9 practice strategies for a solid performance

The Winter Recital is quickly approaching! As students prepare to showcase their hard work, it’s wise to incorporate performance-specific strategies into everyday practice. Here’s a quick list of things to do (and not do!) in the weeks before a performance.

What to Do

Practice Slowly (Sloth Speed)

Accurate slow practice prevents us from practicing mistakes into our muscle memory. How slow is slow? I typically tell students to find a tempo that they think is slow—then make it even slower! Playing slowly and intentionally helps build restraint and mitigate the tendency to rush under pressure.

Quiz the Beginning

Several times a day, walk to the piano as if it were the day of the recital. Take your time, ensuring that the bench is at a comfortable height and distance from the keyboard. Find the starting position of your piece, play the first few measures, then stop. This practice strategy only takes a few moments, and playing the beginning of the piece at varying times throughout the day will cement the process of beginning a performance into the long-term memory.

Work Backwards

It’s also helpful to emphasize the end of a piece to ensure a strong and confident finish. Practice the last few measures of your piece. Listen closely to your sound: does it tell the story or communicate the idea that you have in mind? You may also do cumulative backwards practice. For example, play the last line of the piece, then the last two lines, the last three lines, etc., until you’ve worked back to the beginning.

Create Landmarks

Use the existing structure of your piece (e.g. ABA form, binary form, etc.) to create several starting points. The beginning of each formal section is a great starting point; from there, individual phrases or changes in dynamics, texture, rhythmic patterns, or hand position are suitable landmark locations. If you make a mistake and have difficulty moving past it, you can go back (or forward) to the nearest landmark rather than the beginning of the piece. Landmarks are especially helpful when working from memory! Some students even give creative names to each section to make landmarks memorable.

Mock Performances

Students can practice performing for family, friends, and pets. Be sure to include walking to and from the piano and bowing into at-home performances!

Things to think about in a mock performance:

How will I approach the piano?
How will I start and end the piece?
What will I do if I make a mistake?
How will I bow?
How will I leave the stage?

Record yourself

Recording your playing allows you to listen to yourself in a new, objective way. The recording might reveal parts of the music that need a bit more practice. For example, perhaps some dynamic contrasts are not as pronounced as you thought, or there are passages where the melody isn’t projecting enough. Being aware of any issues uncovered in the recording can help guide practice in the weeks before a performance, ensuring smart use of time.

Becoming comfortable listening to our playing can also help us to look on the bright side; if you made a mistake while playing for the camera, you might realize upon listening that the blunder isn’t nearly as big as it felt in the moment!

Practice “in Your Brain”

Mental practice is a powerful tool, and you can do it anywhere! Think through your piece from beginning to end, singing it in your head. Where are the loud parts? The soft parts? What is happening in the musical story?

Create a Mantra

As I prepared for my graduate recital, I developed a mantra to recite when anxious or negative thoughts crept in. My mantra was “you’ve done the work,” referring to the countless hours of practice and care I poured into my recital program. Creating a mantra that addresses your unique challenges can help control pre-performance jitters.

Mindfulness Exercises

Take a deep breath through your nose. Feel the cool sensation of the inhale in the back of your throat. Focus on that feeling. Repeat this process, adding a predictable rhythm (e.g., breathe in for four beats and out for four beats). This exercise can help you feel less nervous and distract you from worried thoughts.

What Not to Do

Practice too much

Over-practicing before a performance can lead to fatigue, burnout, and even repetitive stress injuries—especially if you suddenly increase the amount of daily practice to “cram” for a performance. If you’ve exercised good practice habits leading up to the recital, there’s no need to add excessive time to your practice routine.

Last-minute changes

Changing fingerings and major interpretive elements close to a performance isn’t ideal. Last-minute changes can disrupt pre-performance practice routines and be a distraction during the performance itself.

Trust in the hard work you’ve put in and know that everyone at the recital is rooting for your success! I look forward to all the beautiful performances we’ll enjoy on December 10!

Five More Strategies for Successful Practicing

Positivity is Contagious

Approaching practice with excitement and positivity is crucial. There will be days that you don’t feel like helping your child practice. There will be days where your child doesn’t feel like practicing. These days might even overlap! Nonetheless, as adults, we are tasked with creating and controlling the practice atmosphere. Announcing that it’s time to practice with a friendly—not demanding or nagging—tone is a good place to start.

Although part of piano practice is identifying and correcting mistakes, it’s also important to focus on what the student is doing well. While I don’t recommend undue praise as a way to motivate or lift spirits, it’s a good idea to keep a healthy positivity/negativity ratio: for every constructive criticism, try to mention two areas in which the student is excelling in a given practice session.

Avoid Mirroring Tension

Sometimes, tension will build in at-home practice sessions. Perhaps your child is reluctant to practice altogether, or is frustrated with challenging parts of their assignment. It’s important to not greet your child’s tension with more tension. Adults are responsible for identifying and diffusing tension; young children do not always have the emotional regulation skills to do this themselves. Diffusing tension may including pausing for a moment to tell joke and have a laugh, offering praise for effort if the student is working diligently on something challenging, or keeping communication open by having the student evaluate their own work. What do they feel is the hardest part of a particular practice session? In what areas do they feel like they are excelling?

Be Fair and Follow Through

To feel safe, communicate openly, and be freely creative, students need to trust that their teachers will not give them more than they can handle, hold them to unrealistic standards, or be inappropriately picky. The same is true for at-home practice, where the parent temporarily becomes the teacher. Avoid asking the student to do more than is listed on the weekly assignment, and be consistent with requests—it isn’t fair to have a student play a passage ten times if five times was the agreement. When children feel like they are being treated fairly, they will be more likely to put in more effort.

Deep Dive: Give Rewards—But Know How to Use Them

Although I do not use studio-wide incentives that reward practicing, it’s fine if parents choose to reward practice. Using rewards without considering how they impact motivation, however, has the potential to be problematic. In the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink discusses the psychology of rewards, including their potential pitfalls. Two main categories of rewards are discussed: If-Then rewards, and Now-That rewards.

If-Then rewards are given upon completion of a task (e.g., if you do this task, then you will get XYZ Reward). They are usually anticipated by recipients.
Now-That rewards are also given upon completion of a task, but they are usually a surprise and do not incentivize completion itself; instead, Now-That rewards recognize less-concrete qualities like good effort, divergent thinking, and focus.

If-Then rewards ultimately stifle creativity and inhibit deep thinking. This is because the focus is on the short term and the reward itself—it’s like chasing a carrot on a stick. Pink also explains how If-Then rewards can deflate motivation: “If-Then rewards require people for forfeit some of their autonomy…And that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivation bucket, draining an activity of its enjoyment” (36). When an enjoyable task becomes a job, our motivation to perform the task out of genuine excitement interest declines.

If-Then rewards are also hard to maintain because they are anticipated by recipients, who come to then expect rewards upon completion of similar tasks. Pink notes, “…before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo—which then forces [the use] of larger rewards to achieve the same effect” (53).

Now-That rewards, on the other hand, foster intrinsic motivation because they allow students to see the relationship between their behavior and rewards. What do Now-That rewards look like in the context of piano lessons and practice? Here are a few examples:

When the student accomplishes their practice goals before their practice session is finished, reward their focus and effort by allowing some time for games via music apps. Explain that the surprise app time is a result of their focus.
When the student successfully uses visual aids included in their take-home pouch (e.g., fuzzies, picture cards), reward them with some fun, affordable manipulatives like Iwako erasers or finger puppets. Mention that since they know how to use those aids so well, you got them some new, cool ones!
When the student uses practice strategies independently, reward their ownership with a treat.

Because they are a surprise, Now-That rewards should always be followed up by explaining why the reward was given—this will get the student eager to show off their good attitude and effort in the future!

What I Don’t Use as Rewards

I personally avoid using creative and improvisatory tasks as rewards in any context. I believe that these activities are inherent parts of music-learning, not fun embellishments to be added as a treat or taken away as negative reinforcement.

Thank you for reading this long-overdue addition to my Perfect Practice series! For more a in-depth look at rewards and motivation, I recommend reading Daniel Pink’s book or giving this episode of Ashley Danyew’s podcast, Field Notes on Music Teaching & Learning, a listen.

Preparing for a Recital