This blog started out over a decade ago as a series of articles written by Graham Fitch on the art and craft of practising. Having been fortunate in that he’d been taught how to practise from the outset by various teachers, Graham discovered that this wasn’t always the case for many pianists. Therefore, he embarked upon sharing his insights to help pianists get better results from their time spent practising.
Since its beginnings, the blog has served as inspiration for several further developments, including Graham’s highly acclaimed eBook series, the Online Academy and numerous online and in-person workshops. While the content has expanded to cover many other piano related topics, Graham’s materials on the original theme of effective practising remain our most popular content to date.
Therefore we’re delighted to announce a major refresh and expansion of Graham’s practice tools video series. These new videos have been reshot in our studio over the last year and feature updated content, new repertoire examples and additional features. We’ve also designed a supplementary workshop series to help you apply the various concepts to pieces you’re learning.
Introducing the Practice Tools
Practising is an essential part of any musician’s journey, yet it often feels like a mysterious art rather than a straightforward science. Many of us sit at the piano not sure where to begin, often resorting to mindless repetition in the hope that this will lead to improvement. Unstructured practice at best leads to disappointing results and at worst can even be detrimental to our progress.
The “Practice Tools” are a set of tried and tested strategies designed to help you structure and optimise your practising at the various stages:
- Learning a new piece from scratch
- Polishing and refining existing repertoire
- Maintaining pieces already in your repertoire
By incorporating these tools into your daily routine, you can transform your practice sessions into productive and enjoyable experiences. This in turn will help you build more secure foundations, improve the quality of your playing and ultimately lead to a more rewarding experience of playing the piano.
The new material will be published in instalments, starting with a set of introductory videos on how to approach and organise your practice sessions. These will then be followed by videos introducing and demonstrating specific tools to help you learn and master new pieces more quickly and efficiently. Click here to watch the introductory video or click here to view an index of the published videos.
Hands-on Guidance
Although the new videos feature many examples to clearly illustrate concepts, it’s one thing to understand something and another to success put it into practice. Our series of supplementary workshops based on the core videos has been specially designed to help you bridge the gap between knowledge and implementation. These workshops draw on the successful interactive formats we’ve presented in the past but with new material and a greater emphasis on the practical aspects.
Each workshop features a selection of tools and practice methods that are introduced in video lessons sent in advance for the session. During the workshop, Graham will demonstrate these tools and exercises for applying each of them to your own pieces (or prescribed examples at various levels). You will then have opportunities in break-out sessions to try them out in the comfort of your own home and get assistance from Graham afterwards if you wish.
The first of these workshops takes place on Saturday 8th March and will look at how slow practice can be used to lay solid foundations when learning a new piece and to maintain and finesse pieces you already know. It will then go on to explore how slow practice can be combined with fast movements for building control, accuracy and speed. Click here to find out more and to book your place!
Access Options
The new Practice Tools videos are available here and are included with an Online Academy subscription. Subscriptions cost as little as £13.99 per month or £119.99 per annum and include access to our constantly growing library of 1,000+ videos and articles, discounts on online workshops and several other benefits. Click here to find out more about the Online Academy or click here to subscribe.
Alternatively, if you don’t wish to subscribe you can also obtain access to these videos via the interactive workshops. Several relevant videos will be bundled with each workshop and by signing up you will get links to these videos in addition to access to the live session. You’ll also receive the recordings and resources from the session which you can try at your convenience if you’re unable to join us live. Click here to find out more about the workshop series.
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