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

The hard part of learning from a lesson book isn't the notes. It's the six days between lessons, when nobody's listening and it's very easy to play the fun bar three times and call it practice.

Here's a routine that fits in 15 minutes and works whichever book you're in.

Start with what your teacher said

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

Warm up with something you can already play

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

Pick one small thing

Choose the bar that tripped you up last time. Play it slowly, hands separate if you need to, and stop once it's right three times in a row. Three in a row is the whole trick: one clean run is luck, three is a habit starting.

Play the whole piece once

One full run at a steady speed, even if it's slower than the book says. Don't stop to fix things. Just notice where they went wrong.

Leave yourself a note

Before you close the book, pencil one line on the page: "bar 6, left hand, too fast". That's your first job tomorrow, and it's exactly what to show your teacher.

How to tell it's working

You're improving if the same bar goes wrong less often each day. The whole piece sounding perfect is a bonus. Keep a tally of how many runs it takes to get three clean ones in a row. That number should shrink.