Mini-Blocking and Breaks

Here is a post I shared on in the Piano With Rebecca (PWR) group. I am making important practicing discoveries these days!

Retrieving Maintenance Pieces: Lessons Learned

On Saturday, I posted that I was about to tackle my neglected maintenance pieces. I was afraid it would be a miserable weekend of stumbling through a dozen or so pieces that I'd worked so hard to learn and memorize in the past year. I started with an interleaved approach (7-minute intervals), alternating between with Mozart's Rondo alla Turca, Jonny May's "Bare Necessities" arrangement and Scott Joplin's "Solace." It was, as expected, quite frustrating as I struggled to re-learn measures I'd mastered just a few months before.

Switching to Block-Style Practice

In the afternoon, I switched to do a more block-style approach with three other pieces ("The Entertainer," a bluesy "Amazing Grace," and Chopin's Nocturne in F Minor) and accidentally discovered the effectiveness of "mini-blocks" with short breaks. I spent 25-30 minutes per piece as planned, but those intervals were broken into smaller chunks, separated by short breaks. I used this same approach on Sunday, and most of my pieces are nearly back to form, with only the most difficult ones (Chopin's F minor nocturne, "Bare Necessities," and Maple Leaf Rag) needing a little more work.

Smaller Chunks? I Can Do This!

I'm so excited about these results because the nature of my life is I often get 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, etc. I often get frustrated by the interruptions (as you'll see in this video), but now I can make them work for me. Normally I would just postpone practice if I didn't think I could devote at least a full, uninterrupted 30 minutes to it. Last night I played in mini-sessions between cooking, exercise, and cleaning the kitchen, and managed to get a whopping 90 minutes in, even though it felt like much less. Every little bit helps!

Question for Other Pianists

I'm wondering when it's better to do interleaved practice (going straight from one section/piece to another after short, focused intervals of 5-7 minutes) and when it's better to follow a short, focused interval of practice with a break when you're away from the piano and focused on something else.

Now for the Cheesy Video!

Anyway, the video walks through how I stumbled upon this approach in practice, and I also talk about an analogy for memory retrieval that I learned in an undergrad psych class that I thought was interesting. Like my previous one, it features lots of cheesy clip art and GIFs!

Comments

Eureka! Secondary Dominant!

I am such a nerd, and I love being a nerd! Today I was working on Section 5 of You Are My Sunshine, specifically on getting this section up to performance level. In other words, I was practicing being a performer , not an arranger . But then, of course, I came up with another idea. I had just played the delicate sixths and descending rag rolls of "when skies are gray" (I chord) and then moved to the parallel octaves of "you never know, dear" (leading to IV). The shift sounded abrupt to me. Harsh. It needed something. It needed musical WD-40. Something to ease the hinge between textures. And then I stumbled upon it! Right before moving to IV, I can slip in a V7/IV — a secondary dominant! So I tried it, and it sounded so good that I actually yelled "Secondary dominant!" out loud in my house like I was Archimedes discovering water displacement in the bathtub. It's such a small thing. One little chord. But it smooths that transition, leaning the harmony ...

The Rusty Lock and Key

I'm in a room. There's a door in front of me. On the other side of that door is a whole world of adventure and imagination and joy and delight, but for the moment, I'm locked in this gray little room. The door itself has a lock that is all rusted. I've tried to open it in the past, but I've never gotten very far. Sometimes I try to scrape the rust off the lock. I also have a rusty old key that I occasionally try to polish. Each time, after I've made a little progress, I'll put it into the keyhole in hopes of opening the door. It turns a half a millimeter or so, but the brief excitement at my progress dies quickly when I realize, once again, the lock isn't opening. I set the old key aside, and from there I can forget about the door, the lock, and the world outside, for months—years, even. But then something happens—I hear birdsong, or I catch a glimpse of color—and I pick up the key and start picking away at the stubborn rust. That dark little room is my ...

The Tyranny of the Dots

In the Billy Joel documentary And So It Goes , Billy talks about "reading the dots." He didn't want—or need—to "read the dots," meaning the music notes on the page. He had developed his own rock 'n' roll piano style and, after a few years of classical training, he left the dots behind. I didn't want to read the dots, either, once upon a time. As a little kid, I had a good ear and could quickly figure out just about any tune on the piano. But in first grade, I finally started piano lessons, thus beginning my life with the dots. The Wall of Dots Between Me and Music I hated the dots! I wanted to learn them, sure, but it was so hard. If my teacher played what was written, I could play it right back for him. But if he asked me to play it from the dots, I felt like I would pop a blood vessel in my brain. It was so frustrating for my six-year-old self to have the code to a simple tune sitting silently before my eyes and not be able to crack it and bring th...

Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

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