- Have you ever wondered why you take ages to learn a piece?
And the annoying thing about this
is every time you're at the end
of almost finishing learning the notes,
if you're being honest,
you're kind of sick of the piece already,
and you've lost all motivation
to practice or complete the piece.
And you're thinking,
wouldn't it be so nice if I could somehow just learn faster?
So instead of taking two months to learn,
I can just take two weeks to learn it,
so I stay highly motivated from start to finish.
Hi, I'm Jazer, and in this video,
I wanna share with you a practice technique
I have been experimenting with for two weeks.
I was initially very skeptical about it,
but after trying it for a couple of weeks now,
I am in love with it, I recommend it,
and I wanna share it with you
because it has helped me to learn faster,
and it's saved me so much time.
I'm also gonna share some specific techniques
of implementing this technique at the end of the video.
So make sure you watch through the entire thing.
And just before we get into it all,
make sure you like and subscribe to this channel,
to stay in touch with more of these free piano lessons
and tutorials.
The technique I wanna share with you today
is called the Pomodoro technique.
What is the Pomodoro technique?
The Pomodoro technique
is where you split every half an hour you have
into a 25 minute intense working session,
and then for the last five minutes
you have to take a compulsory break,
you'll go and stand up and do some jumping jacks,
you'll go for a quick walk or something like that.
But for every half an hour you work
for 25 minutes intensely, and with a lot of focus,
and you spend five minutes to take a break,
and that completes one Pomodoro.
In the official Pomodoro technique
you do four Pomodoros, which totals to two hours.
Now for some of you starting out with this,
I don't recommend doing four Pomodoros at once,
I recommend starting with just one or two.
Now, what is so special about this technique?
The interesting thing about this
is you must follow this structure very strictly.
So you must work intensely for 25 minutes and then you must,
you absolutely must take a break for five minutes
before you start the next 25 minutes again.
And you might be thinking,
oh, Jazer, why would I wanna reduce my practice time?
I'm busy enough as it is.
If I've got one hour to practice,
I wanna practice the entire hour,
why would I want to take a five minute break,
and then another five minute break in the second half hour,
which means I lose 10 minutes,
and so in the whole hour I only practice 50 minutes?
Surely that's not so good.
And that's a very good question.
Let's talk about why it's so effective
to work for 25 and then rest five,
work for 25 and rest five.
My experience of implementing
this technique into my practice,
I will put it on a timer next to my piano,
and to see that timer account countdown,
it gave me a huge sense of urgency.
It provided this weirdly strong sense of clarification
of what I needed to do in that practice session.
I was forced to filter out the essentials
versus the non-essentials,
and therefore I became smarter in my approach.
I knew that I couldn't stuff around,
I had to get good work done
because that timer is counting down
and when it hits that 25 minutes, I have to get out of here.
So let's talk about some music examples.
Recently I've needed to recover one of my pieces
because my student was learning this piece.
I will play it very quickly.
I won't tell you what it is,
if you know what it is, comment below what this piece is.
(piano playing)
I learned this piece a long, long time ago
and I essentially had to learn it
from scratch again this time.
And when I first played it, I was playing,
(piano playing)
I'm probably exaggerating a little bit here.
But I was stuffing lots of things up
because the muscle memory wasn't there
and I forgot some of the harmonic structures,
and so on, and so forth.
The point is that a lot of things were unfamiliar to me
when I first got back to it.
And when I implemented this Pomodoro technique
and I knew I only had 25 minutes to work,
I was super honed in into separating what was essential
and what was non-essential.
So for example, as I was working on it,
I realized, oh my gosh, it's not working.
I'm trying to play it, but it's just simply not happening.
So what do I need to do? I need to go back to the basics.
And some of these basics that I share,
I have said it numerous times on this channel,
and I continue to say it
because I think pianists of all levels
neglect this from time to time, sometimes more than we like.
And that totally includes this guy, by the way,
sometimes I will be practicing for, let's say, half an hour,
and by the end of the half an hour,
I sort of wake up and go, "What have I even been doing?
I've been mindlessly playing it and nothing's improving."
And I go, "Oh, gee, that was a waste of time.
If I could rewind that half an hour,
I'd probably do things differently."
So let me share with you what are some of these things.
As I was playing this,
(piano playing)
and it was not working, it wasn't fluent,
I don't know the parts well,
we need to hone down into the essentials.
So for example,
I knew that I had to practice hand separately first.
For example,
(piano playing)
right, it was very important for me
to learn those finger shapes of it
before I go and put this other hand in together, right?
If you think about it, you have to master baby steps first
before you then put everything together.
And once I started to do hand separately,
(piano playing)
it felt so much easier, then to later put together,
towards the end of that 25 minutes, of course,
(piano playing)
it felt much, much more confident.
So hands separately is important.
Now what's another essential thing I had to do
in this 25 minute Pomodoro timer?
I had to practice it slowly.
When I tried to just go with it and practice it fast,
it wasn't happening, right?
And so from experience I know
that if I just kept trying to push it quickly like this
for another 15 minutes,
I'm not gonna get anywhere, right?
The hands, they don't know what to do
and you need to teach it,
again, back to this idea of baby steps
we wanna go to the baby steps.
So very, very slowly.
(piano playing)
Every, (piano playing)
it's like you're trying to teach it every single move.
Every single move must be precise.
(piano playing)
So on and so forth.
So in that 25 minutes,
I spent about 10 minutes doing hand separately,
making sure I know every single note, every single movement,
every single connection point very well.
And then the next 10 minutes, I spent it on slow practice.
That means putting it together
very, very, very slowly, okay?
Understanding, again, all the connection points,
understanding where all the notes were.
And then in the last five minutes,
then I try to maybe perform it, right?
I try to actually play it like I would to someone else.
And that means I include pedal,
I try to play expressively, and all those things.
Now, again, I just wanna go back to the point
of why this is so effective.
When I have that 25 minute countdown timer,
I am forced to really think about what is important
and what isn't important.
And it's almost like,
because there was this sense of urgency,
I had no choice but to do what I needed to do to improve,
sort of like this concept of burning the boats, right?
You burn the boats and you must make it work.
I recommend you guys to try this Pomodoro technique
and let me know how it goes.
Question of the day for you,
do you think this will work for you?
Do you think, well, that sounds amazing, I'm gonna try it?
Or do you think, nah, that probably isn't for me,
that doesn't sound like it'll work.
Let me know in the comments.
That's all for this video.
Hope you enjoy trying this,
and I'll catch you in the next one.
(gentle music)