Why you need to "play it 10 times!"

Has your teacher ever told you that you need to do more repetitive practice? Maybe she wrote “practice this section 10 times” in your notebook. Maybe your piano teacher is me, because I do this a lot. I want to clarify how and why this SHOULD work, and also how and why it sometimes doesn’t work when students try to implement it at home.

Repetition is an important part of learning when it comes to piano playing. When we repeat something many times, it builds muscle memory. Muscle memory is that magical experience when you sit down to play something and your fingers just know how to play it. Since piano playing is such a complicated and detailed process for the body and mind, muscle memory is an essential part of learning. The big issue is that a lot of students are missing an integral part of the formula.

ACCURACY.

Before you employ repetition in your practice, it’s absolutely necessary that you achieve total accuracy on the phrase you’re practicing. Let’s say you play the phrase 10 times. You play an F natural instead of an F sharp 5/10 of those times. That’s not good, and it doesn’t count.

So, go slow enough that you can make sure you’re interpreting every note, rhythm, dynamic, etc. as perfectly as you possibly can. Also, make sure you’re practicing in small enough pieces, either hands alone or together, so that your goal of playing virtually perfectly is actually realistic based on what phase of learning you’re in.

A simple way to make sure you’re undoing your mistakes, not just fixing them and moving on, is making 10 checkboxes (or tally marks, whatever is helpful for you) to keep track of your repetition. 10 is not a magical number, but I find that 10 works well for me when I do this correctly. If you play the phrase exactly right, just the way you want it to sound, check off the box. Great job!

But if you play it even a little bit wrong in any way - wrong note, wrong rhythm, forgot dynamics, etc. - add a box, then play it slower the next time. You may even need to focus in on a smaller piece or break it down into hands alone playing if you continue to make mistakes. You have to be picky about the result you will accept. This is even more effective with the metronome if you’re trying to increase tempo on a particular passage. As a teacher, I also love this technique because I can see if the student has done it by looking in their notebook or sheet music, and it makes it really obvious and visual which spots the student struggled with.

It’s totally normal and OK to make mistakes during practice. The key is to make sure you’re not repeating the mistakes you make. Don’t let yourself take shortcuts by glazing over mistakes that you’ll just have to spend time working on later.

Remember these two paraphrased quotes of unknown origin:

“Practice makes permanent.”

and

“Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.”