5 Practice Tips For Learning a New Piece of Music

As musicians, we all love getting new music to start learning. Whether you are preparing for a performance or just learning the piece for fun, it’s important to take certain steps in your practicing to best learn your music quickly and correctly. Here are 5 practice tips to implement when learning a new piece of music:

1. Get a feel for the big picture before practicing.

Before you jump in and start learning your new music, it’s important to understand how the piece works as a whole.

Listen to lots of different recordings and follow along with your score. This allows you to hear multiple interpretations of the piece (which then helps you make artistically informed decisions when it comes to interpretation), and it gives you an understanding of any changes that happen in the music (so you won’t be surprised later). You will then have a basic understanding of the piece, and you will come away with the tools you need to implement technique and artistry in your practicing.

Side note: it’s helpful to continue listening to recordings and studying the score as you are learning the piece. This keeps your perspective fresh.

2. Then start small with practice sections.

After looking at the big picture, it’s time to zoom in by making practice sections.

Practice sections are several small groups of measures that you practice in chunks. For example, measures 1-4 are section 1, measures 2-8 are section 2, etc. Once you have practice sections, use them to guide your practicing. Here are a few ways you can use practice sections:

• Learn hands apart for section 1
• Learn hands together for section 1
• Add dynamics and articulation to section 1
• Do the same for section 2, then play sections 1 and 2 together without stopping
• Memorize section 1

Using practice sections will help you break the music down into learnable pieces. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when faced with a huge new piece to learn, but if you incorporate practice sections and start small, then the music is much easier to learn.

Side note: practice sections can be any length you want depending on what makes sense for the piece of music. Sometimes they can be longer or shorter than four bars, although I try to keep them fairly small.

3. Slow and steady wins the race.

As you practice your music in small chunks, it’s also important to start learning your piece by practicing at a slow tempo.

The temptation is to just dive in and learn the piece at full speed right from the beginning, but this actually hinders your progress in the long run. If you don’t take the time to learn your music slowly at the beginning, you risk substituting proper technique and good artistry for speed. If you work s-l-o-w-l-y in your practice sections, you are guaranteeing yourself success when you speed it up later. Starting at a slow tempo allows you to learn the correct fingering, master the dynamics and articulation, and learn the notes and rhythms correctly all the first time around.

4. Perfection is in the details.

This ties into the three previous tips: pay attention to the details when you start learning a new piece.

It’s so important to incorporate proper fingering, dynamics, articulation, notes, and rhythms when you first start learning a new piece. If you tell yourself you will do all of this later, it becomes much more difficult to play the piece properly down the road because – technically – you will have learned the music incorrectly.

Side note: use the practice sections and a slow practice tempo to help you remember the details of the music.

5. Don’t stop!

This happens to all of us: once we learn the first page or so of a new piece, the “newness” wears off and we don’t want to keep practicing.

Don’t fall into this trap! Once you’ve learned the first page, keep going. Continue listening to recordings and studying the score. Continue implementing practice section strategies. More often than not, you will find patterns throughout the music that make it easier to learn. And once you finish the piece, you will be glad you kept going.

What do you like to do when you start learning new music?