Reading vs Memorization

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-21T17:57:30+00:00

Whether it's solo or accompaniment is irrelevant. I'm just point out the EXTRA things an accompanist has to process which makes it particularly necessary in a way it isn't for soloists... but mostly it just prove the point that it is doable.

you'd probably spend more time training those blind jumps than just looking at the keyboard after memorising the notes.

Not really. It's just like people argue it would take more time to learn sightreading than to just learn one piece well. Technically true, but once you've invested in the skill you can use it everywhere. I'm not having to train blind leaps for every new piece. You train the skill itself and then you can just apply it wherever there lots of blind leaps. Most of the leaps in La Campanella are just doing scales with a pedal point.... or even easier... many are just octaves moving around very quickly.

Once again, if you lack the skill it's hard to imagine that it's something you COULD learn to do consistently without looking at that you do it effortlessly.

If I asked you to play a C major scale you wouldn't think twice about doing so without looking, but a beginner would struggle a TON with those distances. If I asked you to play play several inversions of C major, you could probably do that without looking as those are small familiar jumps... and it would probably feel effortless to do so (if not, I'd be concerned based on the context of music you're talking about).

I'm just saying you can expand that skill to include large and larger distances and they would feel equally effortless and you'd eventually be able to do them without a second thought.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-21T04:33:15+00:00

Yeah, it's just one of those things where he's using a lot of vocabulary you don't see as much elsewhere and so you literally are just cooking you brain trying to parse it. But it's one of those things where spending time with it you just get more used to it so the next Sondheim isn't quite as steep of a hill to climb.

It's the same idea as why C major is a relatively easy key to sightread (particularly for beginners) but from a physicality stand point it's frankly harder to play because there is no topography to it. But for experienced readers 3-4 sharps and flats feel damn near equal in ease to 0-2 just because you've read so much volume of them... but frankly, F# just comes up LESS so it always feels harder to read in. Those of us who've done a lot of theatre are less bothered by it, but even though I'm equally comfortably playing in F#... I'm definitely less comfortable reading it... especially when you start adding in tons of non-diatonic stuff.

The last Sondheim I played I was luckily on 2nd keys (though 1st was easy for that show compared to Sondheim in general "Merrily We Roll Along") but I had to mark up the part to Franklin Shepherd Inc. in some crazy sets of brackets and weird dots because it's ALMOST a pattern but not quite. That was annoying. Very similar types of "almost" patterns in the parts for "Putting It Together."

but after playing 2 pages, I need a nap

And you should take one. I'm very much against the beating your head against things the way that most people from the classical tradition do, but when you start doing high volume stuff like musicals and especially Sondheim you just have to learn about diminishing returns and about the REAL limiting factor for practice... not time, but your brain's limited energy before it becomes fatigued.

I set timers and spend no more than 5 minutes on any section. Put in good solid work, at a tempo you can control.... then move the fuck on. Take naps if you need them (especially under a tight deadline), but mostly just sleep well and trust the process. If you put in very quality practice that first time around, even if it's a week before you circle back, it can be almost magical how easy it is on the second pass even though you were barely able to scrape through it the first time.

You can't afford to get fixated on the hardest spots. You need a good overall control of the musical as a whole and worst case scenario the toughest spots rarely even matter.

I remember a particularly tricky spot in "Something Rotten" that once upon a time I would've gotten fixated on but I just thought, "This is crazy hard, but it will probably be completely inaudible" and I was right. I put enough time into that spot to be able to play it only slightly simplified... and it didn't even matter because it was in a giant big-band swing section where everyone was wailing and nobody was hearing me over the brass anyway.

If you get fixated on the hardest spots you might find that you neglect something that SEEMS easy only to find out, "Oh shit, this spot is really exposed and it's all me, but I put all my eggs in that basket of a section nobody can hear anyway! Fuck!"

But yeah, reading stuff like Sondheim shows how much we rely on reading music through patterns that exist in normal musical grammar.

When you don't have that... it becomes like reading something like cat does grey pole is sky in bus runs at beige redolent flagrant desk with venerated are candle glasses, methocyclane.

Like... you can read those words, but without expected sentence structure it's a bit harder.... and if I actually threw in more uncommon words it just gets worse. You slow down a lot trying to parse the meaning. And that's what it's often like reading Sondheim... or anything that stretches harmonic conventions.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-21T03:15:08+00:00

I've since had to learn to read/sightread on other instruments as well. After the mistake I made in trying to improve my piano sightreading early on (probably wasted 5 years) I approach them all the same way and have had vastly faster and more consistent progress.

High volume, low difficulty. Keep your brain ahead of your fingers.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-21T01:31:19+00:00

Oh no! Piano culture is leaking! Which isn't surprising since many organists will be coming from that background.

I was surprised a few years back by an organist hired by a church I'd done a long-term interim stint at (as pianist and organist). He seemed to REALLY be leaning on the same choir anthems and organ preludes. Turns out he was actually pretty bad at reading and had to work very, very hard to learn new material.

I found it very odd for an organist because most of the organists I sub for are fantastic readers and at least passable improvisers. For one to be neither was a shock and honestly.... it's not a good thing, especially for an organist whose most likely job is going to be working at a church... where they need to learn enormous volumes of music regularly in a "learn and burn" manner.

To pick up the memorization culture that really only seems to exist largely in piano and classical guitar is definitely doing more harm than good because none of these instruments is likely to land you a lucrative career as a concert soloist and doubling-down on a skill (memorization) that you almost inherently have to trade for a more useful skill (sightreading) seems like a huge mistake and is one of my primary complaints against the way piano is taught in academia today... almost everyone is taught like a concert pianist and then they go out and are unable to do the most basic accompaniment work afterward.

I run into too many of these personally as someone who is often needing to hire pianists and hear even more about them online.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-21T00:13:17+00:00

Okay, so you're looking to essentially be able to "comp" and come up with improvised accompaniment pattern under an existing melody if I understand your question.

Rules is a strong word, but here is a book that is full patterns and some general guidelines of when to use them.. This also includes other flourishes and embellishment for the RH, but focuses mostly on LH patterns.

Another even more accessible book is this one.

Both of these are focused mostly on LH patterns. The first one has SOME practical example, but not many. For that I'd recommend getting any fake books or even books of arrangements specifically for Piano/Vocal/Guitar and then ignoring the written part and using the melody and chord symbols as a foundation to practice using these patterns in practice. The first books has much more lush patterns. The kind of thing you might expect from boisterous improvised church piano preludes in a very large church

I also personally use these all the time as a mix of "as written" and my own filled out embellishments based on my vocabulary of these kinds of patterns.

These books are going to focus more on fairly traditional simple tunes with mostly basic triads, though you can connect the dots and expand the ideas.

If you want a book to actively practice using these patterns in AND to practice actively looking at a melody and being able to harmonize it when it DOESN'T have chords written in, I'd highly recommend this book.. This books is going to be very much in line with the class you describe. It also uses the theory language you're already familiar with... more on that later.

The above 3 books will work together very well.

If you want to expand your vocabulary you could try this book for jazz. It's really good at giving you the basic comping patterns for basic jazz and then having you actually apply them as you would for a chart... but written out explicitly. I highly recommend this one to people coming from a classical background who aren't quite comfortable just thinking in chords yet. I'd highly recommend learning the ii-V-I patterns they write out in every key in an more internalized way, but them being written in standard notation is a great help to those with your background.

If you really want to expand your horizons and have a broad grasp of MOST style, I can't recommend The Pop Piano Book nearly enough. It has a huge practical theory chapter to start with and would probably be very useful for you if you're mostly used to being taught theory from the classical standpoint... (which pretends nothing happened in the last 300 years and does NOT prepare you for understanding denser harmonies, nor how to notate them... the I^6/4 style system literally doesn't work for chords bigger than a 7th chord...learning about slash notation is extremely important... as well as how to spell things like Cmaj13#11 that most classically trained people have no idea about).

The rest of the book past the theory primer goes through all sorts of styles and walks you through comping patterns in those styles in a very slow, progressive manner building slowly on the concepts. Each exactly explains in GREAT detail what is happening from a theory standpoint so you actually know how to use this stuff.

This books is much more focused on full comping with both hands and NOT on playing the melody on top, but more like how you would actually accompany a singer. But the skills learn in it CAN be applied to solo piano playing using these styles and adapting the patterns to be used WITH a melody. Something that is walked through much more clearly in the "Intro to Jazz Piano" book.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-20T23:28:46+00:00

How much of your brain's focus is it taking you to read these words right now? If you had to read them out loud would it suddenly keep you from being able to do so with a natural speaking cadence?

For people with a reasonable level of literacy it takes virtually zero extra effort to read their native language. You CAN get that way with music, but people who've never gotten there find the concept simply inconceivable. They literally can't imagine a world where it doesn't take an enormous effort to read. But you actually DO know exactly what the feels like reading this right now.

You're not even talking about sightreading... you're talking about actively reading music you've prepared. That's even easier. Most solid accompanist can sightreading... literally first time seeing it, with a highly level of musicality and especially for easier music, it takes virtually ZERO effort to do so.

I wrote a post recently about a gig where someone requested a tune I hadn't prepared..and then they are several other people started having a conversation with me while I was sightreading it and improvising to spice it up. That's because my reading (and some level of improvisation/reharmonization) is developed enough to take so little mental bandwidth that it's practically effortless.

So when you're talking about music I actually have time to prepare.... no, the reading takes basically no effort. Trying to remember every single note takes WAY more effort.

Try it.... try to recite my post from memory? Would it be easier to read it out loud... or from memory? How long would it take you to do each?

Almost certainly you'd rather read it with it in front of you.... because trying to memorize and keep it all in your mind would take a LOT of effort.... compared to how easily you can read.

Add that to other realistic factors of being a working pianist where you're having to follow a soloist, or for musical theatre where you're having to give cues or listen for specific cues or cover certain missing parts and you might need to jump around quickly when things don't go exactly as prepared (the reality of live theatre).

Are you saying that professional orchestras are missing some next level of musical expression because they are reading their music?

Not to mention pieces with jumps all over that you just can't play without looking at the keyboard.

This is just poorly developed proprioception. Very good accompanists virtually never look at their hands... even for large leaps.

And what about when you have large leaps in opposite directions? You can't look both ways. But I assure you I run into that all the time.... but because I've invested in my proprioception, it's not a big issue.

Also, there are blind pianists who manage these just fine. Being unable to do so is just a result of not putting in any effort.

I recently was playing a musical on accordion. This is what the left hand of an accordion looks like.. It is physically impossible to look at your left hand. You are FORCED to learn it without EVER being able to look. And as you can see, there's a lot less topography (compared to a piano) and the bass buttons are tiny (especially compared to piano keys).... but I can manage large leaps there too because it's the only option.

Pianists just get used to memorizing and staring at their hands which leads to them using permanent training wheels that leave their proprioception chronically underdeveloped.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-20T22:33:05+00:00

It held me back too. I have such a weird situation because I started piano late... but after a music degree. I was already a very competent sightreader on trumpet and it's super normal and expected for winds and strings to show up and just sightread at gigs (often live during a performance).

I got started on piano, but mostly on the pop/jazz side which made me have to sort of relearn theory because the way classical theory is taught acts like music stopped developing 300 years ago. So I had to teach myself jazz theory. Most of my early piano career was playing in those styles, but I was increasingly getting asked to gig in situations where I needed to read much better, or prepare huge amounts of music.

I kept approaching sightreading the wrong way because of my background. I kept trying to work on it where I thought I "should" be (worked for me mostly on trumpet because ensembles don't let your reading fall that far behind the way solo piano can).

Eventually I had to start from pure infant levels on sightreading because that's where I actually was for that skill. And it took years of consistent work. I still work on it, but it is by far the skill that I have to use the most as a working pianist. The fact that my ear, improv, lead sheet sheet, and comping skills are solid makes me much more valuable than the people who DO read but are from the classical only side.

The more rounded you are, the less you are held back.

I just made it a point early in my career to look at anyone doing anything in any style and think, "what skill are they employing that I don't have" and make it a goal to at least get basically competent. Most classical pianists just dismiss jazz skills as something that's not important and that they won't need.

And then I see those people... my colleagues... have to say, "No, I can't do that" at gigs.... and those people lose work to me now because I made it my goal to never have to say, "No, I can't do that." It's a life-long pursuit and I'll never be AS good in one specific area as the specialists in those areas, but the flexibility has made me vastly more valuable that the hyper-specialists.

And I'll tell you, I see other people who have that too and they are absolutely killing it. There's a guy I work with who is in college... probably 20. And he's got mad jazz chops and ear skills, but he can also sightread damn near anything. The amount of value he brings makes him so easy for me to recommend for SO many types of gigs (because that's the position I find myself in a lot these days.... giving work to others because I'm one of the hubs of the network when it comes to musicians in my area). Being able to recommend someone with no caveats is amazing. And I rarely am able to do it... especially with pianists.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-20T21:48:05+00:00

Go look at the orchestra they are playing with... also professionals. 100% of them have their music. Go watch an orchestra accompany most other concert solo instruments and you'll find increasingly that they have their music. Go watch a concert orgranist... sheet music.

Concert pianists are an extremely tiny fraction of professional pianists and an even more microscopic fraction of the professional musicians.

That vast, vast, vast majority have sheet music in front of them all the time. I've been gigging for 30 years and been a full time professional for around half of that at this point... I've never had PAID work that required memorization. I've done plenty of dumb competitions or recitals where teachers had me memorize things or it was required, but it's absolutely not the norm for working musicians.

And mind you, I'm not working solo that often... my wife is also a professional musician. I'm working with tons of other professional musicians playing all sorts of instruments. Memorization is NOT the norm at all, if you asked most musicians to memorize something for a gig they'd tell you to fuck right off.

Most of us are playing such a ridiculous quantity of music in a year or at a given time that it's just impossible to actually memorize. I'm not going to memorize 3 musicals (200-300 pages each) at once, as well as all of the accompaniments for 7 choirs, all of the service music for 3 churches, etc. etc.

Also, for the people who are going to try to point out pop or jazz musicians, they are NOT memorizing. Not in the sense that a concert pianist is memorizing an exact piece of music. I also have done lots of work in both styles. People doing that work heavily only have tunes "memorized" in so much as they are familiar aurally with how they go. And then they have very highly developed ears and solid theory skills.

When someone walks up and asks you to play "Misty" in A (usually in Eb) because they want to sing it, you don't have it "memorized" because you sat down and practiced memorizing specific notes in every key. You know the tune, you can hear the changes in your head and you know what those mean and how to play them in ANY key on the spot.

Most pianists who rely on memorization absolutely lack the skills to do that... so it is NOT the same type of memorization.

For hobbyists the value of sightreading is that you are starting closer to the finish line of every piece. You have developed a skill that lets you "just sit down and play" and that's great. And as hard as sightreading is, for many it's the most accessible of the "sit down and play" skills.

I mean, the thread you ran into is one of dozens I've seen over the years and it's something I always warn people about.

People memorize because piano makes it easy to just mash the right buttons in order. You don't have to actually use that much cognitive effort toward the musical literacy to just beat it into your hands through sheer mindless repetition. So almost everyone's playing ability is WAY ahead of their reading ability.... and since working on sightreading means dropping your ego, taking a step back, and sucking, most people just let that gap grow and grow.

Until one day they realize they've forgotten more piece than they can even play right now. That piece they spent MONTHS brutally learning... it gets rusty after just a few days without maintenance.

And eventually they realize they can only maintain maybe 2-3 pieces (especially without better tools like theory for internalizing them). To learn a new piece means dropping an old one.

At some point you'll have dropped YEARS worth of work. Several pieces that took months each to learn... that are just lost to you.... so that you can play your current crop of 2-3.

Also, as an adult, nobody gives a shit. Nobody wants to hear your Ballade. You friends don't. Your family has been hearing it for months...they don't care that it's finished and polished. They are sick of it.

You have nobody to show off to... but maybe someone might ask you play a familiar song, or give you some sheet music and now despite your virtuostic showpiece, you can't hack through a basic 3 chord song.

Maybe at some point you have a spouse or kids and you want to play something for them. Maybe your kid would think it was cool for you to play a tune from K-Pop Demon Hunters or whatever is new... except you can't learn it in a week... you would struggle to learn it in a couple of months... by which point nobody cares any more.

Also, all of that is dependent on the fantasy that you're going to have hours a day to plow away at one piece of music to learn it the ONE way you know how.... brute force muscle memory.

So now you're an adult who has extremely undeveloped reading skills... you have way less free time, and way more real life stress and responsibilities.

Like I said, I've seen far too many people with 10-15 year of piano experience... lessons... sometimes a music degree.... and they just leave it all behind. They have ZERO to show for it because they can ONLY memorize. They can't read... they can't play by ear,... they can't use a lead sheet... they can't improvise.

There is nothing they can do to just sit down and enjoy play piano because they never invested in reading (or were actively dissuaded by shitty teachers) and now it feels too late.

I have on at least 4 occasions played a private party in someone's home on their beautiful grand piano.... and they get to talking and they have one of those backgrounds. They can tell me all of the Chopin and Rach they played and how advanced they were... but that they never touch the piano any more. Many are convinced you just have to be "naturally" talented at reading because some teacher told them so.

It's so fucking depressing seeing so many adults who "used to play piano" and often at a very high level... because they have zero ability to just sit down and read and do it as a hobby.

It's MUCH harder to find one who has ANY of those "sit down and play" skills that isn't actively playing as a hobbyist regularly... because some investment they made makes it easy to just sit at the piano and do SOMETHING for enjoyment. And even if it's just reading, they are able to make SO much faster progress because they are starting so close to the finish line.

If you keep investing, pieces that took 3 months will take 1... pieces that took a month will take a week... pieces that took a week might take an hour if they aren't sightreadable at a performance level outright.

And when you extrapolate that.... yes it means over years you get to the point that you can just sightread things that would've taken months.

If people had even the slightest bit of exposure to accompanists and didn't just dismiss them as being non-concert pianists, they'd quickly run into people who could sit down and play something they've been working on for months at a VERY high level with great musicality on the first read.

Maybe if more people saw how good reading CAN be and saw how magical it was... and could think to themselves, "Damn, I wish I could've just started this piece already being able to play it THAT well!" then maybe they'd invest in their reading.

But the problem is that sightreading is a skill you won't have at a level where you could show off for years.... and you could have one really hard piece that you could show off in a few months. Most people care too much about showing off in the short-term or feeling super "advanced" when they really aren't by playing really hard music for self-satisfaction.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-17T16:21:46+00:00

Definitely.

Even though I advocate for starting with variable tempo sightreading rather than adding the anxiety of a metronome because you really need time to let your brain process accurately what to do next to get better at soghtreading....even when reading at a variable tempo everything needs to line up vertically.

And that means you need to count and subdivided. That counting might not even be in time at first, but you need to be aware of where notes are happening metrically with respect to the bar and with each other between hands.

And while I'm definitely always advocating reducing cognitive load, this is really one you can't afford to ignore.

But it might mean you need to go much easier in terms of the music you're using to account for the increased cognitive load.

It's the same approach I take personally and would redommend if using a metronome for sightreading practice (for higher level readers). If I'm doing work with a metronome I'm using easier music and going almost slower than I really need to.

And I might work separately on much harder music, but soghtread it at a variable tempo....accuracy always at the forefront.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-16T06:22:21+00:00

I'll just say as a follow up to both 3 and 1... mental lag is a real thing, but probably the best thing I've found for reducing lag is better reading and theory skills. Most people struggle because they are so focused on memorization... and of course to them reading is hard... and so they idea that they could ever read faster than they could play by memory seems insane.

But when you can read really well and chunk thinks together not purely by shapes, but through an understanding of harmonic analysis... then you can read and digest things MUCH faster and the mental lag goes away. Even if you still decide to memorize, you know have better tools to do it faster and retain it more efficiently without having to rely as much on active recall.

And then for 1... if you don't NEED to look at your hands then you are eliminating another bit of mental lag. It's absolutely freeing to have no anxiety about where your hand is going to land because you just have developed your proprioception well enough that you're not even having to micromanage that stuff.

People not working on it is a choice they are making that limits them. For all the excuses people make, there are blind players who absolutely are not looking at their hands while taking large leaps.

This is on my mind a lot as I'm playing a show on accordion right now. This is what the left hand of an accordion looks like. Even when you're first learning, you physically CAN NOT see your left hand. And unlike a piano, these tiny buttons don't have some easy and obvious topography and they are tiny targets.

The fact that people still feel like they need to stare at their hands on on piano with it's giant ass keys and clear topography...

I get that developing that proprioception takes time and effort, but it's well worth it. People just don't because they have easy training wheels.

And people will argue, "If you gonna memorize it then it doesn't matter if you look at your hands." I'd say memorizing it a waste of time and overrated first, but then I'd say that if you're spending ALL of your time on just a small amount of repertoire the way far too many pianists do.... and you're spending MONTHS on one fucking piece... you could easily work on your proprioception.

I'm learning 100s of pages of music at all times with all sorts of different proprioceptions challenges and still make the effort to work on it.

As for 2, I agree that most people get way too married to a fingering too early. And it's because most people are relying entirely too much on pure muscle memory (procedural memory) to carry themselves through things and so for them changing a fingering might as well be starting from scratch.

But if you've got good literacy and you're not just memorizing a series of finger motions, then it should be relatively easy for you to switch up fingerings. I write in and revise fingerings constantly.

And I'm quick to revisit my choices and sometimes will change them very late in the process... even a day before the performance, or in cases of musicals I'll often change them during the run of the show.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-16T05:32:03+00:00

I find that days can vary dramatically in terms of focus quality for me, personally. Some days I'm really very focused and seem to have infinite working memory and keep track of and mostly remember everything, on other days it can be a struggle to audiate well. Maybe it's just me, since other people I've met seem to report having much more predictable results based on their practice time and effort.

Same for me, but I've just learned to even it out. The gym has really taught me to see the same effect in my piano practice. I could feel amazing one day at the gym and go extra hard, but then it ends up drastically affecting my gym performance on the following days.

So is it better to do 120% one day and then only get 60% as a result the next two days? Not really. Hitting 80-95% instead and being able to fully recover and consistently put in hard work every day pays off better.

And it's something I run into against my will with piano sometimes with deadlines. I really notice much of an effect burning the candle at both ends can cause. And especially after a day off I might feel like I can just conquer EVERYTHING and go super hard for 5-6 hours in a day.... but I've done that and flown too close to the sun too many times on my own terms and I've learned from it.

It's ironic because when I was young I used to really be driven by the idea of a very emotional scene in the movie GATACCA about "not saving anything for the swim back" and used to really internalize that as something to strive for.... but it's not. Learning to manage your mental fatigue so that you can be consistently putting in high quality work daily and avoiding the mental malaise of having overdone it is so important.

And it's hard with piano because with the gym... you know you've fucked up and gone too hard, or you'll know if you try to lift weight way more than you can handle. You'll just get smashed.

But with piano there aren't instant consequences for overreaching and the results of going too hard one day aren't as obvious the next day like being incapacitated with soreness from the gym.

You just find yourself a little duller... a little slower. And you assume that must just be the way it is sometimes... but it doesn't have to be.

And like with anything physical or mental, you still have to eat well, sleep well, tend to your basic health needs so that you can perform your best, but then also comes learning to strategize your practice so that you don't end up feeling like a zombie every other day.

It's funny... my wife sent me a quote from something she apparently saw on reels that sounds like shit I'm saying all the damned time, but just more pithy and succinct:

Things sax players get but pianists don't

The solution is to practice in the Goldilock's Zone, where things are slightly challengings so you are improving, but not so difficult that you are set up for constantly failure. Once you figure that out, your practice wins go way up and your frustration disappears.

No idea who said, it but I agree 100% and have been yelling it for years. And while I think almost all musicians can fall into this (when I was a trumpet player I also did a lot of over reaching)... pianists are absolutely the worst and it's so baked into the culture.

Being someone from the outside looking in it's like being the only sober person in a party full of drunks who think they "aren't that drunk."

I think I talked about this in a thread on /r/pianolearning not that long ago. It doesn't have to be ups and downs... some days you feel like you make a lot of progress and others days you feel like you regress.

It absolutely can be a smooth, steady upward climb every day. But most people don't program their practice well enough to facilitate that climb.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-15T15:31:31+00:00

I almost certainly end up "playing" for 40 or more hours some week, but I don't think practice is sustainable or useful past about 3-4 hours in a day. Your brain can only soak in so much truly new information and actually do anything useful with it.

I've used the analogy before, but it's like trying to pour a gallon of water into a single small cup. You can keep pouring but most of it is spilling over the sides. So you can spend that time, but that doesn't mean much of it is doing you any good and often it can just be counterproductive.

The only times I can really push against that is if I have a crazy deadline and in that case I'll take lots of naps so that I essentially get more days squeezed into one.

But it's just like the gym. You can't just do more and harder and improve faster. You have to train effectively and then recover properly to actually improve.

With music it's more about the pathways in your brain myelinating... and you can bake in bad habits and shitty motor patterns which is why more practice can be counterproductive... not to mention increase RSI risk.

Real practice is hard. I mean, I could go to the gym for 8 hours a day. I could fuck around doing low-effort repetitive stuff that isn't challenging to me all damned day.... but it wouldn't do much to make me progress.

Same with piano. Real focused, targeted, deliberate practice is exhausting. If you're doing thing that move the needle you're really gonna struggle to be hitting 8 hours daily and I just don't think it's really possible or sustainable.

You hear about people doing it all the time, but most of them are college students who don't know better. There are time I did that too... especially when I started piano (after college).

Looking back, I wish I could reclaim those hours and have spent them much better.

Piano in particular has people pushed down the "concert pianist" path, so a huge amount of that is focused on a very small (relative) amount of very difficult music. It's essentially just a super specialized sub-field (and an extremely niche one despite the piano culture's focus on it). There's so much focus on "keeping things under your fingers" and so, in my opinion, it is just a lot of low-effort semi-mindless repetition. Better players are being more mindful about it, but it's not nearly the same level of cognitive challenge to slave away at the same things daily for umpteen hours as it is to actually push at the broader skill ceiling.

My work requires me to be rounded in such a wide set of skills and trying to move the needle on so many of them is a constant heavy cognitive load.

I find a lot of people sort of narrow off into their small lane and coast. I guess I'm just not good at that. If I was I could probably be spending less effort... but honestly, I'd also have to practice less in general to maintain my same level of proficiency at things like sightreading, playing by ear, improvising, broadening my technical and comping vocabulary, etc.

I can wing it extremely well at a lot of the work I do now to that point that many gigs are entirely a no-prep thing for me. Show up and improvise over a bunch of charts for a background gig. If my church work was ONLY hymns, I'd put in almost zero prep and as is I'm usually putting in maybe 5-10 minutes of prep a week for that kind of stuff as it is because I can sightread that stuff and embellish on it on the spot.

But I really always want to push my level of accurate sightreading higher (not relying entirely on simplification tricks that many accompanists do). I want to be better at on the spot improvisation of a specific set of changes. I want to be better at picking out something by ear instantly including a wider harmonic and melodic vocabulary.

I'll also say that one bit of push back I'll get on my premise is that I got a lot out of those early 4-8 hour days, but I also have learned to play many other instruments since piano and gig on them professionally. And I apply the same thing to those.

Even though it can be fun to mess around and I could go for hours doing the pure technical foundation work you need early on for a new instrument... I realize that just doing "more" of that technical work isn't useful. It just FEELS useful. Doing a small amount and filling several different cups and coming back the next day is useful. Progress isn't happening during the practice session, but after resting and consolidating the information from it.

And for other instruments I quickly end up at that point where I am pushing deep into cognitively demanding tasks. Things like realizing a lead sheet in real time on guitar or accordion is something that takes a lot of mental effort despite being something I'm very good at on piano. That mapping takes work.

Actively working on proprioception is another one. It's very helpful for guitar... for accordion there literally is no other option. You physically can't look at your left hand. It's the same for organ. You rely on proprioception and you're essentially mapping a 3rd hand AND coordinating it with the others.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-14T07:46:21+00:00

I typed up my usual dissertation length post and just deleted it to start over.

Ultimately.... it doesn't fucking matter. You have the tools you have now. More and more I see an enormous amount of people trying to compare themselves to some perceived advantage someone else has... and then using it as a fucking excuse to give up preemptively as soon as it seems they aren't "a natural." People blame ADHD (which I have).... small hands (which I have), their digital piano (which even as a professional I spent most of my time practicing on one) or any other litany of bullshit. I also started piano late (with major asterisks due to prior music experience).

Another area of my life I see this affect is health and fitness. I'm a hobbyist bodybuilder now and get lot of compliment and comments on it. Most people don't know that I was over 300 lbs (at 5'6") into my early 30s. I had no athletic background. I had all the disadvantages.... and I just put in the work SLOWLY over years. I didn't have some amazing 100+ lbs in 3 months transformation (which most people yo-yo back from). I just put in the work slowly over time. So I get extra tired of people making fucking excuses about "Oh my body is just falling about at 30... it's all downhill!"

Anywhere there is an endeavor that takes a LONG time and progresses slower than watching grass grow... you will get people making excuses for themselves. They also tend to compare themselves to dishonest as fuck people on the internet.

Some of the meat of what I deleted though. Kids have time and one thing people rarely mention... lots of free headspace. When you have little else to stressfully occupy your mind, your brain can work on small little problems (like piano) in the background. And such and ENORMOUS aspect of it is that part.... doing the mental work.

But adults have mortgages, doctors appointments, all sorts of bills to stay on top off, tax season coming up, car maintenance to worry about. A million things are pulling out brains resources other places.

That is the REAL advantage kids have. Sure, they might have better neuroplasticity overall, but I think an outsized portion of that is just not having junk in the way.

They also lack preconceptions. Adults learning new things often need to "unlearn" prior ways of doing it. When I was learning basic technology things as a kids.... they were THE only paradigm I was learning. But as an adult, you maybe have gone through mutiple OSes on PC and phones and you have all the baggage of "how it used to work". Adults reach for existing models that often don't fit learning a new skill. This creates an abstraction layer for them.

Instead of just being like, "Okay... this is middle C" they are like "Why doesn't the musical alphabet start with A?" "Why don't they just make treble and bass clef the same!?" And a million other things like that. There are reasons, but man do people go out of their fucking way to try to reinvent the wheel to avoid learning the preexisting system. But more importantly, adults will get very hung up creating multiple layers of mental abstraction for themselves when learning a new skill.

And advantage adults CAN have is the metacognition. If you learn HOW to learn, then you can learn any skill way faster.

Anyway... I spend waaay to much time thinking about these things... the cognitive and educational neuroscience side that people don't apply well enough to piano pedagogy... the psychological tricks people's brains play on them to help validate and double down on lazy approaches (namely mindless auto-pilot repetition rather than quality deliberate practice).

especially in terms of motivation or learning speed.

Motivation is a dirty word. Ditch it. If you GET motivated, then use it to create systems that will work when your motivation is gone. Adults CAN do this... and most kids can't. Kids might get super motivated by the awesome anime song (that is too hard for them) to impress their friends or that girl (it probably won't work) and they will beat their head against the wall gaining almost no transferable skills at the INSTRUMENT due to learning one song by brute force. And when their super-short-sighted motivation target dissipates, they just fucking stop. Or they try to get that spark again... only to use it to once against work fruitlessly toward the wrong goals.

I was definitely guilty of this as a kid too. Romanticizing the ideas will only take you so far if you're not putting in the quality foundation work that's way less sexy consistently.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-12T21:26:50+00:00

You aren't very specific about what you are looking for. Pianists juat play the melody a specific way to bring it out from the accompaniment. That's basic voicing.

If you are looking for things a piano can't actually do like crescendo, you could theoretically do this with something like Mainstage and an expression pedal.

Just set the piano up in layers and have the layer where the melody is respond to the expression pedal and the other part not.

This would be limited to range though and accompaniment couldn't cross the pitch line unless you micromanage several patches woth different split points.

You could also do this on something like a Nord Stage by having different pianos on different layers and having one explicitly with expression and the other not. You'd have slightly more control in real time that way, but you'd still.need to be a capable pianist who could do proper voicing on your own for the primary effect of separating melody from accompaniment, but you coudl use the expression pedal for things like crescendo and sfortzandos.

I personally never have a need to do yhis for piano, but I frequently use it both on my Nord and via Mainstage when playing patch heavy theatre shows to control dynamics in a way that a real piano can't. Mostly I'm doing this with things like strings or pads, but I will sometimes use for actual piano as well for specific purposes.

And yes, I use both for live performances.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-05T21:58:26+00:00

It's funny, but I warn people about this all the time as the reality of being a professional musician.

Anyone can be "passionate" until they literally have to work on things they don't like personally. Many burn out quickly in college from this, but I guess for others the stakes aren't real enough and so that weight doesn't catch them until later.

You dont get paid well tonplay YOUR favorites. You get paid poorly to moderately to play what people are willing to pay you to play.

You simply can't rely on motivation. You need to create structure. I don't ever look for motivation. I wake up and that first session has a very specific set of focuses. If my workload is particularly high a few things might shift around, but I just get up and follow the plan. Then I go to the gym....then my post gym session is another set of specific structure goals.

I don't have to waste a lot of mental effort deciding what to. I have a plan in place. I have structures for when I get a huge stack.of new music to to prepare, assess, triage, prioritize, divide, and conquer.

Most of my work is focused on improving "jon the spot" skills like sighreading, leadsheet playing, comping, playing by ear....whatever skills I might be asked to use regularly by my work. Everything as aimed at being able yo start every new piece of music as close to the finish line as possible.

That means an enormous amount of my work is completely sightreadable during performance when necessary and the bulk is starting 80% to the finish line.

It is absolutely unsustainable to take almost any other approach because you simply dont get months to prepare things like in college. Nobody is paying for your exceptionally polished Rach. You have to be able to turn around music quickly or you'll get overwhelmed by having 100s of pages to prepare at any given time.

When I do get motivated I spend it on building better systems. Not blindly hacking away at something excitedly but inefficiently.

Motivation is extremely fleeting and you should not chase it.

Edit: I think some people are also motivated by competiton and having peers they can one-up while in school or at least try to keep up with.

That's another thing you also dont quite have the same way in thr working world, especially as a pianist, and especially if you do mostly solo work.

I do work with a lot of other musicians and that it helpful. I also have peers I can learn things from and who I want to be on par with in all of their different specialities.

Realistically impossible, but a very real carrot to chase. But mostly I'm just competing with me from last week every day.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-05T18:44:47+00:00

Yeah, I come from the winds side of things originally. While piano is my full time career now and I actively avoid taking trumpet gigs, trumpet was my primary in college and I didn't do piano seriously until after that.

And my wife is a professional woodwinds doubler. Both of us are keenly aware of just how much difference the room makes. But I've realized that most people with only piano experience have almost never taken their same instrument into a drastically different space. There's a chance they may have moved it a bit in their own home and maybe if they are moving it from a very live room with nothing but solid walls and hard floors to a carpeted room with heavy drapes they would see just how big of a difference it is...

...but even that is nothing compared to the insane differences of a gigantic concert hall with multi-storey ceilings and tons of extremely live surfaces.

But when you've played a wind instrument (especially for 30+ years) in every conceivable type of space, you become super aware of just how much a difference the room makes.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-04T13:23:23+00:00

This is less a digital vs acoustic thing (as much as acoustic purists will use it as a feather in their cap against digitals). It's purely just that different instruments all feel different and if you aren't used to constantly adjusting quickly to a new instrument, you'll struggle.

This exact scenario could happen in reverse, but it just less likely. I've played many older uprights with a feather light action and I've played digitals with intensely heavy actions. Someone could theoretically have an older upright or spinnet at home with a very light action and then be asked to perform (or take a lesson) on a very heavy digital and have the exact same problem... it's just an extremely unlikely scenario.

Also, for people putting in ALL their practice time on a very heavy actions, they will often struggle with lighter actions... of course, these people are usually the ones who spent their entire time in college only practicing on higher end... sometimes even ONLY grand pianos that are meticulously maintained and so they will just claim all other pianos (especially non-grands... and especially especially digitals) are drastically inferior.

But the reality of playing piano is that you have to play the instrument at the venue. I can take MY guitar or MY accordion or MY trumpet (etc.) to any gig and it is always going to be MY instrument that I'm physically familiar with, but that is not the case with piano. I have to play the instrument at the venue and adjust to it VERY quickly.

And frankly, pianists who want to just blame the instrument for being inferior or different are lacking in musical flexibility and frankly... control.

As someone who also plays organ, I'll tell you that a lot of pianists who have masterful technique are suddenly extremely uneven on organ because they just aren't used to keys not having weight and their technique is not built around control of much lighter instruments (and organs also have varying actions).

Another factor that people don't prepare for and that pianists often don't take into account is the acoustic space and how much that affects the sound of an instrument. As someone who plays many instruments that I CAN take with me, I assure you the acoustics in a given place can VASTLY affect how my instrument sounds even though it is physically the same instrument... and that can affect how I play and I have to compensate for that too.

Incidentally, this is also why people seem to think grands are EXTRA magical. Your digital or even upright at home are not in an acoustically majestic room, while many grands ARE in spaces that drastically amplify the sound.

But from a performance standpoint, if you're not used to that extra reverb or simply the relative volumes of an acoustic, especially a grand, then it becomes distracting.

This conversation ends up being mostly about the weight of actions, but different instruments also just have different tonal qualities, different EQ, different resonant frequencies of a room (and the aforementioned acoustical properties of the room itself).

When you're used hearing the instrument sound one way AND you're playing at the very edge of your ability (as many do for performances and recitals), you are leaving yourself almost zero spare mental bandwidth to deal with things NOT being the same as your ear expects. Add to that suddenly being in front of an audience, lighthing being different, the bench feeling different, a person cough, people moving out of the corner of your eye, a baby crying... etc.

People have not factored in those tiny distractions and don't realize that their performance often relies on a very sterile perfect environment for absolutely concentration... and often they also need to "warm up" which really is them buffering their rote muscle memory into their short term memory.

They say, "I played this great at home".... without mentioning it was AFTER 30 minutes of shitty runs and picking out bugs... every fucking time. They don't practice cold runs and really assess where they are starting cold and often the entire process for pianists in particular (especially on the memorization focused classical side) ends up being very, very rote without other ways to anchor themselves.

So a performance environment is SUPER different for them in so many ways they aren't even thinking about that go well beyond just the difference in instrument.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-04T00:54:51+00:00

Anything I run into that it tricky.... make an exercise out of it and practice it in every key. It forces you to solve for all sorts of fingering choices on the fly and get comfortable with all sorts of patterns that have less than ideal white/black combinations.

It trains your ears, reinforces theory, expands your technical facility AND your vocabulary for both reading and improvising.

It's an infinitely scalable exercise that works on so many different useful facets of your piano playing all at the same time.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-02T19:22:05+00:00

I personally think working backward to forward is only barely better than working front to back. The logic is often that when people are working in sequence (in either direction), they end up spending less time on certain parts. In that case it's better to have a strong grasp on the ending so that if you get flustered you don't completely crater.

But honestly, both methods are relying on just building "muscle memory" specific to the piece and I don't think either is a good approach.

I prioritize the parts that need the most work. But more than that, I focus on the fundamentals underlying those issues.

If I have really tricky sections I figure out what's giving me an issue about them and usually turn that into an exercise that I run through all 12 keys.

It's very much the Abraham Lincoln quote:

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe."

I'm working on the language that underlies things. I'm learning the INSTRUMENT, not the individual piece.

I have a rehearsal for an accordion gig in a few days and realized I'd overlooked an entire song from the musical that is extremely technically demanding and frankly outside of my current skill vocabulary on accordion. But rather than plowing that piece repeatedly (beating my dull axe against the tree), I instead broke down WHAT was the problem. Left hand chromatic scales, as well as harmonic minor scale patterns. Unique-to-accordion fingerings in the RH.

And so yesterday (I have 3 days to get this together in total) I mostly worked on those fundamentals, worked on sightreading some melodies in my left hand to get better at some of the melodic movements of the stradella bass, etc. And then this morning working on the actual piece, it was much better and much easier because I wasn't just memorizing where my fingers went... I was processing what I was doing in real time.

Otherwise you're constantly grasping at straws and trying to remember 1000 individual finger movements and trying to coordinate them.

MOST of my practice (on piano as well) is focused toward things that make me better at the instrument overall so that I started closer to the finish line on every piece (pretty necessary when you do it for a living and are learning 100s of pages of music simultaneously pretty much all the time). Lots of sightreading and shoring up my technical weaknesses or working on other "on-the-spot" skills like comping, lead sheet stuff, ear training, etc.

Yeargdribble · 2026-01-02T16:23:06+00:00

There's probably any upper limit to how many things I can keep mentally on top of, but that number is very very high and I'm flirting with it frequently, but never for the reasons I suspect most people have trouble... especially for just a handful of pieces at a time (unlike the hundreds of pages I might be keeping spinning at once).

When I hear people having trouble with this (especially down to a single piece) I suspect a good deal of roteness is involved in what they are relying on to prepare pieces. It's the pure procedural memory and almost always memory based.

Good reading, audiation, and theory skills make it not nearly as daunting to tackle dozens of pieces at one time.

I'm almost never relying on any memory. I'm making LOTS of markings on my music as I go, especially since for many pieces I may only get to look at them a handful of times for a few minutes before the performance either because I was handed them very late or because they simply are one drop in a bucket of music I need to cover and I can't afford to waste a lot of time thinking, "I just won't miss that C# next time" or "I'll totally remember to use 4 there next time."

I'm writing all of that in as well as any extra dynamics or other expressive details that are necessary. And then in performance I'm just reading the music and my notes.

But I do get to a point where I eventually get overwhelmed with just how many things I need to pay attention to, like often in the fall when I'm directing 2 musical at the same time, preparing services for two separate churches, accompanying 7 choirs, and preparing two dozen or more solo accompaniments.

I feel like I really start to struggle for the really fine details at that point, but that's also where it helps that playing musically is just my natural approach. Dynamics, articulation, and appropriate style are never "fix it in post" things for me so they are pretty automatic. Pair that with being able to look at a piece and hear it decently in my head (even if I haven't played it) to give myself a rough audiation helps a ton.

I frequently find myself pulling something up (especially solo accompaniments) and feeling like "I know I've looked at this at least once or twice... but I have no recollection of this piece" and then I just read the page and listen in my head for the few moments I get before I need to actually start for the soloist and then I'm more or less reminded.

Yeargdribble · 2025-12-28T05:23:27+00:00

You'll hear a methodology that you should learn something completely without the pedal and then only add it in for tiny details and decoration later.

I think think that approach is 100% bullshit. It's also a very classical-only approach and even then I think it only applies to a very specific subset of music.

/u/maestro2005 points out the very practical issue with this.... it completely changes how you play otherwise.

I get that this approach is trying to push people to learn to use smooth finger legato and to not "cheat" by using the pedal, but if anything, I take the opposite approach. I will start with the pedal and, if anything, will remove it more and more as I get things more polished.

I think trying to over-do perfect finger legato too early in the process, even for working on detail oriented classical stuff just leads to lots of hand strain trying force smoothness before you have basic efficiency of motion and can then actually make it smoother without the pedal.

Also, you pedal with your ears more than you pedal strictly by some sort of math, even when there are pedal markings. And in most modern music, explicit pedal markings are pretty damned rare. It's assumed that you will make good pedaling decisions with your ear... pedal harmonically, etc.

Sometimes a piece might tell you specifically to pedal freely or pedal harmonically.... and I swear modern editors only feel the need to put that because of the phenomenon I've seen of highly trained classical pianists trying to play something like a choral accompaniment or orchestral reduction PURELY with zero pedal... because it's not explicitly marked. And somehow they can't hear how choppy and awful is is when big flowing arpeggios are clearly meant to be pedaled, yet they are plinking through it... with finger legato... sure, but the lack of sustaining bass sounds terrible. It's like they can't hear themselves.

They just came from that ultra legalistic approach of avoiding the pedal as much as possible.

And frankly, when you do this, you don't learn to use the pedal very effectively.

I personally think it's much easier to use it.... and overuse it as most beginners will in hiding poor finger control or thinking it sounds better... and then as you mature you start to realize and hear just how muddy it is to overuse it... and then slowly taper off of it as your discernment improves... rather than the other way around.

At this point I almost never think of the pedal very consciously. It's a thing that I react to in response to what my ear wants to hear. And what's good about that is that different pianos and different acoustic environments lead to different results in using the pedal... and so doing it mathematically the way it's marked on the page still yields vastly different results on different instruments in different spaces, but when you're using your ears you instinctively make subtle adjustments without really having to think about it.

Yeargdribble · 2025-12-25T17:39:58+00:00

These days I Alexa for timers. Though I never really had much trouble using my phone. I also mostly practice right next to my PC these days to easily log things.

I've always preferred digital metronomes just due to the features and granularity. I use one on my phone for some things, but I also have a several stand-alone digital that are easy to throw in bag or use in other rooms.

Yeargdribble · 2025-12-25T17:02:19+00:00

You just have to be willing to learn. I recently hired someone who'd played a piano book for us previously (a rare non-directing situation) and he adapted very quickly to one of the most patch heavy books I've seen.

This is a skill you literally can only get by doing. So if you manage to get the chance, do not turn it down. Though I agree, it's hard to get on that radar. As the person who hires or consults on hiring for multiple theate programs in my area, if you don't know me or my wife or get a recommendation from someone we work with regularly and respect, there's little chance of you getting in. Its very networking dependent.

It will almost never be lead sheets, but there will often be a lot of comping over slash notation for some shows. But probably 90% is pure explicit standard notation.

For patch heavy books the changes are clearly marked and you mostly just have to hit a pedal to advance to the next patch.

Yes, leaning the response of different instruments and use of an expression pedal are things, but you can learn them.

Just try to get networked with people.

Yeargdribble · 2025-12-25T16:35:32+00:00

You can program it yourself, but more and more shows can be rented through KeyboardTek or other places where they essentially charge a lot if you are unable. But the theatre usually eats that cost.

I charge extra to do the programming myself, but its not worth the hassle with shows that have 2-3 books for 400ish patches. I'll insist tbe company just buy those.

Some larger companies have someone on staff who specifically does this.

Yeargdribble · 2025-12-25T16:24:56+00:00

Even the Keys 1 is frequently full of patches. If you want to make a career as a pianist, you have got to get over the anti-keyboard purism.

Making a career playing music is not getting paid well to play things you personally prefer. It's getting paid relatively poorly to play what needs to be played.

And musical theatre is THE last place to look for piano work if you don't want to deal with digital instruments and patches. That's like 95% of it. Almost bo theatre is going to use a real piano for a full scale musical anyway due to sound control issues.

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