I'm sorry but this video is wrong on the point that "making mistakes creates faulty muscle memory". This is a learning myth that is very strong within music teaching, and it comes from people observing that certain mistakes, which weren't present before, starts to repeat themselves. it is understandable how one might think that means you have learned a mistake, but there are other explanations for it. one could be that focus is declining causing more mistakes, but this is usually not the main reason. the main reason is about switching attention from thing to another. let's say you need to play 4 notes one after the other and you focus your attention on how you play the 3rd note in the sequence. Naturally, that is going to interfere with the playing of the other 3 notes, and new mistakes will appear. Now this can also be said about other concepts withing playing. You can switch your attention to how accurately you are playing, how softly or hard you are playing, the tempo, and many other details. Therefore noticing that you are starting to make a new type of mistake can often mean that you have progressed from one mistake and you have started to undo another. Bad habits are a thing, but the way they are developed is different from what you are saying. The brain has an ability to sort between a correct repitition and and an incorrect. When you make a mistake your brain releases cortisol(stress) and norepinephrine(anxiety/fight or flight), and you can feel this as you get annoyed by the mistakes you are making. When you get a repitition correct the brain releases dopamine(in this case the feeling of reward). The brain takes the behaviour and motor movements that caused stress and anxiety and replaces them with the behaviour and motor movements that cause reward. This is called reward contingent learning. The only way you learn a behaviour is when dopamine is released. That also means if you do an action that appears to be correct, like playing a sequence of notes, but you get there through the wrong method, like over tensing your hand muscles or a better example, then you will learn a bad habit. This is where a teacher could be helpful by stepping in and correcting the bad habit by telling the student that they shouldn't reward themselves(release dopamine) if they tense their hands. And even if you get a bad habit, it is not the end of the world. Practice is not permanent and most of learning a skill is about undoing bad behaviour. In fact I would advice people to do the opposite of being slow in practice. Get as many repititions in as you can do in a given amount of time(at a pace where you still get a fair amount of correct repititions in). Think of it as giving an AI as much data as possible. as for why people plateu, it usually has more to do with the intensity of the practice or the feedback they get during practice. If you are more interested i recommend the book "Peak" by Anders Erricson, an expert in the field of practice.
Looking back after many years of piano practice - what made me more skillful, and what was a waste of time, if not lowering my self-esteem? If I liked the piece, I was playing! The pieces I struggled with the hardest, I had to admit, that I actually didn’t like them much, and my favorite pieces were just a breeze to learn, or at least gave a pleasurable time sweating over. So - first rule of practice: Play something you like, enjoy listening to, and want to share with others. 🙂
as a preteen, I had a guitar teacher who told me to stop if I make a mistake and start over. 45 years later, I still stop (even if only for a second) if I make a mistake = not good
When I used to do piano more seriously, I would play a song starting at a slow speed (80 bpm I think), and increase it 1 or 2 bpm each time, until I was at 110 or 120. If I made too many mistakes, I'd go back down to 90 or 100 and sharpen things up. Stuff like that is how you can spend 2-3 hours on just one song each day.
I know you talked about mastering sections before learning new material, but should we get up to proper speed (for example 140 bpm as the piece should be played) before moving onto new material? Or should we play the notes correctly out of time and then move on? Incredible video.
If you stop every time you make a mistake you are literally creating a, ahem, """"""muscle memory"""""" of doing so (have fun trying to play anything live in front of an audience). You are literally developing a terrible habit right there. As with everything in life, balance is key.
I'm currently working on it! If you want to be a tester please get in touch. My plan is to make another video about playing lead sheets soon and to hopefully get some testers from the audience, if you'd like to get a free version of te course and help with testing it in return please email me at sam@pianosauce.com :)
Sleep is probably one of, if not THE most important aspect to making any type of progress on a piece of music. There are still much to be researched and studied about the fundamental nature of sleep and why we need it, but one thing for sure is that during sleep, your brain consolidates short-term memories into long-term memories, because during the day it's too busy doing everything else. Long hours of good quality sleep CEMENTS the progress you make. Which is why it is almost always better to do 1 hour of practice each day for a week than 7 hours of practice for one day, because repeated consolidation of memory over multiple days of sleep lead to incremental growth and progress. The same principle of using sleep to consolidate progress can be used when studying for exams or doing anything that requires receiving and retaining a lot of new information: the number of hours you sleep is just as if not more important than the thing you do itself.
hmm question; so I am currently learning the piano and I find once I remember the notes I cannot go to slow because I easily make mistakes as well as if I go to fast before I am ready. I need to hear the relationship of the sound between each note, how they connect. so if i go to slow my brain gets bored and I make mistakes. If I go at a steady pace where I can hear roughly how it is sounding together I make significantly less mistakes. Why is this? because clearly going to slow will not work for me. Is there a point where i should learn music at a set pace that is not too slow. i mean i still make mistakes but I pull them out as I play the bars.
I've always thought of piano practice as a journey of seeking something internally - we have to overcome our ego and be absolutely honest with where we are. I've made my fair share of mistakes of playing something faster than I could and therefore reinforcing the mistakes.
I know, that this is "unhealtly" but trust me or not, my firsti piano proyect is the coda of Scherzo 1 (chopin), I know, i should not be playing these hard themes, but seriusly, this video helped me a lot to improve my skills
This is true to an extent. But I will push back with research that shows intention is also a key factor in learning. When you make a mistake, the brain lights up and becomes more plastic, there is a window of opportunity to ingrain the right motor patterns after a mistake.
Massively agree! That's what the stopping and fixing mistakes section is about. In my experience fixing every mistake you make immediately is the single quickest way to learn something.
It takes years of hard work to become good. There are no shortcuts. There's also no such thing as muscle memory. I know it's called that, but it's inaccurate.
This is fundamentally wrong and not based on science. You learn better when making mistakes and plasticity is heightened to correct those mistakes. Not daring to make a single mistake while practicing will certainly hinder your progress.
totally agree, mistakes are v important and valuable, but they have to be handled in a specific way to be useful, and not counterproductive. That's what the stopping and fixing mistakes section is about, if you do that when every time you make a mistake, it's pretty much the fastest way to learn anything, that I have found anyway.
Thank god for this video. In the vast ocean of free online content regarding piano lesson, this is the first one I encounter which really takes the time to explain things and match perfectly what I need to take it to the next level by giving me autonomy. I can set sail now thanks to you ! Let's go !!!!
I had been getting cramp in my fingers over 20 years ago with my hobby of electronics and soldering stuff in which either hand my fingers were locking holding the soldering iron or component. It hasn't been too bad lately so I've started playing piano again, I've not played for about two years and I've forgotten a lot of stuff but some bits I do remember so it's not like starting from scratch.
Extremely helpful. I know, from my experience as an adult beginner playing the piano, your advice is so true. It works. Thanks for sharing your insights.
