Bad habits when playing piano slow your piano progress significantly. Unfortunately, they are also all too easy to pick up. They’re even easier to pick up when you’re teaching yourself because there’s no professional to spot them and help you get rid of them, or even prevent them altogether.
Here are five of the worst habits you should strive to avoid as a piano player:
- Practicing scales mindlessly or with bad technique
Practicing your scales is a crucial part of developing your piano skills, and builds the foundation for your skillsmanship. However, it is just as important to be sure that your practice sessions are in fact helping you improve rather than causing you to reinforce bad habits.
If you find yourself slogging through scales, not really paying attention to what you’re doing, or if your hand position is awkward and not well-coordinated, then you might want to re-evaluate your scales practice routine. Try for precision, correct fingering, ease of hand position, and fingers flowing onto the keys, even if it takes a little longer and means you do fewer scales. With scale practice, it’s definitely quality over quantity. Via TakeLessons
A good rule here is to take it really slow when you start off. Gradually build up your speed, but always keep to a pace that allows you to play with no mistakes.
- Memorizing music with muscle memory alone
Pianists have a long tradition of performing music from memory, and the pressure can be on when it’s almost recital time and your piece still isn’t memorized. Pianists often resort to playing the piece they’re trying to memorize over and over until they can play it in their sleep. The only problem? That type of rote memorization can go terribly wrong if there’s a moment of distraction, or if the pianist messes up and tries to restart where he or she left off. Via TakeLessons
Only a small minority of experienced pianists have brains that can assimilate something new in a short amount of time. It’s a lot like taking tests and exams at school; you are more likely to score better in an exam if you go to a movie the night before the exam than locking yourself in a room with your books for last-minute cramming.
The way to avoid this bad habit is to leave plenty of time to memorize piano music by analyzing the score, listening to and playing along with recordings, and practicing intelligently and consciously, instead of relying on muscle memory to commit the song to memory. Via TakeLessons
- Poor breathing and a bad posture
Breathing and posture go hand in hand, since our ribs attach to the spine, and excessive compression in the torso can severely limit breathing. If you find yourself hunched over the piano, with your head pulled forward to see the music better and your breathing is shallow, your posture is compromised. Believe it or not, this will affect your music-making.
To solve this bad habit, take a few moments in between practicing sections of a piece to notice your sitting bones releasing into the piano bench, allow your spine to uncurl from any compression, and send your head away from your spine, allowing it to balance easily right on top of your spine. You should feel more spacious and have more flexibility for ease of breathing. Via TakeLessons
- Unruly hand position
Everyone has a natural hand position, but when playing piano, it’s important to find a comfortable and flexible hand position that is coordinated. Proper hand position makes for better contact with the keys, greater control over dynamics and easier, smoother playing of technical passages.
Having an uncoordinated hand position can hold you back in a variety of ways as you’re learning piano, so make sure this bad habit isn’t one of yours! Via TakeLessons
- Reading music incorrectly
Do you find yourself struggling to read piano music correctly, over and over? Or perhaps you struggle with playing in time and with correct rhythm. It’s important to learn to read and interpret all aspects of the music correctly, so that you can play with correct notes, rhythms, dynamics, articulation, and phrasing. If you’re struggling to recognize all the various symbols and positions of the notes on the staff, try going through a music theory book and/or note speller. Via TakeLessons
The worst thing about bad habits is that they take so much more time to get rid of than to pick up. That’s why it’s so important to be aware of bad habits as early as possible so you can watch out for them and prevent them before they become ingrained. This will enhance your learning rate and prevent you from wasting time doing the wrong things.
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