Six months ago, I bought a Yamaha DGX-670 – which I’m very happy with – and committed to spending 15+ minutes a day for the rest of my life learning piano. As I explained in Never Stop Learning… Slowly; Old dog learning new tricks in small, daily steps:
I’ve said many times that I’ll die regretting I never learned to play jazz.
After hearing myself say that one too many times, I decided to do something about it. I have too many other things I love and want to do to spend hours a day becoming a musician, but I decided I could set aside 15 or 30 minutes a day for the rest of my life to learn piano.
15 to 30 minutes isn’t a big commitment, but if I do this consistently for decades, I’ll become a decent piano player… and may even play in a jazz band. I don’t aspire to be great. I just want to have fun.
Can a 54-year-old actually learn to play piano on 15+ minutes a day?
My six-month report card
How am I doing?
I’m happy to report I’ve mostly kept my promise. I missed a few days due to not having access to a piano (when traveling with my son while he attended Eastman School of Music’s Summer Trombone Institute, which was fabulous… I loved both the solo concert and the trombone choir concert!) or forgetting until bedtime and deciding against ruining my sleep. But I’ve probably practiced at least fifteen minutes roughly 95% of days and generally tried to make up my missed practice by doing at least 30 minutes on days after missing my 15 minutes.
I have now proudly outlasted my daughter’s prediction to my wife that I would quit piano by November. :-)
Christmas songs for you(r enjoyment????)
I’ve recorded some Christmas music to share with you. By my personal scale, as a relative beginner, they’re challenging pieces performed passably. But compared against any Christmas songs you’ll hear on Spotify, my performances are horrible. You’ll notice mistakes, uneven dynamics (because I’m tensing up on some tricky fingerings, then hitting the keys too hard), and uneven rhythms… occasionally verging on painful pauses as I struggle to get all my fingers in the right places. It’s not fluid or even or inspired, but the pieces use a reasonably rich variety of non-basic chords and inversions, and I’ve learned to coordinate my two hands decently well. So I’m reasonably proud I’ve come this far in six months.
(Chords included in these songs: A7, Am, Am6, Am7, B♭, B7, C, Cdim, C7, Cmaj7, C#dim, D, D7, D7sus, Dmaj7, D7aug, Dm, Dm7, E♭dim7, E7, Em, E, F, Fm, Fmaj7, F#dim7, G, Gm, Gm7, Gmaj7, G+, G7, G7sus, G#dim, G#dim7. Luckily, each new piece seems to require learning fewer new chords. I’ve added links to some of these chords in case you’re curious what they look like on a piano. You can find more at PianoChord.org.)
Deck the Halls
Frosty the Snowman
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
Jingle Bells
Joy to the World
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Santa Claus is Coming to Town
(I’ve been reading a long, fascinating book on our two brain hemispheres, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, and am amazed my hemispheres can coordinate as well as they do, given that they’re effectively autonomous entities with radically different personalities and views on the world.)
Just six months into my new multi-decade side quest
I hope my Christmas music next year far surpasses this first effort. As we say in programming, “If you’re not embarrassed by the code you wrote six months ago, you’re not learning fast enough.” But this is a solid start to my rest-of-life side quest. Listening to these in the future will hopefully give me a sense of continued progress because there’s obviously major room for improvement. But these are decently challenging pieces, not “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” so I’m happy and proud I can play them semi-decently after six months of low-intensity training.
Until this weekend, I had never tried recording myself. I now plan to record myself regularly, even when I have no need for recordings. Why?
Partly because I hope to continue documenting my progress here, but mainly because recording will force me to practice more efficiently…
The surprising learning benefits of recording my performances
First, recording myself puts me under pressure. I normally practice with my headphones on, to avoid torturing my family and risking one of them – most likely my daughter – murdering me. When I have occasionally played out loud for people, I’ve felt nervous and performed significantly worse.
The same happened as soon as I hit “Record.” I instantly tensed up and started making more mistakes. I plan to put myself under such pressure frequently, hoping that I’ll learn to calm down while performing for an audience or a recording.
Second, recording myself spotlighted my mistakes. When I was just practicing, I underreacted to my mistakes. I didn’t learn quickly from them. I didn’t stop to ensure I worked out the correct fingering for the trickiest sequences. This slowed my learning. If I had sorted out my mistakes as soon as I made them, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be loosy-goosy with my fingerings and inversion choices so long, and I would have made more rapid progress. Instead, I muddled through pieces, haphazardly choosing one fingering, then a different one in my next take, and yet another in my next, winging it as I went along, and often messing up.
Nail it, then scale it!
This resonates with some shrewd advice I recently heard on a Youtube piano lesson. The pianist stressed the importance of not allowing yourself to play incorrect notes. He encouraged learners to go as slowly and as un-musically as needed when learning a piece to avoid playing incorrect notes. If you make a mistake, he suggested, immediately stop and figure out why and how to avoid that mistake. Don’t move on. Repeat the sequence and nail it several times before moving on.
Looking back on my past six months, I’ve concluded that’s excellent advice I will follow. It’s more fun to power through and play the piece, mistakes and all, but it’s more effective to go slowly until you get your fingering right, then improve your fluency. If you wing it, you’ll make mistakes, and if you don’t stop when you make those mistakes, you’re learning bad habits that will require future unlearning.
Bad habits require additional time and training to undo. Far more efficient to avoid developing bad habits from the beginning. An analogy is a startup trying to scale before it achieves “product-market fit.” Don’t ramp up your sales and marketing until you’re sure you’ve found a profitable business model. Better to “nail it, then scale it”! This is even the title of a book I’ve read. Periodically recording myself will further reinforce the importance of not just moving on when I make mistakes.
Third, attempting to do anything perfectly is humbling. Recording myself has reinforced this message and left me even more impressed by the professional musicians who seem to perform effortlessly and flawlessly. I now better appreciate the decades of intensive, progressively more difficult practice and training that cumulate in such top-quality performances. Concert audiences see only the tip of a proverbial iceberg of practice sessions.
Study + Sleep = Progress
Something I did partly intentionally and partly for convenience also helped: studying piano soon before going to bed. Sleep is essential for learning, as this study designed to measure the impact of a fitness class intervention on student performance inadvertently discovered:
100 students in an MIT engineering class were given Fitbits… in exchange for the researchers’ access to a semester’s worth of their activity data.
…[I]ndividuals who went to bed after some particular threshold time — for these students, that tended to be 2 a.m. — tended to perform less well on their tests no matter how much total sleep they ended up getting.
…There was essentially a straight-line relationship between the average amount of sleep a student got and their grades on the 11 quizzes, three midterms, and final exam, with the grades ranging from A’s to C’s. “There’s lots of scatter, it’s a noisy plot, but it’s a straight line,” he says. The fact that there was a correlation between sleep and performance wasn’t surprising, but the extent of it was, he says.
…The study also revealed no improvement in scores for those who made sure to get a good night’s sleep right before a big test. According to the data, “the night before doesn’t matter,” Grossman says. “We’ve heard the phrase ‘Get a good night’s sleep, you’ve got a big day tomorrow.’ It turns out this does not correlate at all with test performance. Instead, it’s the sleep you get during the days when learning is happening that matter most.”
A 1999 study of Tetris learners found that more than 60% of study participants reported dreaming of Tetris and:
subjects who had slept for six hours or more after learning a new task—in this case, spotting a visual target on a screen as quickly as possible—improved, whereas those who didn’t sleep on it didn’t. Moreover, they found that those who improved the most slept for eight hours, with ample time for both slow-wave and rapid eye movement (REM) periods of sleep.
In 1994, Jeffrey Goldsmith coined the term “Tetris effect.” “Practical Psychology” explains: “When we play Tetris for hours, our brain starts creating new neural pathways that allow us to recognize patterns with less effort and improve at the activity. Our brain, as it were, helps us practice the game even when we are not playing.”
Active learning helps create these pathways, but they strengthen and get consolidated into our long-term memory by the sleep we get after learning. So, the quality and quantity of post-learning sleep matters. So too does the gap between learning and sleep. A 2019 study in the journal “Sleep” found that napping after learning was at least as effective as continued cramming, perhaps even superior for long-term knowledge retention:
We found that a 1 hr nap provided comparable improvement to learning as an equivalent time spent cramming. When tested 30 min after learning, retention of factual knowledge was significantly greater after an hour spent napping or cramming relative to taking a break. The nap benefit remained after 1 week, while cramming no longer provided significantly better retention than taking a break.
…When retention was tested immediately after learning, both napping and cramming produced better retention than taking a break, but only the nap benefit remained significant when tested 1 week later.
I believe practicing before bed enhanced my practice effectiveness. An interesting recent New Yorker article, What Are Dreams For?, presents fascinating research by University of Iowa professor Mark Blumberg suggesting REM sleep is essential for strengthening linkages between body and brain… and thus essential to improving my piano playing:
People… twitch during sleep: our muscles contract to make small, sharp movements, and our closed eyes dart from side to side in a phenomenon known as rapid eye movement, or REM. It’s typically during REM sleep that we have our most vivid dreams.
Neuroscientists have long had an explanation for our somnolent twitches. During REM sleep, they say, our bodies are paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams; the twitches are the movements that slip through the cracks. They’re dream debris—outward hints of an inner drama. Human adults spend only about two hours of each night in REM sleep. But fetuses, by the third trimester, are in REM for around twenty hours a day…
Why spend so much time in REM before you have anything to dream about?
…[V]ideos attest to the apparent universality of twitching: not only do many animals twitch in REM but they start before they’re born.
…[Research now shows that] The brain was listening to the body.
In a series of papers, Blumberg articulated his theory that the brain uses REM sleep to “learn” the body. You wouldn’t think that the body is something a brain needs to learn, but we aren’t born with maps of our bodies; we can’t be, because our bodies change by the day, and because the body a fetus ends up becoming might differ from the one encoded in its genome. “Infants must learn about the body they have,” Blumberg told me. “Not the body they were supposed to have.”
…The theory, he pointed out, turned the rationale for REM paralysis on its head: the paralysis isn’t there to stop the twitches but to highlight them.
Performance and Your Conscious and Unconscious Brain
While trying to record my performances, I’ve felt an odd, uncomfortable betweenness. When I began learning each piece, my conscious brain was heavily involved. As I’ve become more familiar with each piece, my unconscious brain has taken over more and more. But I don’t yet know any of the pieces so well that my unconscious brain can just play it flawlessly. I feel caught in an unnerving middle ground where my brain flips back and forth during performances between conscious and unconscious control, and that’s often when I’m making mistakes.
I suspect professional athletes and musicians know their craft so well that they can largely perform unconsciously. I’ve even read that overthinking during performances/games can harm musicians and athletes. I’m excited to gain more experience with this over the months ahead.
I just found an article confirming my intuition:
Tennis legend Arthur Ashe said famously, “There is a syndrome in sports called ‘paralysis by analysis.’” A new study from University of California Santa Barbara was published on August 7, 2013 in “The Journal of Neuroscience” that shows why overthinking causes athletes to fumble, choke, and drop the ball….
The UCSB researchers were curious to uncover the brain mechanisms behind ‘paralysis by analysis’ and why paying full attention and trying too hard often interferes with peak performance. Their findings suggest that the secret to not choking lies in overriding our ’explicit’ memory system, and allowing our ‘implicit’ memory system to run free.
We have two types of memory: implicit memory and explicit memory. Anything that we learn to do through practice that becomes automatic (like riding a bicycle) is part of our implicit memory. Implicit memory is a form of long-term memory that doesn’t require conscious thought and is expressed by means other than words. Explicit (or “declarative”) memory is another kind of long-term memory formed consciously and can literally be described in words.
Describing how to serve a tennis ball is basically impossible. Implicit memories must be formed and taught through witnessing them and then experiencing them first hand. Whenever your body and mind learns through “practice, practice, practice” implicit memory is strengthened and is able to function on autopilot. This creates a state of flow. If you are constanlty overthinking any physical process by engaging explicit memory, you will create interference that leads to discombobulation and short-circuits the fluidity of your performance.
With thanks to Marius Masalar for their photo on Unsplash