How to learn a piano piece faster

Study it before you play

Five minutes with the score, away from the keys, saves hours later. Look for four things.

1. The form. Which sections are the same, and which are nearly the same? Repeat signs, a tune that comes back, a second verse with one bar changed. Everything that repeats is work you only do once. Mark the differences in pencil: they’re where you’ll go wrong later.
2. The key and accidentals. Check the key signature and circle any sharps, flats or naturals that aren’t in it. Knowing you’re in G major means every F is F♯ unless the music says otherwise.
3. The chords and patterns. A left hand that’s really C, F and G chords, a run that’s a piece of a scale, a figure that moves up a step each bar. One pattern to learn is easier than twenty notes.
4. The three hardest bars. Find them now, so you can give them the most time from the start.

This is where knowing your scales and chords pays off. When a run is “the G major scale from D” and a bar is “an F chord, broken”, your hands already know most of it.

Decide the fingering first

Before you practise a passage, choose the fingers, write the important ones in, and use them every single time. Changing fingers from day to day means your hand learns a new version each day and never settles on one. If the printed fingering doesn’t suit your hand, change it once, in pencil, and stick to it. If the numbers are new to you, see piano finger numbers.

You don’t need a number on every note. Mark the places where the hand moves: a thumb under, a stretch, a shift to a new position.

Work in small chunks

A chunk is one or two bars, plus the first note of the next bar. That extra note matters: it makes you practise the join, which is where pieces usually break when you put the chunks together.

Play a chunk until it’s right three times in a row, then move on to the next. Then join the two, then add a third. You’re always working on something small enough to get right.

Hands separately, then together early

Playing each hand alone is a good way to learn the notes and fingering of a chunk, but don’t stay there long. Playing hands together is a skill of its own, and a chunk that’s perfect in each hand can still fall apart when you combine them. Once each hand can play the chunk slowly, put them together, slower still if you need to. See how to play with both hands for ways to make that step easier.

Slow, with a metronome, then step up

Start each chunk at a tempo where you can play it right and relaxed, with a metronome to keep the beat even. When it’s right three times in a row, go up a few bpm. Big jumps bring the mistakes back; small steps keep them away. The details are in how to practise with a metronome.

Hardest bars first, and from the end backwards

Give the hard bars the first and freshest part of each session. Easy bars come together almost by themselves; hard ones need your best attention.

Then try learning the piece from the end. Learn the last chunk first, then the one before it, and play on to the end each time. The final bars get played most often, and the piece gets stronger as it goes, instead of fading out after a well-practised first page.

Don’t practise your mistakes

Every time you play a wrong note and carry on, your hands get one more go at the wrong version. Play the same slip ten times and you’ve practised it ten times.

When something goes wrong in a chunk: stop, work out what it was (the note, the finger, the rhythm), slow down until you can play it right, and then play it right several times. If the same bar goes wrong three times, the tempo is too fast or the chunk is too big. Halve one of them.

Stop when you’re tired

Once your attention goes, you start to make new mistakes and practise those too. When a passage gets worse instead of better, stop for the day. Many players find it goes better the next day than it did at the end of the last session: come back to it then rather than forcing it now. Several short sessions on a piece usually do more than one long one.

When is a piece learned?

Not the first time you get through it. A piece is learned when you can:

• play it at its tempo, three times in a row without a stop;
• start from several places, such as the start of each section or every four bars, not only from the top;
• play it on a day when you’re not at your best, and still keep going.

Starting from several places is the test most people skip. If you can only play from the beginning, one slip in a performance means going back to the start. If you plan to play it from memory, see how to memorise piano music.

A week with a new piece

As a rough example for a one-page piece, with 20–30 minutes a day on it:

1. Day 1. Study the score, write in the fingering, learn the hardest chunk hands separately.
2. Days 2–3. The hard chunks hands together, slowly. Learn the last chunk.
3. Days 4–5. The remaining chunks, working back towards the start. Join neighbouring chunks.
4. Days 6–7. Whole sections at a slow tempo, then step up. Fix the bars that still break, one at a time.

Pianomi can help with this: bring your own music (MusicXML, MIDI, MuseScore or PDF), learn it hand by hand, then play it in Wait mode, Play through and Tempo. It shows which bars go wrong most, so you always know what to practise next.