Frustrated with your piano practice because progress seems too slow? Take heart…

Why don’t I progress faster? I practice the same songs over and over again but it doesn’t seem like I get better very fast. Hi, this is Duane and good morning to you. It was common to me as well to every student that’s every taken the piano, or any instrument of that matter. You practice and you practice and you wonder why am I not getting better faster?

There’s really a simple answer but it’s kind of hard to understand until you get a perspective on it. The answer is the distance between your understanding of a concept and your muscle memory. Let me just play an example. Let’s say that you were assigned by your teacher to master this arpeggio. At first it looks maybe complex but then you figure out it’s just a C chord. I’m taking this simple C chord and I’m breaking it up, playing the root and then the 5th, and then swinging my hand up to the 3rd, and then the 5th, and up to the root, back down to the 5th, 3rd, 5th, root.

I do that over and over and over again but it seems like I always do something like … it just happens as you’re learning. The difference is, as I said, the difference between understanding and muscle memory. You can understand that in a short amount of time. You can understand what’s going on: root, 5th, 3rd, and then bringing your hand over to the 5th, root, and back down. You can understand that intellectually, but your hand doesn’t have any history. Your hand has to have muscle memory in order to pull that off smoothly.

Let’s take a run like this. When I first learned that, I had to do this. Let’s see, tuck my thumb under. No, that’s not right. I had to do it over and over and over again because I kept goofing, kept messing up, but that’s because my hand had not spent enough time in the woodshed going over that. You may say I can solve that because I can practice that a thousand times today. That’s a good start, that’s an excellent start, but there’s something about the passing of time that has to happen, too.

I’m not a scientist so I don’t understand it. I read scientists writing about that but I can’t explain it at all. There’s something about the passing of time that has to happen before the muscles have enough memory that they can pull that off. Now when I play that, I don’t have to think about that at all. In fact, it’s better if I don’t think about it. If I think about I have to say “Uhh, let’s see, what note am I supposed to play?” When I’m playing the piano like that, I can think about baseball, I can think about what’s for dinner, I can think about what I’ve been reading in the Book of Isaiah. I can think of lots of things and I play better when I’m thinking about something else, because it allows my muscle memory to play without my conscious brain interfering.

I’ve taught thousands of people to play the piano over the years, first in personal in a studio and then of course over the internet, and DVD and so on. I’ve worked personally with at least a thousand people over the years and I found that the higher the IQ of the individual, the bigger the gap is between intellectual understanding and muscle memory. That’s simple to understand because the smarter a person is … If you have an IQ of 150 – genius level – then you have no problem understanding that at all. You’ll understand that in 3 seconds.

Whereas, if you have an IQ like me, much much lower, it might take you a while to figure out what’s a root, what’s a 5th. How does that work? It takes me longer to figure it out. For somebody with a high IQ, they understand it immediately but the hand still takes a lot of time to get that history, get that muscle memory into the muscle, into the hand.

By the way, my hands are not made for piano at all. As you can see, I have short, stubby fingers; they’re kind of fat and they’re just not made for piano playing. To be a good piano player you should have long fingers, thin fingers, long reach. I can barely reach a little over an octave. If I play a 9th, I play the octave, too. These are not great hands, but if you spend enough time in the woodshed and just play and play and play, then you’ll eventually get to where you want to go.

The key is loving it. I just loved music when I was a kid and I was bound and determined I was going to play like some other people. Maybe I didn’t get up to their level but at least I got to a satisfactory level by just spending hours and hours working day by day on the piano. Okay, that’s my little lecture for today so I hope that helps your understanding a bit. It won’t help your muscle memory a bit, though. By helping you know why it takes longer to learn, maybe that will be an encouragement to you. I hope so.

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On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7mH0rosoG8&feature=youtu.be