Have you ever been in a situation where
you hear a really nice piece on Spotify or YouTube and you're feeling 'Wow,
that'll be so exciting to play.' So you buy or you download the sheet music and you put it in
front of you. You start learning it. You're super excited and you go at it for one day
two days before you start realizing that 'Oh gee. This learning process takes a really long
time'. And you realize that it'll probably take you weeks or months before you can even
dream of playing like the piece that you heard on YouTube and Spotify. And before you know it,
you start to lose motivation and then everything just sort of goes to waste. Hi! My name is Jazer
I play the piano. In this video, I want to share with you a method that I use
to learn pieces in days. Not weeks, not months but these days I can learn pieces
in days. Not because I am any smarter but it's more because I have a great method
that I work with. I'm going to share with you step-by-step how to do this Deep Sections Method
so that you can utilize this for your own practice and not need weeks or months to
learn pieces. But you can do the same process in days now. Before we get
into how to do the Deep Sections Method, make sure you LIKE and SUBSCRIBE to this channel
to make sure you stay in touch with more of these free piano lessons and tutorials.
In this video, it's going to be a little bit different. I'm not going to be playing
too much piano but I'm actually going to be talking and discussing deeply about
the strategy of practice. My advice to you is to try to digest what I'm saying.
You may not agree or see the value of it right away but try to utilize this method for one day,
two days, maybe even a week and you're going to see some huge results. What is the Deep Sections
Method? The basic idea is this - you're going to be creating many sections in your piece to
practice as opposed to playing through the entire piece. These mini sections can be 8 bars, 4 bars,
2 bars, 1 bar, sometimes even less than 1 bar. The idea is you're going to be repeating these
mini sections for 7 times. And here's the catch, the seven times - they have to be
110% perfect. That means you're not allowed to make the slightest bit of error. Let's
jump into a quick example, I'm going to use the Mozart Sonata. And see? So in this piece, let's
say that we are going to create our very first mini sections for the first 2 bars of the music.
So, what I'll do is I'll repeat this section
for7 times and remember they have to be 100% successful.
Once I successfully do it every time, I have this weird quirk that I do. I really enjoy doing it
and that is that I'll just say out the number. I'll say one and then I'll go for my next one...
two...
three. You might be wondering why 7 times? I personally find that 7 times
is a good number between actually good deep work and also not so many times that it becomes a bit
too boring. In the Deep Sections Method, there are 2 things to remember. The first
thing is that you will not need the pedal. So I advise against using the pedal for this method
because pedal adds another layer of coordination that you simply don't need, when you are starting
to learn a fresh piece. You should focus entirely on your two hands and your ten fingers
and which notes to press correctly for the start. The second thing to remember in the Deep Sections
Method is something that may not be so intuitive for some of you but it is that rhythm doesn't
matter in this practice. Let me demonstrate what I mean so if you need to do this...
And you need some time to find this next pattern. Let's say you need to find time here. For me,
that still counts as a successful time. So, if you play what you just heard something like this...
I still count that as a successful time. I would actually much rather
you do something like this compared to this...
When I see students playing and practicing like this,
I think it's a bit of a waste of time because it's a little bit like gambling.
It sort of feels like you don't really know what the next note is and you're just gambling and
trying your luck with what the next note is. So and whenever you do something like this...
It shows me that you are not 100% secure about what the next thing is. So with this Deep
Sections Method, what I'm more interested for you to do is to just take all the time you need. You
can just pause there and get your fingers moved to the actual correct spot before you strike it.
That's what's more important for me.
So, to reiterate you can do something like this, this is perfectly fine.
Pause a bit to think
for every little section that you feel is not 100% confident you can just slow it down.
Take your time to think about what the next thing is, before you strike it. Because each time
you do something correctly, you're actually then learning something. Your fingers go "Oh,
that's how to do it." Then you learn something great, right? And if you repeat that 1, 2, 3,
4, 5, 6, 7 times. Now you're really starting to understand how that part actually works,
instead of taking a chance and gambling on what the next notes are. One of the
other parts that students often make mistakes in this piece is in bar 18.
Just another section to demonstrate the Deep Sections Method again,
so in this one you can do something like this. So, let's say I want to do instead
of this four bar progression, I want to split it into smaller sections for example..
Okay, maybe we just do that. We just do one bar and we're going to work on this very,
very deeply. And you can even do something like this. Find your position. Find your position
This is much better than something like this where I see a lot of students do...
Sort of just gambling and not being 1000% sure what the next note is.
I rather you do something like this. Pause, think first.
Okay and that counts as one. And I'll do my second time now.
Two and so on and so forth. Keep doing it until seven. I've gotten a lot of my students to try
the Deep Sections Method and they really love it. On service level,
it can kind of seem like 'Oh Jazer! This seems like a really boring method to practice."
But if you were to try this method, you'll find that it's actually a really fun thing to do
because you can try to think about it as a game. So let's say, each note is kind of like
let's say a coin in Mario right and you're trying to get all the coins.
Think about every single note as it is a required coin to get and if you don't get it,
then you have to restart. What my students tell me when they do the Deep Sections Method,
whether it's in the lesson or at home, is that they tell me that their reflection is they
used to think they knew the parts but after doing the Deep Sections Method they realized they didn't
know the part as well as they thought they did. And after doing it, they now felt like it was they
knew the passages in their hands. And they were so much more secure. And they feared the parts much
less because they've practiced it and there is a muscle memory to it, there's an oral memory to it.
It's a lot more secure. I recommend you to try this Deep Sections Method and let me know in the
comments next time if you have achieved any good results from it. In summary, we should never ever
play and practice a piece from the start to the finish. The return on investment of that method is
very really low. You're not going to get much good work out of that. But rather you should create
small sections to practice in your piece. In summary, here are the few pointers for how to do
the Deep Sections Method. Create small sections on the piece to practice. They can be eight,
four, two, one, even half a bar. You will practice them for seven successful times.
So even if you make the slightest bit of error, you actually have to restart again.
You will not need to use the pedal and the rhythm doesn't matter for now. It's more important to try
to prepare and get every single note right. And then just proceed to move on to each
new next section, once you finish your seven successful times. What you'll realize after doing
this for a couple of days is that these sections are going to start to get really, really secure.
And then you can start to expand your sections so instead of the previous section being two bars,
you can now expand to let's say four bars. And then once those four bars are perfected,
you can move on to an eight. And before you know it, you're basically playing each
full page pretty perfectly. Go and try this and let me know in the comments how you went with a
Deep Sections Method. Happy practicing everyone and I'll catch you in the next video!