let's get organized
Step #1 - find a song that you truly love :)
One you could listen to over and over and over again. Because you certainly will.
It all starts with "that song is awesome - i neeed to learn it!"
Google "song title" midi (and hope for the best)
Load it in, see if there's a fun track to play, and, you know, try it. Repeat.
Your song list is your overall grand plan.
finding time
Aim for every weekday after dinner or something. Take a little walk just before. That'll prep your brain.If it's a bad day, do 5 minutes and see. If it is, just bail - emotions are emotions. Tomorrow is another day but don't waste today.
Take breaks every 15 mins to eat a chocolate, walk a minute and think out loud. Your family should leave you be lest they endure THE SNAP.
what playing piano actually is
You're reading rhythms of notes and your fingers are making the hit just in front of that rhythm so the sound is dead on. Your future listeners are counting on no slop - don't let them down.Piano players use the term "muscle memory" a lot. But the brain is where the memory is, of course. And it doesn't plan out individual muscle movements in isolation. It plans out a whole concert of muscle movements at a time. From brain, to nerve tree, to all muscle sets at once.
You play a song as a very long series of reflexes.
As you practice a song, that sequence of reflexes gets built smoother until
it's dead on to the rhythm - or a slight offset you planned out.
each individual note volume ("velocity") is perfectly hit to
make swells and fades as you feel they should.
learn while you sleep
While you practice, you're only setting yourself up. You're not actually getting it right until you sleep.That's when your brain rifles through the day's long list of movements and decides which ones to jam together into a single reflex.
A practice session that doesn't improve from last time (just playing through) is NO GOOD because you're cementing those imperfections into reflexes.
Once the built reflexes are goood, that's when you're ready. But how can you be sure? Record yourself. Do not shy away from this - you can't truly hear a song while you play. Your brain LIES to you :) Prove it - be ready.
Sleep is the "nightly build" (that's for the programmers in the crowd)
practicing
Finding the tough parts is the goal. You can't fix em until you find em.And plan out aaaall the swells and fades - that's the part of the song that's "you".
don't wear yourself out
Pay attention to your tendons and when you're getting tired. We want to use the least amount of force possible. You'll see piano players shake out their hands, long exhales, shoulder rolling, stuff like that.Play as if you were about to start meditating or yoga. Try to get all the stress out and gone. Play as "floppy" as possible while still grabbing the right keys.
There are a lot of grand theories in this area of piano playing. But most of them boil down to
stay loose and fluid
as little effort as possible
Let's say you're playing the same note lots of times. After each hit, let your fingers relax and slowly move from pretty open to fist-ier. This relaxes your tendons a teeeny bit after each hit.
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