Practice Piano Songs Phrase By Phrase

 

This is Duane again and we’re having a series on practice tips. Today I’d like to urge you to practice your piano songs in phrases. Most people when they practice, they make a mistake. They play through the entire piece that they’re practicing. That’s okay once in a while but don’t do that as course. Get each phrase done and polish it off. Work on it hard and repetitively before you go on.

Let’s say you’re playing, well, it doesn’t matter, let’s say I’m playing “When Sunny Gets Blue”. I want to practice my phrases. That’s enough. Just do that much and practice it until you get each chord right the way you want it and each nuance. By nuance, I mean dynamics and touch. You see, I want to be getting soft here, loud, echo kind of thing. Just work on that.

Let’s say you’re playing “Over The Rainbow”. That’s enough. Just work on us. Get that down the way you want it.

Most people play through an entire song and so they make the mistakes. Maybe the first time through, they play like this. They’re always making mistakes every time they play, and they’ll continue to do that. I don’t know about you.

People tend to practice that way. They continue to do that and so the mistakes continue, and they never get past that. Master a phrase at a time, okay?

If I’m playing “Satin Doll”, just take that phrase and get it down. If you go into the whole piece, you know you’re not going to be able to focus on mastering each individual section and that just makes sense.

It’s that way in all of life. When you’re fixing your hair, don’t do your toenails at the same time. Concentrate on one area and get it done right. That’s my little tip for today. Hope that helps. Bye-bye for now.

Hi, this is Duane, and I’d like to take you over a little tour through playpiano.com. This is the best place you can go to find a ton of piano material. If you’re an adult who wants to teach himself to play piano, maybe you took piano lessons as a kid like so many of us did, and then you got away from it because of career and family and so on, and you want to get back to it. You want to bone up on things. This is a great place to go and I’ll show you why in just a minute, so stick with me, okay?

Come over to playpiano.com. That’s all there is to it, just playpiano.com, and you’ll see this daily piano tips. The first thing you should do is you should fill out your name and email there because you get free piano tips every day, video tips. They are powerful tips about all kinds of things related to chords and arranging and improvising and so on.

On this page itself, you can see some samples of those tips. This is a video called “How to play the same song a dozen different way”. Here’s a bunch more down here, embedding chord substitutions in the blues, five easy ways to make your piano playing improve right away, piano player’s toolbox of cool techniques, how to create a flowing river of sound, seven ways to make fatter chords. You get a big fat sound, you know what that means.

Here is improvising your own peaceful song. If you like New Age music, that’s great stuff. A simple two-chord groove you can create out of just two chords, and seven different ways to play the same song, and there’s all kinds of other things here. If you want to write key signatures and how they work, if you want to know about fingering, time signatures how they work, etc., etc.

Now, in addition to that, just take a look at these, I’ll click on this and we’ll go to free piano videos. Here’s a whole bunch, I think there may be 300 right here, if you want to know how to play “Joy to the World” using piano chord styles or “Silent Night” or the three chords you absolutely have to know.

Let me just toggle down and see how many there are. It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Yeah, there’s 300 different videos right there that you can get to right there if you want to know what all that stuff is.

If that’s not enough, you could come over to my YouTube channel and find a whole bunch more. Look at this. This is my YouTube channel. I’ll just toggle down a little bit, there’s all kinds of free…these are all free stuff. As you can see, we have 5 million views and 25,000 subscribers so far.

Let’s go back here to playpiano.com though. Oh yeah, everyday I write a different piano blog, usually a new article. For example, how many styles can you use to play one song like “Satin Doll”? If you want the latest blog, just click that and it’ll go over to, this is the one I did just yesterday, combining left hand piano techniques.

There’s a zillion articles in here and written out as well as in video form. Look at the archives. My goodness, I started, this is January 15, and I started back in, I think it was ’08, no, it was November ’06. You’ve got hundreds and hundreds of articles and videos and materials on that blog so be sure and sign up for that.

Oh my goodness, I could take you to so many…here’s my Facebook page. You can go over there and be sure and…I’ve got over 4,000 likes. Be sure and sign up to be my friend here if you’re on Facebook because there’s tons of stuff there you can get.

I could take you to my Pinterest page and all kinds of places but I don’t want to bore you. I just want you to know that playpiano.com is a central place for you to find out anything you need to know about chords, okay? These are all free.

In addition to that, if you want to go further, then I sell courses and that’s how I make my living. These are full-blown courses. They’re not 10-minute videos. These are 2-hour videos for the most part with books and so on and so forth. There’s a crash course, 52-week crash course, 52 separate lessons. There’s a course on runs and fills and chord progressions.

Anyway, you can go on over to the catalog and read up about those.

There’s an eBook called “Free Piano Stuff” and it’s got hundreds of things like that in there as well. Just remember that, playpiano.com. That’s the central place you want to go to learn all about piano playing, and be sure to sign up for the free, I call it a newsletter but it’s video tips you get everyday so you can learn.

By the way, this is for adults. It’s not for kids. Kids need a live teacher, but if you’re a self-motivated adult and you want to bone up or learn from scratch, and you don’t have time for lessons like most adults who don’t. They don’t have time, they got a career and a family and so. They don’t have time for lessons and to practice an hour everyday and so on, so this is a perfect answer for that.

Okay, thanks for being with me. Bye-bye for now.

***For lots more good stuff on piano playing come on over to my website at https://www.playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips – “Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions!”

Here’s a great little book on chords and chord progressions on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Chords-Chord-Progressions-Exciting-ebook/dp/B0076OUGDE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404158669&sr=1-1&keywords=piano+chords+duane+shinn

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4S4YMKzK5w

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