Practice · October 13, 2026

How to practise piano between lessons (without a teacher watching)

A simple routine for the six days between lessons: what to play, in what order, and how to know you are actually getting better.

The hardest part of learning from a lesson book is not the notes. It is the six days between lessons, when nobody is listening and it is easy to play the easy parts three times and call it practice.

Here is a routine that fits in 15 minutes and works with any book.

Start with what your teacher said

Open to the page your teacher marked. If they wrote "bars 5 to 8, slowly", that is today's job, not the whole piece. Practising what was assigned beats practising what feels good.

Warm up with something you already know

Play one piece you can already play cleanly, once. It takes a minute, it wakes your hands up, and it reminds you what a good run sounds like.

Work on one small thing

Pick the single bar or phrase that gave you the most trouble last time. Play it slowly, hands separate if you need to, and stop when it is correct three times in a row. That "three in a row" rule is the whole trick: one clean run is luck, three is a habit starting.

Play the whole piece once

Do one full run at a steady speed, even if it is slower than the book says. Do not stop to fix mistakes. Just notice where they happened.

Write down one line

Before you close the book, write one line on the page in pencil: "bar 6, left hand, too fast". That is what you will do first tomorrow, and it is what you can show your teacher.

How to know it is working

You are improving if the same bar goes wrong less often each day, not if the whole piece sounds perfect. Keep a tally of how many runs it takes to get three clean ones in a row. That number should drop.