Intensity vs. Duration

I think a very common misunderstanding about practicing is "the longer the better". You may have heard stories of very skilled musicians spending up to 8 hours a day on technical work alone, which may lead you to the conclusion that to get to a very high level of playing you need to be spending hours and hours practicing.

However, I would say what is far more important than how long you practice, or even what you practice, is how you practice. You could play a one octave C major scale for three hours a day, but if all you do is play it over and over again at a very slow tempo, probably all you will end up doing is deciding that playing the piano is extremely boring, and you will never progress. Both of which would be true if you continued to practice like that.

On the other hand, if you only spent 5 minutes a day on the same scale but played it with the metronome, rapidly increasing the speed, and working hard to get the scale up to a very high speed, with great technique as well, you would see significant progress in a very short time, and feel inspired to try more, or more difficult scales.

So, if you feel like you aren't improving, or progress is coming very slow, try to increase the intensity of your practice. Some ways you can do that are:

• use a metronome

• increase the speed

• find a more difficult exercise (such as playing a scale in both hands or in more than one octave)

• repeat smaller sections of a piece more often

With technical work you should aim to increase the difficulty as soon as the current level you are at starts to feel easy. With a C major scale, the intensity increase might look something like this:

• 1 octave in right hand, quarter notes, 100 bpm

• Same but in left hand

• Both hands together, quarter notes, 100 bpm

• 100 bpm, 1/8th notes, both hands together

• Start increasing the speed by 10 bpm until you hit 200

• Start back at 100 bpm but playing 1/16th notes and increase until you hit 200

• Start from the beginning but with a two-octave scale

If you completed all these levels, you would be playing scales at an incredibly high level, and you are only spending 5 minutes a day on it! And it won't take years, if you really push yourself to reach the goal.

Now, this isn't to say that time doesn't matter at all, it does, it's just that intensity is far more important. Once you have increased the intensity to as high as you are able, then you could start increasing the time, but just increasing the time will not necessarily help you progress.