What separates good piano players from GREAT piano players? After working with more than 100 students I’ve learned what makes certain piano players standout. I’ve seen how some piano players slowly progress over time while others seem to have their piano skills ramp up and develop MUCH faster. Today I’m sharing those insights with you.
The Two Things That Separate Good from GREAT Piano Players
Becoming a great piano player takes practice – that’s obvious. What’s not as obvious is how to practice to become great. Want to learn? Read on for the first separator of good and great piano players.
1. Detailed, Specific Practice
With detailed and specific practice, you can increase your skills exponentially. Let me use an analogy to explain this further.
I ran track in college. The biggest difference between running track in college and running track in high school was how specific our workouts were.
In high school, we’d go lift weights, and it was kind of just random. Yea, we’d do some squats or other exercises, but it was just sort of like, “go lift.” There weren’t many specifics in regards to the exact reps and weight lifted.
In college, every workout was very specific. It was literally scientific. If we had let’s say a squat max of 400 pounds, they’d tell us to do 80% of your max weight, 3 sets of 5 reps, take 3 seconds to go down with the weight and 1 second up, and take 90 seconds between each set. We’d literally time our rest between sets. And that’s what separates high school athletes from college athletes. Piano is the exact same way.
When learning piano as a kid, your teacher might just say, “Oh yea, practice your scales” or “Go practice your pieces.” In college it’s very detailed. The first 10 minutes you may be working on technique, the next 3 minutes you’re working on scales, or you may work metronome ramp up, and then you’ll go into finger drum next. That’s how your practice session should look.
Even when you get into your pieces you should use this same type of detailed practice. You may spend 15 minutes on section A, then work on hands separate, next going through metronome ramp up or section B. You’ll literally have a stopwatch or kitchen timer so you can time each part you’re working on.
The details are what take your piano skills from incrementally increasing to exponentially increasing.
Results Per Minute Practice Time
One of the most important things I realized is the idea of “Results Per Minute” practice time. This is how much actual progress you make per minute of practice time.
Let’s say you have person A who is practicing kind of sloppily, but still making some progress. For every minute they practice they gain 1%. This is an arbitrary number I’m using just for this example so bear with me. Now, with person B, who is practicing really efficiently, let’s say for every minute she is practicing she gains 3%. She’s very focused, working on small sections, and utilizing different practice techniques.
The difference between 1% and 3% isn’t that much, but if you do this over the course of a whole practice session, a whole month, a whole year – the difference compounds. This is where you’ll get a huge separation between the two people. Remember, small changes in practice efficiency lead to compounding progress boosts over time.
On top of that, think about this from a motivation standpoint. If you’re making slow progress it gets really frustrating, really difficult to learn, and you question if the practice you’re doing is actually working to begin with. This might lead to you skipping practice sessions or even make you quit.
When you’re really efficient with your practice, you learn much faster, and now you get excited about practicing. This excitement leads to you practicing even more! You start putting in extra practice sessions, doing longer sessions, and that’s when your piano playing level starts skyrocketing.
You have to create these positive motivation loops where you’re having success, which gets you motivated, you practice even more which leads to more success, and it repeats again and again. This is why being VERY specific in your practice session is so huge. For the exact step-by-step goal setting process I use, sign up for my free course, Become a Piano Superhuman. Next, I’ll go over the second thing that separates good from great piano players.
2. Mastering Your Technique
This one’s a bit more controversial. If you ask a lot of piano teachers what’s the most important aspect of playing, most of them would say something around playing expressively or playing with emotion. I agree, but with one caveat. Once you’re good at playing piano and you have solid technique, I do think that playing expressively is really important.
If you’re a beginner to an intermediate piano player you have to realize that if you don’t have that technique, you can’t play expressively. If your fingers are fumbling around the keys and you don’t feel comfortable with the keys, you can’t translate your expression to the keyboard. This is why technique is HUGE at this level of piano playing ability.
When I was in college, my piano professor literally told me to spend the first 10 minutes of every practice session on technique, scales, finger drills, arpeggios, and stuff like that. He knew that this was the most important thing when you’re starting off as a piano player. He literally told me, “Zach, you wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you do your scales.”
I really think technique is the first bottleneck.
Here’s another reason why technique is important. A lot of people think they’re bad at something else, when really their technique needs work.
Let’s say you’re trying to learn how to sight read and mentally you get the piece and know what notes to play, but your fingers are sloppy. You may not be used to where the notes are and you may not have that “At home” feeling on the keyboard just yet. If you don’t have that comfort with the keys, even if mentally you know what the next note is, you’re not going to be able to make your fingers do it. You might think you’re really bad at sight reading when really the bottleneck is your technique.
If you can get your technique good, you can open up that bottleneck. Yes, there will be other potential bottlenecks later, but you have to start with mastering technique. A lot of things you can’t truly work on if you don’t have rock solid technique first.
I suggest using that first 10 or 15 minutes of every practice session to work on technique – scales and finger drills. You can go into more stuff than that if you want, but make sure you at least do those every day. The nuts and bolts of working on those are also in my free course. Sign up for the course if you want to take your piano skills to the next level.
