Be it for an upcoming exam or performance, just for general noodling around or as a relaxant with a glass of wine after a long week, more and more of us want to find more time to fit more piano practice into our week.
Thankfully, thanks to a combination of prioritising time, using technology to your advantage and even bringing others into your practice experience, we believe that these simple and actionable tips can easily help you invest more time into your piano practice.
So how can you make time for your practice when life feels crazy? Here are a handful of tips to make your piano practice a habitual part of your day, no matter what else you might have on!
Practising Without A Piano
To kick off our list, we’re starting with a quirky take on the word ‘practice’. Unfortunately most of us can’t just get up and take our pianos with us to work (although you technically could with a portable piano), but just because you’re not at your instrument, doesn’t mean you can’t practise in another way, shape or form.
Be it training your ear or simply immersing yourself further into the pieces you are looking to learn, pianists can still enjoy a plethora of piano information and knowledge on the go. From podcasts about how to explore the instrument to biographies of your favourite composers methodology and perhaps our personal favourite, novels about the piano by simply immersing yourself in this realm of creativity, we are still able to better ourselves as piano players in a broader sense of the word.
Likewise, if it is fingering pattern technique that you are looking to improve, then using a desk as your keyboard can be a great alternative, we’ve even seen some go as far as printing out a keyboard on a large piece of paper and using that to practice on whilst away from their instrument! If you’re looking for a few easy warmup exercises you can do from a desk, read our guide here.
Five Minute Morning Exercises
Do you often find that your day truly kicks off the minute you start eating breakfast? Why not practice before! This is something that the fitness industry uses quite a lot but there’s no reason it can’t apply to piano too!
Most people find it tougher to exercise during the evenings or daytime due to other commitments, so one tip that even the busiest people do is taking just 5 minutes in the morning before breakfast to focus on you. This can be a great way to even get just a slither or piano practice in and over time, those 5 minutes add up and even if it’s Monday-Friday, that’s 25 minutes of extra practice that you’d just got in - or just under 2 hours a month!
Even if it’s using headphones or your soft pedal, being able to practise in the morning before the hecticness of the day kicks in can be a great way to start your day.
Need your acoustic piano to play silently? Learn more about silent pianos here.
Stick To Your Schedule
Treat your piano practice like a work meeting. In the same way evening classes won’t adjust their times to one individual, or in the same way that your monthly work review meeting doesn’t move, make sure you treat your practice the same.
Give yourself that 30 minutes to an hour a week where you have committed to doing nothing else but practising piano, if something comes up, cancel it. If a distraction interferes, make a point that you’ll get to it later. This is your time and you’ve earned it!
One tip that our team have found particularly effective is utilising the likes of your phone as a timing tool. There are countless productivity apps out there that restrict your time on social media apps so you can break the cycle of endless scrolling. You might be surprised by how much more you can achieve by minimising your scrolling times...we certainly were!
Learn with A Partner/Child/Friend
A great way to keep yourself motivated is to learn alongside someone else, not only does it keep you motivated to learn (and perhaps get ahead of them if you’re a little competitive) but it also gives you both something fantastic to talk about and spend time together.
This is particularly true of adult learners looking to learn with their child or significant other, piano has a fantastic ability to bring people together and form connections, so why not use it as an opportunity to develop your personal relationships too!
Here are some of our best tips for: Learning piano as an adult and the best ways to keep piano practice exciting for children.
Change Your Mindset
As a final note, this is one that is particularly true for those looking to prepare for an exam or performance, but a far better mindset when it comes to piano practice is to consider it not as something that you have to do, but something that you want to do.
This is a subtle mindset shift, but it pays dividends, if you consider the piano to be something that you have to do rather than want to do, not only will you not enjoy the experience as much, but you’ll find it infinitely easier to make excuses not to practice. If you are really not enjoying a particular passage on a piece that you are learning, try changing it up for something new, or take the pressure out altogether and just spend some time discovering what you do want to be learning.
There you have it, a few surefire ways to help ensure that you are still able to maintain your piano fix, no matter your schedule! Want to learn more about piano or more tips for keeping practice interesting? Read our guide to structuring your piano practice here, or explore our blog for more.
Likewise, if you’re looking to upgrade or purchase your first instrument, our experts are here to help and our showroom is always open for demonstrations and piano consultations to help find the right instrument for you.