put them together. There is
something I love to say to my piano students, and that is that in piano one plus one equals
five. What does that mean? What I mean is, in piano playing the hand coordination that you need
to execute a piece or a song really really well, is actually many levels higher than just mastering
two hands. You can't sort of just jump in and play hands together perfectly straight away.
A much better way to go about it is to practice right hand really really well, left hand really
really well, before you put them together. Bad habit number four is: Always using the pedal.
Now I get that practicing with the pedal just feels a lot nicer and sounds a lot better. Because
it got this kind of surround sound effect when you use it. But, especially in the learning stages of
your piece, I recommend you to actually not use it very much at the start. People often say piano
playing is a very difficult task because you've got to coordinate two hands. When you always
add the pedal into your music, you're not only coordinating two but three limbs - hand, hand, and
leg. The point that I'm sharing now is something similar to the point that was shared before. And
that's talking about this concept of isolation. If you want to get better at a specific part,
it's really important that you isolate that part as opposed to trying to juggle 10 balls at once.
Bad habit number three is: Not practicing daily. Let me break this one down for you. It seems very
sort of common knowledge but here's why this is important. A key element to your
piano progress is something called "sleep". Without getting too much into the science of it,
every time you practice piano and you then go to sleep, your brain transfers your
knowledge learned and your experiences into long-term memory. So it's really important,
whether you're learning the banjo, learning how to cook, learning a new language,
to do a little bit every day. Because you do a little bit every day, you sleep every day,
you become stronger a little bit more every day. For example, if you're learning a piano scale...
if you simply did just two minutes a day. Two minutes of riding the scale up and down. So two
minutes a day, times seven days, that gives you 14 minutes by the end of the week. Where you've
done two minutes a day, you would have mastered that scale so much better than if you just did the
entire 14 minutes in one day. Huge achievements are made up of small steps along the way.
So give this one a try. Bad habit number two is: Relying either too much on memorizing or reading
sheet music. In my experience as a teacher, there are two main kinds of students: there are students
who love playing music through reading sheet music, and there are students who love playing
music through memorizing notes without the sheet music. Which of these groups are you part of? Let
me know in the comments below. Growing up learning piano, I always was more of the second group.
I would hate reading sheet music and sort of read something once or twice and immediately try
to commit it to memory. So I don't have to read the sheet music again. The problem with that was
I didn't work on my sight reading very much and that actually capped my level after a while. I
realized I couldn't progress much further in piano because my reading was just not up to my
standard of technique. So it's really important, whether you are a huge reader or a huge memorizer,
that you actually do the opposite and build the opposite skill. And now moving on to our Number
One piano bad habit. The number one bad habit I see many beginners make is: Practicing too fast.
This is what I see a lot of students do they learn the notes. They start practicing
slowly and then eventually they can play pretty fast. And when they can play pretty fast,
they never go back to the slow practice. So after a while, they actually play these notes on
autopilot mode and they're not actually conscious and mindful about the notes that are happening
anymore. So over time when they are asked to play that passage, they can play something like this...
It's unclean. It's not on time. It's a little bit messy. I recommend you,
at whatever stage in your piano learning, to always go back to the slow practice.
Why slow practice? To always be conscious of what is happening with our fingers on the piano.
I might even go slower than that. this one... this one...
After practicing slowly for about 10 to 20 minutes, I can guarantee you,
you're gonna play that passage a lot better. Because you simply know the exact movements
that need to happen as opposed to sort of just jumping in and playing everything on autopilot.
And there you go, we've come to the end of the Five Beginner Piano Bad Habits. Which of these
can you relate to the most? Let me know in the comments. Let me know what other piano
questions you have. Ninety percent of the content on this channel are inspired by your questions.
Have a great day of practice and I'll catch you in the next video.