Classical Pianist Practice Secrets 

What are your favorite practice methods? Tell me in the comments❤️

The comment section will be soon flooded by twoset fans.

Hi Annique...very interesting video...there is a saying "practice makes perfect"...of course the obverse is "practice makes you practice your mistakes"...what constitutes effective practice varies widely between individuals...I think what works for one may not work for another...just do what works (deteminining "what works" for you is easier said than done...lol)...I have a 15 year old son who just won his first piano competition playing Rachmaninoff op39#5 (first he ever entered)...he recieved a 5 minute standing ovation...he does no scales...no finger exercises of any type...and I've never once had to ask him to practice (only asked to let me have a chance on the piano every once in a while...lol)...he only was curious what 39#5 would sound like on a Steinway"D"...not abot winning... Martha Argerich said she has never done scales and considers it "a waste of time"...it worked for her too

Great vid, thanks for the tips. It was fun to hear your '10 pencil' method. I use & teach a similar trick for juggling - never thought to use it for piano though! Fun way to gamify your practice

Thank you so much for this video. I practice only one or two measures at a time. I then move on to the next two measures and then try to combine them all once I feel confident enough. I'm glad you mentioned the thing about scales. I've been playing for around 13 years and I've hardly touched many scales. The fastest I've ever been able to even play one is 80 BPM to the sixteenth note. But, the thing is, my harm was always fatigued and hurt afterwards - particularly my left. So I always felt I was doing them wrong and I've never had a teacher (with the exception of one in college but it didn't work out due to my other classes schedules) to really show me/coach me how to play them better - more properly I guess.

I like that you are very optimistic and talking in a very engaging way Because I tend to get bored if I listen to lots of talking

Two set Fans, where you at???👇

Good! I’ve finally found some use for my pencils. Hm. Now… Where did I put them back in 2010?

Gaaah the pencil trick! I will definitely try that tomorrow

It would be so helpful if you record another warm up video🙏😍

Ik your a classical pianist but can you go the 1,10 and hour challenges with a jazz piece like my favorite things or something

Will you do the 1 minute, 10 minutes, 1 hour challenge with Alban Berg piano sonata op.1 or Vers la Flamme by Scriabin?

I'm a concert level classical pianist. I agree w the warm -up but not w mechanical exercises & the ljke. I Do 5-10 Scarlatti Sonatas every morning-cycling through all 545. Then I play either 1 set of Etudes by Chopin Op.10 or Op 25---or ALL--or 4-6 Liszt Transcendental Etudes or the Paganini set. Then I'm off to the races,daily playing Stravinsky's Petroushka & Balikeriev's Islamey , Godowski transciptions& 1 Horowitz arrangement . If you play much @ this level----you can literally play ANYTHING. After 63,575 hours of piano playing---I'm still learning new repertoire & learning from a 360 degree directionality, even from students. In the final reckoning, you've chosen your level. You're where are as the summation of everything you've played or NOT played. The best way to get good at piano in NOT practice or exercises-----listen carefully it's: SIGHTREADING EVERYTHING!!! I do as Horowitz recommended: " play everything." I do,& love the results.

Fantastic🌟🌟🌟 Thank you very much!!!

Thank you so much for the tips!!

a collaboration with edy, brett (and of course ling ling) would be nice 😊

I love your vidéos and now i love the piano bc youre like a professor

I'm a beginner pianist. Playing for less than 2 years. I do repetition games using my notebook instead of your pencil method. That way, I can give myself accuracy scores with percentages, so I don't receive myself as far as actual accuracy vs perceived accuracy.

Lmao, if I tried the pencil thing a year ago when I was so negative towards myself no pencil would have moved to the other side.

Of course I've enjoyed it! 🤩🤩🤩🤩

Which hanon exercises do you do?

I do the pencil thing! just not with pencils, I do it with matches!

Uu new video!

Could you try the one hour challenge for Rachmaninov prelude in c# minor if you don’t already know it?

Bold of you to assume I would ever finish moving the pencils to the other side ;-;

I practice a section to be played 7 times until I can play the section 7 times without 1 mistake. It works well but it is so, so frustrating to make a mistake on the 7th repeat. Oh, start again 1.

You can do the 1 minute, 10 minute and 1 hour challenge with this piece: Grand Valse Brilliante op.18, Please💞

It is so bad that people only support famous people as i play piano and make music and work so hard but no one supports me... People only support big people 😔

You should make reactions to pianists.

What the hell is TwoSet? Is it a thing? Should I know? Why? Anyone,?

Im still waiting for unravel part 2, i played that piece myself and I only got as far as you only i spent 3 months not 1 hours😝. It might be evil of me to say this but i feel better about myself when a pro pianist struggles with the same thing i did, even though you spent 1% of the time i did

Can you please try Merry go round of life by howls moving castle 🙏🙏🙏

Classical Pianists = Artist + Athlete.

PRACTICE 40 HOURS LIKE LING LING

Can you play INTERSELLER Dorian Marko - Cornfield Chase

Repetint repeting repeting and repeting.... No no no. Repeting without music sense is not God way. Repeting for choose the best way, yes, not repeting for repeting. Don't give advice without knowing.

Chopin didn not want his students to practice more than 2 hours per day, one of his students confessed he practiced 4 hours and Chopin became furious!

40 hours ? Are you a TwoSet fan ?

Hi! :) for you guys that are being frustrated from practicing a single part over and over again, try this: practice the part over and over again until you feel semi-comfortable (doesn’t have to be perfect!) and then take a break. This allows your fingers muscle memory to develop while at the same time you are relaxing your mind. Eat something, relax, drink and water, and after like 20-30 min, return to practicing that same spot that you have been practicing so hard on! Guarantee you that you will see results! Also, the period that you wait depends on your hands and how comfortable you are. Your hands will tell you if you are ready to come back!

Besides getting an overview or playing through, I take small parts of the piece and play the chosen part for 5 minutes, then stop and turn to another part. Those parts can be really small, even just a few notes. After 20 minutes, I take a small break. After about one hour, I take a longer break. It really helps me to stay focussed and learn through letting the mind have periods of rest. After such practice session I play the whole piece, or somethong else I enjoy. Sessions may repeat during the day, but session breaks should be long enough to give the brain time to process what was learned, and then doing something completely different, or resting, also is important according to my experience..

ling ling practices 40 hours a day. So we're all screwed.

One thing that I found helpful for practicing left hand is to play it alone moved up to the "right hand" register (move your seat so your arm doesn't get into the way). The lighter sound and action allows you to identify problems more easily. It also helps the left hand play lighter.

As for the third technique, it reminded me of John Field, who is said to have worked like a slave on difficult passages. It appears that he would place a box of tokens in front of him and remove one after each successful attempt and not stop until the box was empty. I think that practicing very small parts will be very useful for me. Thx a lot, Annique! 🌷

Albeniz didn't practice......good luck! I understand: Rubinstein said if he didn't practice for a day he noticed it; two days, his wife; three days, the public .

Am I the only one that actually finds the first Hanon exercise very musical and very beautiful? Especially when you get up to the F and until the next C, it's weirdly beautiful and nostalgic. I guess it's because of the chords that are created by the exercise it self. Sometimes I'll just play that middle part of the octave in different ways and with some more interesting left hand accompaniment than just mimicking what the right hand is doing, and I'll also like expand the "theme" a bit more, and it can really wonderful. It's also a great exercise in improv and even composition, if you do it the way I described.

If you practice you get better If you get better you play with better players If you play with better players you play better music If you play better music you have fun If you have fun you practice If you practice you get better

For warmup, I usually play an song I already know that's not too hard. We all have standby songs we can play at a moments notice. I just play an easier standby song and not the whole song. I like your pencil method. To play a song perfectly 10 times in a row forces you to concentrate on it.

The pencil/repetition technique is really good for increasing accuracy and reliability. It’s like a fun (but frustrating) game.

So...You don't wanna be a ling ling wannabe mate?!

For the sections which I’m not firmilar with, I normally take maximum 4 bars and just keep practicing until I get it. There’s once just fully concentrate on that and I get it in 1hr. I’m not sure if that’s too long for 4 measures or something. The aim is to get it right, then fingering and followed by techniques. I’ve only started in 2018 and there’s a long long way to go 🤗

I like the "10-tokens" technique but pencils scares me. After dropping and having pencils rolled off and being stuck in the piano, I highly recommend using something else other than pencils. Like 10 cards, or 10 erasers etc.

I personally like to play exercises that can help me practice a technique that I need to work on for that piece, so for example, if the piece i am going to practice requires me to play scales, i will practice scales, it helps a lot :))

It would probably take me 45 years or maybe forever to be satisfied enough to move all the pencils to one side ;D

I do something I like to call segmenting. It can be likened to programming a computer, but for oneself. You work through little snippets of a piece at a time. Each segment, very short in length, can be highly focused on in this manner. The important thing to bear in mind here is connection. You must always end each segment on the first of the next. So after perfecting one, and doing so on the next, you put them together with that continuity in mind. I find that with such ultra focus, I am able to save a lot of time practicing. Ultimately, it is a variation on what all music teachers try to drill into their students: repetition. My teacher always used to tell me, “the first 500 times is the warm up, and the next is the practice”.

You can do the 1 minute, 10 minute and 1 hour challenge with this piece: Grand Valse Brilliante op.18, Please💞

Chopin didn't practice Hanon neither did Liszt. In Karnival of the animals, Saint Saens let us hear what the pianist practicing Hannon and scales sounds like.. an animal.

1. Warm up 2. Try the passage one octave up or down 3. Use a number of pencils to reinforce a passage by keeping track of how many times in a row you played it well

What sport(s) have you played?

Not sure why she says that scales rarely happen in piano literature, when in fact, scales appear constantly in piano literature, all the way from the Baroque to the contemporary. Scales are an essential part of how composers construct their melodies and passages. Sure, you may argue that the scale isn't always starting on the root, but it's still a scale. Composers such as Beethoven and Mozart are constantly using scale-based musical phrases (You may in fact be hard pressed to find a work by these composers that doesn't use a scale-based passage at least once). This is why it's important not only to practice the physical act of playing the scale, but also making sure you're reading it, so that you're keeping your eye trained for when it has to spot the same scale on all of these classical pieces that constantly employ scale-based musical passages. In fact, there's a very good book by Clementi that is all short pieces in different keys, where the scale is being used as the main thematic construct, so that the student starts to practice their scales in the context of a musical work.

Your english speaking level is improving fantastically!!

Warm up absolutely essential indeed. But personally, I have a hard time with scales and exercices, I just cant motivate myself. So I warm up directly with the piece Im training, playing slowly and exagerating the movements, and then slowly increasing tempo

Practice 40 hours a day

I love the idea with pencils! I will definitely try it 💗

I practice 2 hours a day 😢😢😢 very little I'm grade 2 classical pianist 😢😢

I think we need to remind ourselves more often that the main reason we don't like to exercise is boredom. And the reason for it is that we repeat the same thing without having to think much. I found a simple solution for myself: I put on a movie/TV series or even better, a podcast, in the background. And because of this, boredom doesn't come to you on its own, and I can exercise for 6-8 hours in one breath.

Interesting your comments on scales. I feel like I should spend some time on it, but I also would rather do Hanon exercises. But I had the impression I should do scales for my warm up every day or something!

Greetings from a Classical Pianist from Albania! You are AMAZING

Hi Annique hope you doing well ! I would love to hear a small compilation of you playing some classical music sinc you're very good at it. All the best for you Queen

Hello and thank you for the tips. I am very interested in the first way you were taught to play or practice scales. I practice them but they never sound clean and clear like your scales. What am I doing wrong?

Practice slow, strong fingers and forte with breaks

Every performance is an offer haha . No way around it. Thanks for the tips tho 😁

I just love how natural this girl is in front of the camera.

Thank you - now I know what to do with this pack of extra large popsicle sticks I just found; I don't think I even have 10 pencils, lol! Thanks for the video.

"Very concentrated on small parts"

Because small parts is often similar all the music!

I like the pencils idea. I will try something like that.

Das mit den 10 Bleistiften ist eine schöne Idee! Danke! 😊 Ich werde das mal mit 10 kleinen Halbedelsteinen versuchen (z. B. Jade).

Playing 10 times felt a bit "demanding" to me. It's tiring and makes me more tense. It works better for me to play 3 times in a row perfectly. If I make a mistake, I start over from zero until I can do it 3 times in a row.

40hrs practice aka Ling Ling practice..Twoset anyone?

And here I thought this will have a reference to twoset

I never feel that my hands are cold, maybe in the wintertime yes but most of the year no. Hanon is intolerably boring and i don't think Chopin practiced Hanon [obviously].

I like the movement when you play Morzat

Thanks Annique, this really helped a lot!

I love your piano when it's old you and you wanna get rid of it please ship it to me in Cairo (Egypt)!😅

I liked the "pencils" part.

I like it that you use pens. I use eh... wooden lawndry pins? (I am not native English)

We love you

just play slow first, then speed up.

You are beautiful. Is there such a thing as over practice?

This is my way of doing repetition. Hey how did you steal it?

Do you watch twoset violin?

Oh look, another youtube hero. 🙄

dont you play anime song? xD

ling ling 40 hrs

im stealing the pencils

Hoodies for kids?

are you candy😍

Linh Linh spirit 🎉😂

LING LING 40URS

Twoset fan?