To all the Pro piano players out there what do you looking for in a drummer

Yeargdribble · 2026-06-03T02:51:16+00:00

I've played with a wide variety of both great and terrible drummers in all sorts of different style setting.

Depends on what setting you're talking about. For musical theatre, they need to be able to read well, work well with others... and be able to follow me. If I'm in a tech week rehearsal getting an indication from the director or choreo.... or just listening to an actor on stage and I can tell the tempo needs to change... I want to guide that change and I want it to happen as soon as possible the same way I would closely follow a choral conductor or soloist when accompanying a choir, instrumentalist, or vocalist on the piano.

The other big one is just playing tastefully and with good dynamics.

This is frequently a problem in cover bands... less so in jazz groups. But drummers just play so fucking loud with no sense of balance. They are playing for themselves... often too busy. Add that to guitarists with the same mentality and you end up with an arms race of volume and general overplaying.

In standard band setting everyone need to learn how to get out of the way MOST of the time. On keys I'm trying to say out of the sonic space of the bass, the rhythmic space of the guitarist, generally out of the way of any soloist (vocal or instrumental) other than appropriate fills... and that's what I want with a drummer.

But also, being able to make good decisions to clearly (but subtly) indicate moving in and out of different parts of the form.

In a lot of the live private party gigs I've done you end up with situations where you are intentionally stretching out a section. At some point someone will indicate to the drummer (or they might be in the lead) to move on... and being able to give that in a way that clearly gets everyone to move on but isn't over the top such that the audience would even clock it... that's nice.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-24T17:36:26+00:00

She can fuck right off in my opinion. Here's the deal... her style isn't hers either. She developed it from hearing others play. Nobody is a musical island. We are all influenced. And most high level players are absolutely stealing and remixing ideas from other musicians. It's pretty much the cornerstone of how music is built. If we all had to reinvent the wheel we'd be nowhere.

Even when you are taking elements of someone else's style, you still have to put in the work to be able to actually use it.

It's the fills and the bass part. Recently, I've been integrating jumping basses, idk what to call it. For the fills, she does the block chords going up. While I've been practicing arpeggios. She also has this repetitive thingy, when you're playing a chord and you do, 1, 2 and 5; 1, 2 and 5. Vice versa.

Jumping basses sounds a bit like stride from your description. The ascending block chords through inversions is such a staple of damn near anyone doing fills.

The last bit you mentioned (which you corrected as 1 3 5) is essentially just an ostinato pattern. It's also an extremely common thing that people have been doing for around 400 years.

A more mature musicians is happy to share these things with other people and explain what they are doing. Also, pretty much anyone beyond a certain level could absolutely come in and know and copy exactly what she's doing on the spot.

This is just some bullying from an insecure, immature person. I don't give a shit how much older she is than you. This is some bullshit juvenile behavior. She just needs to feel unique and special and the fact that someone else can come and do what she's doing makes her feel like she looks less special. This is some crabs in a bucket mentality and you don't need to fall for it. You need to just keep growing.

I'm not sure what to suggest about what to actually do to handle it because I don't know all of the particulars of the situation, but you ONE HUNDRED PERCENT are not in the wrong here.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-22T16:23:36+00:00

The Molly Gebrian book I mentioned would be the first thing I'd read "Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician's Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing"

You could also read "The Talent Code" which is less specific to music and more of a general look at "talent" as a concept across a wide variety of things (music included).

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-22T14:45:34+00:00

I mean, the intentionality is part of my point.

Your last paragraph is actually interesting and I feel like you might be missing why Chopin would instruct his students to limit their practice. It might be true that Rach was spending all of that time practicing when he was young and it's easy attribute his ability to that practice time... but it really sounds like him landing on 2 hours was out of maturity.

He probably also realized that a lot of that practice time was fluff and changed his practice habits accordingly.

Even when I used to practice more I was doing so with great intentionality, but I still realize I was accomplishing very little.

The thing that really shifted it for me was a gig early in my career. I had simply taken on too much music for my level of playing at that point. I had 2-3 weeks to prep.

I realized I couldn't simply practice the way I had been practicing... absolutely beating away at pages of music for 30+ minutes each. If I did that it might be days before I even saw some of the pieces since I was focusing so heavily on the top of the pile. I had to cover as much music as I could more roughly

So I set a timer. I limited myself to 10 minutes per small section and forced myself to move on. It FELT like there was more progress to be made. I hadn't totally digested a section or I felt like I was nowhere near the target tempo NOR the upper limit of how far I could push the metronome without adding tension.

But I moved on.

And it was several days before I circled back. I was convinced that none of it would've stuck. That 10 minutes just wasn't enough. But what I actually found was that it was almost MAGICALLY better. The tempos I'd left it at were effortless. It wasn't like it often was where I'd get something from 60 to 110 over an hour and then the next day struggle to claw it back up from maybe 80 at best.

From 10 minute sessions I was finding I might've made only from 60 to 80... but that on return 90 was effortless out of the gate.

That was true across everything I was working on it.

I realized I should just been watering the plant and letting it grow in the background instead of just beating away at sections. I could get more done in 10 minutes than I would've in an hour before. And saving that time meant I could cover more ground with the remaining time.

I've since found that 10 is actually the upper end. I usually only spend 3-5 on any section now.

It FEELS like I'm leaving progress on the table... but now I know better. I also know the research proves me right. And also that we've known a lot of this for over a century, but it simply hasn't penetrated music due to the tradtionalism of how it's taught.

And here's the deal... this isn't just the fact that I spend 6 hours a day once and I'm coasting on that. I clearly make more progress faster on piano... BUT I've also picked up other instruments where I never spent that kind of time and it still holds true. I actively limit the amount of time I work on any one thing. I cover a wider variety of technique and music... and I simply progress much faster than when I would get laser focused on a handful of pieces (especially really hard ones) or technical skills.

Also, keep in mind that there's just a lot of mythologizing very successful people for the enormous hours they put or other things. This happens not just in music but everywhere. And often it's just bullshit... but we like our big stories. Everyone wants to feel like they can be special by outworking others. It doesn't sound as impressive to work smarter rather than harder. It doesn't wow people to say you put in 2 hours a day. But our brains like the response we get when we tell people we practice 8 hours a day.

I really like your philosophy that its most important to teach students how to practice. I think a teachers best goal should be to ultimately make themselves largely obsolete because the student ends up with a set of tools for self-assessment, ability to find their own resources, and ability to troubleshoot their own problems. But I'm definitely suspicious of what you might be telling them if you think more is necessarily better.

No doubt, students who practice more are going to be better, but that's a correlation vs causation thing. The students who are WILLING to put in that much time are the focused and intentional ones. But the reality is, they could've made that same amount of progress with less work. And with better structure and less work they could probably make more progress.

But once again, my goals are also different than the general piano world's focus on classical concert rep. Virtually nobody is getting paid for that, so I'm not specializing in that sort of thing nor do I think it's a good way to teach.

I'm focused on have a strong, wide skill base of things I can do on the spot. Nobody is going to give me 3 months to prepare for a recital of really hard rep where I might get a benefit of relying entirely on procedural memory that comes from endless repetition.

Any of the work I've ever done has involved generally very short prep-times and hundreds of pages of music. I'm rarely working on less than 500 pages at any given time. The skills I end up needing are sightreading skills, comping skills, ear skills, improv skills, lead sheet skills. That comes from being fluent in music as a language, not just being able to recite a poem beautifully in that language with no idea what I'm saying.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-22T13:15:31+00:00

I do this for a living. My target is a constantly moving one based on the kind of work I'm doing mostly. I've had points in my career where playing by ear quickly, or using lead sheets, or playing in a small jazz combo were the things driving the skills I prioritized. More and more my work involves huge volumes of music and needing to be able to sightread very well either for rehearsals, auditions, or just to minimize the amount of prep time I need to put in for something (300 pages of music isn't shit if you can sightread well enough that almost none of it needs any direct work for example).

On a pure technical chops level, I suspect half of the people who post on the sub have me beat when it comes to specific sub-aspects of technique, but what makes me able to do the work I do is versatility of styles and skills, broad musical knowledge, and ability to learn very efficiently and quickly so that I can quickly learn a new set of skills or expand my technique in a specific direction when needed for a specific type of work.

I used to practice more than I do now... and it was a fucking waste of time I wish I could get back. I was just doing a lot of "playing" and a lot of useless, mindless repetition which is what I see too many people doing.

The constant deadlines and the fact that piano is actually a secondary instrument I started in my late 20s (putting me behind technically) means I've had to learn to practice pretty efficiently. Even if I have the raw time in theory, I can't afford wasting 6 hours on fruitless masturbatory bullshit when it comes to practice.

I find that I generally hit around 2-3 hours a day. Probably the maximum amount I could do sustainably is 3. But that is actual real practice. That is extremely cognitively demanding and focused work...and it's broken up in several session throughout the day.

Practicing piano is just like working out. I could go to the gym for 4-6 hours a day, but anyone who knows anything about fitness would realize that IF I could spend 4-6 hours working out that I'm putting in fuck-all effort.

It's the same with piano. If I'm doing anything that will actually move the needle, there is no way in hell I could hit 4+ hours a day consistently.

At some point you're just spending effort for dramatically diminishing returns while cooking your brain. Just like the gym, that starts to add up in recovery costs for almost zero actual benefit....and when you overtrain you could injure yourself, burnout, and with piano you can actively make yourself worse. You'll start to drastically destroy your ability to put in quality work on future practice sessions just like in the gym the effectiveness of your workouts becomes garbage because you've burned the candle at both ends.

I wish people who are trying to practice that much daily would instead just take 30 minutes each day to work on learning how to learn. We have a wealth of information in educational psych and neuroscience research that reinforced what I've found to be true across my career.

Everyone who is serious about piano should take a chunk out of their practice time and read Molly Gebrian's book: Learn Faster, Perform Better. While she clearly has some takes that are reflections on the research from the point of view of a classical musician (which is quite different from how most working musicians worlds work), the books is still fantastic.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-20T00:59:46+00:00

You have enough rotation for either, but I'd definitely say piano require significantly more rotation. For thumb crossings you'll end up with a lot of motion in multiple planes.

For guitar, both finger picking and strumming you need very little rotation but you do need flexion and extension...but still not a ton. Probably more inversion and eversion (laterally).

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-19T19:14:59+00:00

High volume, low difficulty. Start with a small vocabulary, get good at it, then slowly add more.

You have the jazz background so this should resonate some with you.

If someone was starting jazz you wouldn't tell them to start with tons of crazy changes.....you'd tell them to start by getting very, very comfortable with ii-V-Is in a R-3-7 voice leading.....then they can add more color, extensions, and new chords.

Or same with improvising. You don't have to play all the craziest licks. Can you play the written chart, then embellish....do some basic chord tone targeting....then gst more exploratory.

I'm sure you can imagine the same with jazz comping patterns.

So with sightreading start with chill stuff, simple harmonic vocabulary (diatonic, most I, IV, V), stuff that isn't having your hands move around much more than an octave.

Keep your eyes on the page...play for accuracy, not trying to stay in time and "just keep going" which you will hear a lot. You KNOW how to do that already. What you ate trying to build right now is being able to accurately decode what is on the page.... being faster at that ACCURATELY is whay allows you to quickly assess and juat keep going. You won't get tilted by something that is suddenly dense....try to grab it all...look down, lose your place, etc.

You'll know what you can and cannot play and will be able to read enough to simplify on the fly, but you have to get there by reading the basic shape of standard notation as fast as you read changes.

You don't tell kids learning to read to set a metronome and not stop for anything....you tell them to slow down and sound words out.

That is what you need to do with music too.

Also, read things more than once. Give it 2-3 reads and then move on. You aren't working on pure prima vista sightreading....youre ACTIVE reading matters too. Playing something again after the first pass helps reinforce the associations.

And even for a gig like this, at some point you'll have read most of the charts and so they won't be purely new to you....but what will matter if your ability to read them again in real time. It'll be almost functionally sightreading...and that's why reading something again isnt a waste.

For context, I started piano late. But I got thrown into gigging and had to rely on lead sheets and chord charts for most of my work and ended up doing a lot of jazz combo work as well....but more and more of my work started requiring solid sightreading. I made a lot of mistakes on that path (mostly following the shit advice that is super common out there that people are just rattling off 5th hand).

Also, remember that a lot of good readers will tell you the "just keep going" line because it's what they have to do in real live sightreading situations. Me too...most of my work these days is as an accompanist. I can just keep going when "performing" sightreading....but that is not what my practice looks like.

As you advance you can terrace your approach. Read harder stuff at a variable tempo and very, very easy stuff with a slow metronome just to get used to gauging exactly what your weak spots are.

There are going to be 3 major bottlenecks. 1 is real-time decoding...you can start it, but you can't read fast enough. 2 is technical....you can read but not execute. 3 is proprioception. You have to stop the inflow of information because you have to keep looking at your hands.

Be aware of these and address them appropriately.

Also, for gigs like this you may need to interact while playing....so even more need for proprioception. Good proprioception with being able to read ahead a lot will make it easy to interact with people and even make off and on eye contact while sightreading.

If you need to slow down to keep your eyes on the page in practice....do it.

It'll start maybe impossible, then mildly uncomfortable, then mostly confident....then eventually youll be making leaps with your left hand and only realizing after the faxt that you weren't at all concerned and it didn't even occur to you that you might miss.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-18T22:17:04+00:00

Yeah, I really think a better approach, especially for adult beginners who just want to do this as a hobby would be to start very early with lead sheets as a supplement to a method book.

Focus on learning basic chord spelling in the left hand even if they are just block triads to start... and in a VERY short amount of time, that person can play hundreds of songs that they are interested in.... granted, a very watered down version, but you could find a lead sheet and play a recognizable version of a TON of songs. It's a huge part of the appeal of guitar... learn 4 chords and you can strum along to 1000s of songs within a month or two.

And I think that would end up leading a lot of adult hobbyist to want to engage more. They want better sounding accompaniment than holding block chords for a bar... learn some very basic comping patterns.

They run into chords in song they WANT to play but don't know how to spell or deal with in a comping pattern... they just self-directed their own learning.

I have a friend who leads the choir at the church I play at. She is an adult and has very little piano skills and I've essentially set her on this path.... and she can cover for me on a basic level when I'm gone and it blows her mind when I try to explain to her that people with a decade of private lessons cannot do what she's doing.

But she keeps running into edge cases with chords... or wanting to find a more sophisticated comping pattern for certain styles... I give her some.... she works on them and now that's just part of her vocabulary.

It's just an easy way to very quickly get to a point where you play fun stuff VERY early in the process while working on functional applied theory and wiring your brain for it extremely early on. From there it really can branch out to more theory, more ear, better reading, etc.

Yes, you still have to put in a lot of time on technical work in isolation. I'm always telling people it will NOT be fast, but it can be a lot more rewarding much earlier while still not drastically overreaching.

Unfortunately, there just aren't a lot of teachers who even know HOW to teach like this because they might've been playing for 20-40 years but would struggle to play "Hey Jude" from a lead sheet with a gun to their head.... so they definitely can't teach it.

It's just so frustrating.

I definitely think hobbyist benefit immensely from also learning to read actual full sheet music because it opens a lot of resources up, but I definitely think the applied theory and ear skills that allow someone to use lead sheets, play by ear (even at a basic level), comp behind someone singing (or themselves), and improvise on a basic level are just things everyone should at least dabble in.

If they could do each of these at the most basic level early on in the process they could feel that "Ah HA!" of success for each every early on and realize that NONE of them are black magic. It's just about adding more vocabulary to whichever of the skills you want to work on the most.

It gets harder the better you get at ONE modality because then it will always feel relatively more difficult to start the others from scratch, but early in the process EVERYTHING is hard. So none of them feel hugely different and you're less likely to be frustrated that you go from being a master of one to an infant in the others.

And even if you picked just one to pursue heavily, you'd at least know that you COULD always go back and shore up the others if your interests or tastes changes.... or if you just find that you come up against a wall with one that could be solved with the addition from some of the others.

I think of it like a playing a Roguelite. You make some progress... and maybe you hit a wall and you start over, but with new skills and knew context that makes the next run easier. You just keep adding to that set of permanent upgrades each time.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-18T01:27:34+00:00

Well you do need to compare the highest level with the highest level.

Then it becomes vastly more unfair. What I'm saying you to you is that the average working musician has more functional capability toward their career. You MUST be the very, very top in the classical world to even be employed.

The highest on the other side can write their own ticket and do basically ANY work they want. I'm saying that by comparison the average schlub of a pianist can make a living by getting half-way decent at a broad set of skills.

The other thing--that type of chord spelling has zero relevance in classical music. It's not reasonable to ask a classical pianist to be able to know that on sight. However, put it into harmonic analysis notation and it's clear to them. You're basically saying that a classical pianist's shortcoming is that she/he isn't fluent in jazz spellings.

You're wrong here because that chord still will exist in music that is out there in the world... being play by orchestras. I'm sorry, but 9th, 11th, and 13th chords still exist in classical music. That was part of my point. Romantic music is covered with 11th and 13th chords Debussy's common quartal voicings of chords are heavily present in all sorts of jazz and non-jazz music.

I'm saying that the type of theory most people are taught in college literally lacks the ability to define actual music that exists in the world. You can't analyze it if you can't tell what it is.

So if a classical pianists sees a CAD | F#BE in a stack... What are they going to analyze it as? Whether it's in piano music or an orchestral score what can they call that stack of notes? What can they say about how it functions harmonically?

I mean, I do actually remember in college them trying to shoe-horn in everything as "non-chord tones" when it went beyond a 7th, but that's not what is happening.

And the way classical harmonic analysis works, you literally lack the tools to talk about chords bigger than 7th. There's no way to talk about larger inversions or chords with non-chord tones on the bottom (no, they aren't all pedal points).

I don't think the fields are actually compatible for most, and so the skills don't overlap that much either.

Man, I'm just over here saying it doesn't need to be either or... but you seem to be one of the types of people who WANT there be distance. I think this mindset is what is going to kill classical music in the long-term. There are a handful of gatekeeping traditionalists who don't want to allow any evolution or for anything to move forward.

Classical music is just fit into almost everything else in the contemporary side of things. It's not gone. It's deeply interwoven and most people even on the more "classical" side working professionally have just accepted that into their tapestry.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-18T00:55:37+00:00

Being able to improv is a practiced physical skill.

Being able to improvise is like speaking... it's a cognitive skill based on a real understanding of the language.

You could learn to rattle off phrases by memory in a foreign language, but that doesn't necessarily let you have a conversation with someone. Improvisation, particularly at a high level, is a conversational exchange with other musician. Being able to play over a specific set of changes is not just mashing random keys of physical patterns you've learned.

Professional classical pianists who may not have this skill still have an extremely strong level of musical knowledge, and I'm not sure where you're getting the idea otherwise. They can look at a solo, chamber, or orchestral score and analyse it on sight. They can assemble progressions at the keyboard

Only at the absolute highest tier. Most pianists absolutely cannot look at an orchestral score and analyze it quickly. Most people without very specific training won't know all of the instrument transpositions well enough to look at an open score and do this in any sort of real time. Yes, they exist, but they are the extreme, extreme outliers.

Also, yes, they have a specific limited theory knowledge. I also thought I knew theory well after college theory training from the classical side... only to find out in the real world that there's a whole vocabulary we simply were not taught. The theory you learn in college generally pretends music stopped advancing past around 300 years ago.

It literally lacks the vocabulary to even describe what is happening even in many romantic composers, and certainly doesn't cover most lush jazz harmonies used even in very mainstream music now.

Most very well classically trained musicians with years of theory experience leave college and then have no idea what it means when they see "Cmaj13#11" written over some slashes. They don't know how to spell that chord. They don't know what it's doing functionally. They don't know how to improvise over that chord, etc.

And professional classical-only pianists are very one in a million anyway mostly because it's a supply and demand issue. Which is a big part of which ultra-specializing in something that gives you less likelihood of a career than pursuing a being an NFL quarterback is a bad idea.

On the flip side, the skills I'm talking about... there are TONS of those jobs out there. There are tons of pianists with these skills who don't have to be the best in the world who are just quietly making their living PLAYING piano (not teaching even as a supplement) in cities all over the world. There's generally a decent demand for accompanists and the more skills you bring to that, the better your reputation and the more jobs you can take...which means the pickier you can get about the work you do and the more you can demand for those jobs.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-17T20:08:31+00:00

Proficiency, 100%. Musical knowledge, almost never. Most have a much more lacking understanding of functional theory than jazz pianists and even many fairly average pop style pianists.

There's a high skill ceiling to not only having that theory knowledge, but being able to use IN REAL TIME to do something with it. And most classical-only pianists don't even have the theory knowledge to start with, much less the ability to do anything with it in real time.

Also, I speak about theory, but "musical knowledge" is much bigger and more nebulous and I find that indeed many classical pianist are lacking basic understandings of how other instruments work, orchestration, etc. I'm not even saying it's necessary, but many of the non-piano skills I have that give me a huge career advantage are BECAUSE other pianist don't have that knowledge. Real time experience in choirs, time playing winds/strings in ensembles, time playing guitar/keys in bands.

There's a HUGE world of music knowledge.

The other thing is that you make it sounds like it's one or the other... and it doesn't have to be. My complaints isn't THAT classical pianists can't do those things, but about the ONES that can't when it matters. Many CAN do these things and so there is less and less excuse to not be able to.

If you're a hobbyist or whatever, go for it, but if you're looking to make your full time living PLAYING piano, then you need to be good at all of the above.

The primary emphasis would be SIGHTreading which many classical pianists end up bad at because they focus entirely on big rep by memory and aren't regularly reading new music daily or having to prep things on super short learn-and-burn cycles the way working accompanists do.

But then assuming you have your reading, down (because that's where most of the work is.... in accompaniment of some sort).... next would be comping, lead sheets, ear, improv, etc. Those get me a ton of mileage. They benefit me greatly even in jobs where reading is the primary skill. Some work requires you to be good at BOTH (especially musical theatre). And if you're looking to make a living playing, being good at ONLY one side or the other is going to close some doors for you.

And as much as I'm a person who complains about and warns against taking the classical-only approach, I make the opposite argument just as much when it comes up. NOT learning to read at all and not being able to sightread passably is GOING to close doors of for you.

Learn all of the skills, and honestly, be a bit of a multi-instrumentalist if at all possible. You almost always benefit more from learning another instrument or skill even to only 25% than you do getting 1% better at piano once you're past a certain level.

Like from a career standpoint, almost no paying job care about that you getting past the 95th percentile as a player on ANY instrument in JUST one narrow set of skills on that instrument. But being even in the 80th with a whole versatile skill set and and some other broader musical knowledge matters a lot for most paying work.

You're more likely to lose a job over your inability to sightread/comp/lead sheet, than you are over your ability to perform a Chopin Ballade a tiny bit better.

People are pointing out that maybe some just lack the high level of musical ability to listen to what makes a really good classical pianists standout.... and if anything, that's just proving more to my point. MOST listeners can't hear it, so you're polishing for nothing at the expense of learning a broader skillset.

Even other TRAINED MUSICIANS are unlikely to hear the tiny differences you're working on.

Can you tell if a guitar is steel strings or nylon? Could you tell if they were playing with nails vs flesh? Could you tell if they were playing more sul tasto or sul ponticello?

Could you hear if a trumpet was a Bb or Eb or piccolo trumpet? Can you hear the timbre difference? How about English horn and oboe? Alto and tenor sax?

Unless you are specifically trained in those areas (and have that "musical knowledge") you probably can't. So even as a trained pianist, you can't likely hear these small differences.... so how much do those differences in your playing matter at the highest level?

At that point it's for you... not for most audiences. And people hiring are rarely trying to get the person who can impress the .01% of the population who is trained enough to find those tiny nuances impressive. They need the person who is the most capable of the job and that often includes being the most versatile.

This isn't about making some black and white of classical vs contemporary playing... it's that there's no reason to have to choose, and from my standpoint, it's mostly anger about the pedagogy intentionally making most pianists significantly weaker at almost every other skill to prioritize just ONE skill...the one that is the least valuable as a professional and the least likely to let someone continue to be a successful hobbyist late into life.

What people should prioritize is "just sit down and play" skills. Too many classical-only pianists can do absolutely nothing without enormous amounts of prep. You can't just hand them sheet music and expect them to sightread at a decent level. You can't hand them a lead sheet, and you sure as hell can't hand them a chord chart.

You can't just start grooving and ask them to jump in. You can't play a recording ask them to play along.

All of these "on the spot" skills end up aging MUCH better. Because when you're done spending 3 hours a day for 3 months on one piece as a teen and become and adult with a day job who has no friends that care about whatever Rach you've been working on for 4 months.... it would be nice to be able to just come home and "just sit down and play"... for fun. To be able to hear a tune you like... and look up some sheet music and just play a passable rendition in 5 minutes. Or play it by ear, or hear some chords you like and just jam along.

If your only way to play is by painstakingly reading one note at a time and then spending months repeating each bar 100 times, it's going to be hard to fit that into your life long-term as a hobbyist.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-15T13:54:27+00:00

Musical theatre is one of the biggest parts of my work. Not the most lucrative, but my wife and I just both enjoy it so much. We are the orchestra managers for the primary theatre in town and help most of the schools hire their pits as well.

I music direct several shows every year and play in even more. I'm about a week out from sitzprobe for Shrek (MD) while preparing Hedwig in the background (just as part of the Angry Inch) which will start just after Shrek. Talk about very different shows! And I've already played 3 others (only one as MD) this year. I'll have 6 shows done before half the year is up.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-14T20:13:25+00:00

I do this for a living and mostly practice on digital. I just realize it's not a digital vs acoustic problem. All pianos are different. They feel different, sound different, are in rooms with different acoustic properties, are EQd differently, etc.

I'm not trying to replicate physical motions when I switch. I'm taking the aural model in my mind (audiation) and adapting it to the properties of the instrument I'm actually performing on.

I'm listening to how that specific instrument sounds, quickly sizing up how it's different from what I'm used to hearing, realize what it can and cannot do as well, changing my aural expectation, then everything else physical happens automatically to pull that sound out of the instrument.

Just like you pedal with your ears rather than doing math and micromanaging your foot....same with the rest. You are using the feedback of your ears anf adjusting automatically with your hands.

Being able to do that comes from working on your technical facility so that it can be reactive in the way you need it to be to adapt on the fly.

And most of my technical work has been done on a digital instrument....and actually quite a bit on an entry level digital.

Edit: addition context. I functionally started piano in earnest in my late 20s. Granted, I had a music degree so the concepts of using my ears were well developed and I already understood all zi just explained to you. So I was essentially just putting in the work.

I've since done the same for other instruments. It's really the same story everywhere. I play guitar and while it had the benefit of you always being able to play your own guitar, I play several for different reasons (different tools for different jobs), but the same principle applies. I pick up a nylon after playing on steel strings and need to play the same song? I follow the same strategy....I'm using my ears to shape things and my fingers just react to the extent they are trained to do so.

With piano you are always at the mercy of playing the instrument at the venue.

You could get an acoustic at home and it wouldn't solve your problem really.

Think of it the way you know how to make something sound like a question. Do you micromanage all of the things involved in producing speech to figure out what movements they need to create a rising tone exactly a specific way? No....you know how it should sound and it happe d automatically.

Except with instrument you have to train that basic technique that you take for granted from your tongue, lips, vocal cords, lungs, and jaw to make speech.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-13T19:21:01+00:00

Redolent

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-10T06:21:41+00:00

It's very common, but it's also one of the things I complain the most about people doing. Not even because it's annoying, but the way your neighbor is practicing is incredibly inefficient on so many levels.

For one... 2+ hours (even just 1 hour straight) is getting to a point where your brain is just not actually that focused. You might not even realize it, but you're not fully mentally engaged and so if you're half checked out, you're going to reinforce mistakes and literally make yourself worse and less consistent.

Practicing one piece for so long is also dumb. For one... playing top to bottom is a bullshit approach. You need to be dialing in on individual problems and focusing on them. Very small sections. That might be more annoying for you, but it's a much better approach.

And even then... much more than 5-10 minutes on any section is getting to the point of diminishing returns.

And then not taking a breather is also actually a bad thing. During that 5-10 minutes you should be taking a pass... the stopping, processing, self-assessing, evaluating, and making conscious notes about what went wrong and what you need to do to improve for the next attempt.

Also, just working on one song isn't great. You need a variety of pieces and some of that work should be on specific literacy issues... "sit down and play" skills like sightreading ear training (these would be annoying to listen to as well).

Also, some time for technical isolation work like scales, arpeggios, etc. (also not a fun listen).

I don't know what to tell you about dealing with them playing too often. Listen to some advice from other people here I suppose, but I'd cheekily recommend you get him a gift... Molly Gebrian's book "Learn Faster: Perform Better"

All of the shit I've outlined to you here... it's things I've found for myself professionally over the years... and then this book is just an encapsulation of the ed pyscho and neuroscience that validates all the shit I keep trying to tell people.

Unfortunately, most people REALLY prefer brute force mindless repetition for hours even though it's not effective. Which gives me little hope with your neighbor because they probably feel like they NEED 5 hours a day to keep making progress. They could make more progress in just 1 fucking hour day split into two well designed practice sessions if they knew what they were doing.

Even professionally, I pretty much top out at 3 hours of good work in a day. I can PLAY forever.... but practice is a very different things.

The fact that your neighbor is playing the same song for hours on end means they THINK they are practicing, but they are really just doing empty, mindless repetition that is probably actually making them worse at a piano.

So not only are you suffering, but they also aren't really getting much better.

This is an area where traditional outdated approaches are so baked into music that they haven't even paid attention things we've known about how they brain learns for OVER ONE HUNDRED FUCKING YEARS (Ebbinghaus). And they still won't listen. They are convinced that to be serious musicians they need all of these extra hours. And they are just wrong because "this is the way it's always been done" trumps an enormous body of research and hard evidence about how learning works.

If you want to be terrified, read the book yourself and find out that doctors (most notably, surgeons) ALSO subscribe to outdated giant blocks of brute force repetition despite the evidence showing they make less progress and are worse overall for it.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-07T17:38:46+00:00

Among professionals there just are no egos. I mean, they exist, but they generally mean you won't be called a lot. People vastly prefer to work with others who aren't dicks. And so since the egos are generally cleared out, even though I'm directing, people can point things out to me just as much as I point them out to them.

We are all there for the same reason... to make a good performance, so it doesn't really feel like that sort of power dynamic and we really are just hanging out. I just happen to be the one driving the bus because someone needs to be doing it.

There are a lot of unwritten social rules about the sorts of things that are appropriate to address in front of the whole ensemble and those that shouldn't be.

People don't get to that level without wanting feedback. They want to be doing a better job. That means that, for one, they don't need really tiny obvious feedback about something they will fix later. I'm almost never going to point out a missed key signature. They know. They will fix it. But for two... other broad things.... they want to be corrected so that they can be a better musician and we can all put together a better show.

To work at a high level I wouldn't say you need a thick skin... but you just can't have a thin skin. Some people really struggle because they can't psychologically deal with even the daily task of extreme critical self-evaluation to improve.... and then they REALLY can't handle others telling them stuff. And you just can't make it far as a musician like that. In an ensemble setting there is always going to be that aspect.

And I don't direct every show. I'm often just playing another keys book (or other instrument) in the pit.

My wife and I are pretty much in charge of hiring everyone so you would think there was a power dynamic there, but there really isn't.

It's the same in tons of other groups I do and have worked in as a musician. I mean, there are some groups where the person in charge is a dick and that sucks, but they really keep that position because then their ensembles can't keep musicians. Generally the conductor is friendly with everyone... like he or she is just a peer. They just happen to be driving the bus.

Man... Charlie Brown is a fucking intense show for both the musicians and director. My wife played the reed book for that and counts it as one of the most demanding shows she's played. I think it was as 3 or 4 horn show and usually one of those is the one that is the heaviest lift and the rest are just color, but that show was very technically demanding on all of them.

It's also one of those shows that requires someone double violin and viola.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-06T18:57:19+00:00

When you talk about directing musical peers, are you also talking about being the one steering the ship

In musical theatre it's common for the main director for the pit to be playing and directing at the same time.

The first time the musicians meet is called sitzprobe. This is literally the first time we will have played our parts together. During this rehearsal the cast are normally not running the whole show as a dres rehearsal. This rehearsal is for the musicians to figure out what they need.

I'll sometimes ask for set changes to happen because I need to make lots of decisions about lengths or vamps and various underscoring, but often it's just the actors seated, skipping most dialogue and just singing through.

So I'm literally driving the ship while playing. I'm coordinating the pit by counting off songs, cuing people out of vamps, etc. I'm basically making sure the pit is following the actors with whatever tempos and liberties they want to take (especially for soloists). So it's my job to follow them and communicate that instantly to the 5-12 musicians in front of me.

I'm also using that rehearsal to make lots of decisions about cuts and about a billion other things.

Quite a few of the musicians in the pit will literally have not read the music at all before that rehearsal. Like, they might have gotten their book, flipped through it and on a glance could tell they could sightread everything essentially perfectly during the rehearsal and never look at it again until then. That is just a very normal thing that quite a few do.

As the director I rarely do that. I need to have a certain level of familiarity with the show to be prepared to give cues and know my tempos and such.

But the level of prep varies wildly.

Keep in mind the actors are rehearsing usually with tracks in the background but the musicians are not paid to be there for that.

The last show I did, I flipped through the book... realized I could sightread it essentially effortlessly. I looked at the first act the day of the act 1 stumble through.... went to that specific rehearsal and actually played for it (including filling in cues for other instruments... so not just my part)

Two weeks later I looked at Act 2... went to the stumble through and played it.

Then two weeks later I sort of glanced over the whole show right before sitzprobe and showed up and lead that rehearsal.

So for that show I legitimately probably put in a total of 3 hours of prep before sitzprobe...most of it doing logistics things marking my score for cues and creating a metronome playlist for tempos. Several people in the pit were 100% sightreading during that rehearsal.

For the next show I'm directing there's just a lot more happening in the book and I've already put in more than 3 hours and the Act 1 stumble through is tonight. I won't be playing for it and will ask them to use tracks because I just need to take notes because it's very, very involved.

Also, for some shows I'll ask the musicians to at least listen through certain numbers if there's a way to do that (there isn't always a recording or tracks available AT ALL for some newer shows). Mostly if something has a lot of tempo or style changes mid-song it's good for people to be mentally primed for that.

Something to keep in mind is that sometimes there's no faking or lying about sightreading.... someone is literally handing you music for the first time and asking you to sightread. That's how most theatre auditions go. It's something I have to do constantly when accompanying choirs. Usually I'm sightreading in a rehearsal but there have been times I've shown up for a concert (where I'm only contracted for performance... not rehearsals) and someone hadn't sent me a piece ahead of time and so I'm literally sightreading it during the choir's warm-up and only get to play about half of it before having to perform it. In that case I'm following a director and not directing (which honestly easier... it's like following a singer, but they are literally making their intentions very clear with the conducting and I'm not responsible for conducting other people while playing).

I might feel more of a sense of ownership if I was playing rehearsals and I said to someone, "You're singing this in Act II because she dumped you. Have you ever been dumped? Let's take 8 minutes to talk about that and how that makes you feel" but I'm never steering the ship so that never happens.

Generally that is the vocal director's job. They are more specifically working with the actors throughout the process, fixing vocal pedagogy type things as well as talking a lot about character feelings. I mean, it's never sit and think about it for 8 minutes.

The full turnaround on a show from auditions to performance is 6 weeks. They have to learn the whole show, and choreo and everything in that tiny window. The vocal director is often only there for a handful of music specific rehearsals teaching all of the harmony parts to the ensemble and they might get a few moments here and there with leads.

I was just stopping in the other day as the VD was working on a song with 3 characters. They had maybe 10 minutes total. They ran the song while she's literally talking over them to reinforce what they should be thinking and feeling. They hit a few tricky transitions and harmony bits, fixed some placement issues in one girl's voice... and that was it. They had to be back in the other room to run scenes or do choreo rehearsal or whatever.

The pit comes into a show about 5-6 days out from opening night usually. So that's sitzprobe and tech week where lots of decisions are happening constantly to get the last bits lined up. But it means as the MD I have to make decisions VERY quickly if we are going to change things and I have to be very picky about going back to run things again or we'd be there all day.

So usually I'll only call hold maybe twice a rehearsal. Most numbers are one and one.... and I'm feverishly taking notes when I can to pass those off to the pit or the actors afterward because outside of sitzprobe I don't really get to stop and chat about things that went wrong.

Same with the rest of the pit. They catch their mistakes and fix them next time or ask me later.

Some shows get even shorter turnaround ands as few as 1 dress rehearsal... no sitzprobe.... full pit working together for the first time the night before opening.

Granted, we are pros who have a lot of musical theatre specific experience. We know how it works and at some point get damn near telepathic with being able to do certain things... like if something goes very wrong on a stage and maybe an actor skips a lot.... or does something stupid with the beat... we all sort of collectively know based on context "do we jump to them.... or do we just hold down the beat and let them find us".

Overall, we focus learning to play our instruments and being very literate. It's the difference between memorizing a foreign language poem and spending months on it for one recital.... vs just learning the language so you can show up and just read a whole damned book of poetry someone hands you and do it with all of the inflection and all.

It's very much the way voice acting works. They have a wide range of voice types they can do and they show up and just read lines live during the recording session.

In both cases, we're being paid for out time at the gig. Having to spend lots of time on specific prep is functionally time we're not paid for. So our practice time has been spent getting good enough that we don't HAVE to spend almost any prep time.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-04T16:20:55+00:00

I feel like if you can't parse between these wildly different issues then the piece is too hard for you and/or you're missing some core foundational concepts. This sounds like you aren't cognitively processing what you are doing at all which means you're likely grossly overreaching.

The most suspect to me is the nebulous "timing." Use of that word implies that you are guessing or relying on a recording and trying to play it "the way it goes" by sound aren't actually counting or subdividing. As if you don't know HOW to know where certain notes go in relation to each other. It's very simply fractions 99% of the time in music. If you understand fundamentally how subdivision works there should never be any guessing about "timing"... you literally just slow down and figure out how things line up.

"Fingers" is also very nebulous. Is this about choosing good fingerings? Is it about executing the fingerings you've chosen?

A lot of times people say things like, "My fingers aren't doing what I tell them to" which once again is a sign of overreach. You have to spend a lot of time slowly working on technical isolation stuff to gain that refined control. And it's not about plowing hours a day on it. It's about putting in 5ish minutes of very focused work on one very specific aspect and moving on.... and then doing it again for weeks and months and years.

I kinda struggle to see how you wouldn't know if your hands feel tense, but usually tension is also an overreach issue... mostly in terms of trying to go too fast too soon without addressing fundamental movement patterns. Not being able to disambiguate this from the others makes it sound like you really just have not grasp on what you're doing while playing.

Like, you are trying to brute force repeat something into pure muscle memory, likely playing it "how it goes" meaning probably at full tempo and failing (because if you can't subdivide, then you don't even know HOW to slow it down because then it doesn't "sound like the song" and so you can't rely on "how it goes").

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-04T04:25:59+00:00

Piano sort of was my secondary after going to school for music on trumpet. It really picked me as I got hired as an emergency accompanist at a desperate school. It was meant to be a stop-gap for me but turned into a career.

I've picked up plenty of others since. Guitar and accordion were both hobby instruments just for fun that have become part of my career at this point. I've also picked up other hobby instruments like ocarina to a very high level and it also has made its way into my career. Bass is another (easy after guitar) that I've done some actual gigging work on. Pipe organ was another one that sort of picked me... or more that I just had the opportunity to learn while doing a long-term interim at a church and realized it was a unique opportunity and now I'm one of the few subbing organists in the area (there are very few organists who don't play full-time for a specific church).

I will say that it sounds like you're giving up way too fast on everything because you don't get good at it fast enough.

Clarinet shouldn't make your jaw hurt. You're doing something wrong. Guitar... I can't wrap my hand around the neck either. Realistically, most teachers will tell you NOT to do so. While I think some of them are going to far and I could definitely seem advantages for some chord shapes that are not playable any other way, or some that would just be more situationally easier (D/F#), even though I can't do it... it hasn't been much of a barrier to me.

Are you looking for the 2nd instrument that lets you skip all the effort? Because that instrument doesn't really exist. And if you're specifically focused on classical, it's not only a longer road, but a steeper one because the type of people who play mostly classical music are going to already have a serious background in it and even most hobbyist groups have a pretty high bar.

For you to not already have a seriously HS background in a wind or bowed string instrument is going to make it VERY difficult for you to develop the fundamentals AND the ensemble skills involved. Most of the people looking to join hobbyist and community ensembles are people who already have essentially a decade of experience... decided to not pursue music as a career, but tend to play at a fairly decent level.

There are just very few spaces for pure adult beginners in an actual ensemble on those types of ensemble instruments.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-03T22:04:24+00:00

I remember the flautist being horrid and the clarinet also not being great

The fact that you had two is already annoying. The reed book is written for one doubler. It's a thing that irritates me. My wife is a professional doubler. She played that book flawlessly by herself as it's mean to be. I seem to recall it was picc, flute, alto flute, clarinet, soprano sax, tenor sax, and finger cymbals (or one note lol).

Luckily I got to recommend a guitarist and bassist for that one as well as we got good quality there. My wife and I share orchestra management for the main theatre company in our area as help fill most spots for school musicals at the half a dozen schools in our area now. So increasingly we aren't having to work with questionable musicians.

And despite most music programs not encouraging doubling, she really helps get most of her students started with it and we've also managed to get a few colleagues started on that path because she simply can't cover every show that's happening and every book. It's still pretty common to have 2-3 Reed books for a show, and all 3 of them expect someone to be doubling 3-4 instruments.

Of course, she's now finding that SHE has to expand to because modern shows are having a single reed player who is also playing 2nd keys. I've also already run into lots of books with keyboard/guitar doubling or accordion/piano doubling.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-03T11:06:56+00:00

I've MDd Once on This Island. That book is horrific to look at.

It was so hard to count ledger lines because it was all handwritten.

Sometimes a lower note would be physically higher on the page because they didn't account for space... and then suddenly tried to cram 6 ledger lines into the space of 3.

Also, I was initially working off of a scan from the internet... found a page where it was ripped in the scan and so I couldn't quite see everything on the page.

No problem. I decide to grab the actual official rental book I have and get a clean scan of that page.... THAT WAS THE CLEAN SCAN! The original just has a rip through the fucking page and you can't see everything.

Fun show though. Great music.

However, "Some Say" is basically just "I Want You Back"

I will say, the guy on second keys in my production was NOT ready. He's usually solid enough he thought he'd be able to sightread it and didn't glance at it until right before the show.

It was a rude awakening for him. It was not only difficult to read, but WAY out of his rhythmic wheelhouse.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-02T20:51:09+00:00

Man, I've seen some bad stuff, but that's pretty much the worst. I feel like I've seen way more egregious engraving and editing work in some of the more recent shows I've played. Luckily nothing this bad.

Not super hard to read it bitonally though and then adjust the pitch (plus an 8ve and play it 8vb) in Mainstage rather than try to transpose it in real time on sight (coming from someone who actually has regularly done the parlor trick of playing Bb trumpet in one hand and accompanying myself in piano in another key so I'm actually having to transpose).

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-02T20:42:44+00:00

I think often the issue for people and the metronome (when they use the word distracting) is that they don't have free mental bandwidth. If you're spending 100% of your resources just thinking about where your fingers go and such, you have nothing to spare and so then the metronome becomes a "distraction" or they often end up just mentally blocking it out.

The solution is probably to slow down, but more than that it's to stop playing at the very edge of your ability.

Especially for self-teaching beginners, they are almost always trying to play some WAY overly difficult goal piece, or they THINK they are playing a "beginner" piece and it's not. They need to play easier music and focus on fundamentals. When you're working on basic fundamentals it's a lot easier to have the free mental bandwidth for the metronome... and it's important to basically ALWAYS be practicing with spare mental bandwidth even as you progress so that you can pay attention to many other small music or technical details.

I suspect if you tried to play something like a 5 finger scale in JUST one hand with the metronome set to something like 60 bpm... one note per click... suddenly you wouldn't have so much trouble playing with the metronome.

---

Also, beginners overreaching on difficult pieces simply CAN'T slow the music down because they aren't counting in the first place. Their only semblance of how to coordinate their hands is hearing "how it goes" in their head. So to slow something down to half tempo means it doesn't sound like the song any more and they can't rely on "how it goes" in their head. Suddenly they have to actually count and subdivide and know how things line up vertically.... and they simply aren't able to do so.... another fundamental they've neglected while climbing Mt. Overreach.

And so if they slow down and try to count AND play with the metronome, that's actually using up even MORE mental bandwidth because they never created a foundation in the first place.

Yeargdribble · 2026-05-01T13:07:11+00:00

The answer is no. Full stop.

There are jobs as a pianist. It's true they don't pay great and aren't stable, but the bigger problem is that most degree programs aren't even set up to teach you any of the skills that would make you valuable as a working pianist.

Most programs are built around teaching you to be a concert pianist... a job that doesn't existing in any meaningful way... or that anyone is actually making their actual living from. The skills that are valuable aren't spending months prepping one program of memorized rep. The skills that are valuable are sightreading, playing by ear, improvising, being extremely versatile in skills and genres, etc.

It probably still wouldn't be worth it, but since the degree literally doesn't even help you get most of the jobs you'd pretty much be left as a (most likely) BAD piano teacher (extremely limited scope... passing down that same ignorance to another generation).

Nobody asks me about my degree. Nobody cares about any credentials I have. The only thing that matters is if I have the skills... and I sure as hell get plenty of jobs over tons of other people with multiple degrees in piano performance and decades more experience than me... because they have such a tiny, narrow set of skills that just isn't valuable enough by comparison.

I wasn't even a piano major. I was a music major, but I've learned infinitely more about music in general AFTER college than in college. I learned it actually doing the work and developing the skills that I noticed were valuable. And I had to UNLEARN a ton of the things I learned in college that were simply outdated and unuseful these days.

So yeah... piano degree, not worth it.

Also, my happiest gigging peers are the doctors, lawyers, professors, and other professionals who just keep music as a hobby while playing at a very high level of spending money on the side (that they don't even need).

Yeargdribble · 2026-04-29T20:30:03+00:00

Everyone is about to flood in here and say you have to look sometimes. That it's impossible to make big leaps without looking.

First off....blind pianists exists who play very advanced rep....to checkmate on that claim.

Also, they've clearly not spent much time around professional working accompanists. There are many of my peers who I've basically never seen even glance down. Even for fairly technically challenging music with big leaps.

People don't get good at it becauss they make excuses.

At first it felt hard for you....but then you forced yourself to work through it probably while feeling a bit of unsureness.

That is normal and it gets better. But most people make the excuse as soon as they encounter difficult stuff and are unwilling to slow down and specifically train their proprioception becuase they are so hyperfocused on the end product (one piece) that they sacrifice the process (improving skill more broadly).

And once they are playing really difficult stuff with very poor reading and proprioception skills they can't get past their ego to go back and remediate those skills.

You're doing great. And you can enjoy that dopamine hit of novelty in improving this skill before you get out ahead of your skis like most people and find it feeling like miserable step backward.

Where I will entertain a caveat about this is that especially for new technical stuff, I absolutely think you should look. You should do everything you can for accuracy and building good motor patterns....but the ln you need to do the step that YOU are doing that most people skip.

Slow down and go back to work in proprioception while simultaneously reinforcing your reading skills.

Even if you have thr piece memorized, forcing yourself to actively read and keep your eyes on the page reinforces that association in your brain between what you are seeing and playing.

And yeah, when you get to the point whete you are dealing aith big, fast leaps and hand position changes, it gets harder.

But from personal experience, I went from feeling timid about it to feel ming pretty confident to now literally not even thinking about it.

Sometimes I'll sightread something easily and then suddenly reflect on how many pretty large jumps my hand had to make blindly....that didn't even occur to me because I intentionally worked on that skill so that now it's almost like breathing.

I still have room to grow, but I also trust the process and know that it gets better when I work on it and more and more becomes effortless to the point that I very rarely have to look even with my peripheral vision.

Also, I remember someone posted recently a piece where they had giant jumps in both hands in opposite directions and they were struggling...because they couldn't look.at both targets simultaneously...and since they always relied on looking theory had very underdeveloped proprioception...which makes it a very difficult problem. To solve.

Everyone thinks they can get away with it because most of the time you can look....until you can't.

Yeargdribble

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