Piano Practice Demonstrations

My dad wrote Fundamentals of Piano Practice to describe the efficient piano practice techniques used at The French School of Music in Plainfield, NJ. TBD - add the digitized version of his very small first edition including “Acquiring Technique” and “Theory of Learning”, ideal for young piano students.

What follows are some very rough videos for practicing piano. This is all I can do with this project. The best way to view these videos is to scroll to the middle where lecture starts, view that, then go back to the beginning and look at the practice session for a demonstration of what was discussed the lecture. These are practice sessions for two of my compositions:

• Lullaby of the Doomed (sheet music and Soundcloud recording), Day 1 video starts with practicing a song partially known.

• Churrasco by Candlelight (sheet music and Soundcloud recording), Day 5 video shows practicing a new song from scratch.

Here is a link to a Facebook playlist containing all of the videos related to this Practice 30 Challenge. If you want to start chronologically, you can begin with the Day 1 video.

However, if you want to see the correct progression of piano practice starting from scratch, this list below starts from Day 5, then loops back to the Day 1 - Day 4 videos.

Day 5 - Practicing a new piece from scratch: showing an unnecessarily long “control experiment” sightreading hands together and not using French School practice techniques, laying the groundwork for “Churrasco by Candlelight” (map out fingering)

Day 6 - First day practicing Churrasco (hands separate, continuity rule, memorize, musical expression, tackle the hardest parts first, discussion of fingering)

Day 7 - How Churrasco is shaping up both with hands together and hands separate practicing in a few challenging sections

Day 8 - Rough run-through hands together, and lecture to wrap up this series with discussion of practicing on your leg, mental play, block chord method of practice, play pedal. Finger crunch discussion references link with video below.

Day 1 - Practicing “Lullaby of the Doomed”, focusing on a problem area - run through and focused practice

Day 2 - Staccato practice

Day 3 - Back up a few critical bars from problem area, dovetail in. End practice session with slow / medium speed

Day 4 - Lecture only on day 3 video plus other tips: record yourself, practice cold starts

Other Topics

Finger crunch video (on Quora) - scroll down