Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum I just can't stop making mistakes...

I forget who used the term "fracture" for the spot that causes trouble - where a mistake is likely to happen.

One method of dealing with a fracture is to practice it, not "until you can play it correctly", but "until you play it correctly _consistently_".

Hence the "two bowls of beans" technique:


This is a slow process, but reasonably effective in giving you _security_ in playing.

If you can't empty the left-hand bowl, either the material is too hard for you, or you're trying to play it faster than you can, at your current level of ability.

There is an aphorism:

. . . An amateur practices something until he can do it right;

. . . A professional practices something until he can't do it wrong.

I understand that we amateurs can also make new, never-before-heard mistakes! But in my experience, the real nasties are the ones that we make repeatedly. "Two bowls" works pretty well, for them.

And if you manage to play cleanly without any note mistakes or finger slips, you'll likely find phrasing errors or voicing failures. As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, "it's always something!"

I use an equivalent method to the two bean bowl method. I have a stack of seven poker chips on a coaster on the music desk. When I play through correctly, I move one chip to a new pile. When I make a mistake, all the chips go back in the first pile. When I get seven correct repeats error free in a row, I move up the tempo and do it again. It is a slow process, but it does work!

Haha, I like that bean bowl (or poker chip) tip! I might seriously give something like that a try!

And that's a great aphorism about amateurs and professionals.

I use tequila shots. It doesn't work but by the end I don't care any more.

I like your method better!!

If I attempted to do that two bowl thing, I would be found dead on my piano bench with a crazed look etched into my face. On the other hand, that tequila method might end up entirely different.

I've thought the same as well, recently... but I just kept going and repeating the parts I often made mistakes in. Basically, for me, they were caused by not having the finger down correctly. After I wrote the fingering that worked above the notes and then stuck to it, the mistakes went away.

This is what I am focusing on too now. I notice that in the pieces I think I know I change the fingering without thinking about it in various parts. So I am now playing those pieces slower and focus on using the same fingering and whenever I notice my fingering changes I replay that part to figure out the best fingering and then I repeat that part to make that fingering stick. I notice it is pretty hard for me to keep using the exact same fingering all the time and I do think there is a lot to be gained here.

If you don't use the same fingering each time, you'll have extreme trouble playing even the simplest Bach(like) / Baroque pieces. Sometimes, there's just one fingering for a certain measure, and you have to start setting up for it one or two measures in advance, or you'll get stuck. I know. I've stubbornly tried to play some pieces without working out the fingering first, failing for a week, and then, after writing in the fingering, the piece was done in two days.

I am really just an intermediate level Adult student but I still found this quote about practice inspiring:

Amateurs practice until they get it right
Professionals practice until they cannot get it wrong

Ah. I've seen it often. As soon as someone succeeds at playing the piece flawlessly once, they move on to the next, and forget it. In the end, one can only play the last, or next to last piece one played, as all the others are not polished and partly forgotten...

I move on to the next piece if I can play it three times in a row, flawlessly, and then I try to maintain it. Sometimes I don't practice new pieces, but I just go through the repertoire. (I did with the organ, and now plan to do that with the piano as well.)

I saved the following title and picture from a few years back.

What playing Bach feels like to me when I put one wrong finger down

Never managed that on ANY piece o'music, including those I wrote myself . . . .

It's important here to distinguish between two kinds of mistakes: One of a kind fumbles, and consistent learned mistakes that are the same over and over. It's better to play through the one-off's without breaking tempo. The learned mistakes require time drilling the bad part correctly, and it's best to nip them in the bud. The quicker you start the bean bowl thing, the less effort it takes to un-learn and re-learn.

The other thing is to not let an obsession with perfection result in practice past the point of boredom, and crush the enjoyment out of it. There's a quote attributed to Beethoven:

To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable!

According to WikiQuotes: "Not a direct quote, but Beethoven did say something along those lines ... according to this reddit discussion. Ferdinand Ries wrote about his experiences taking lessons from Beethoven. Look for (ctrl+F) 'fehlerhaftem Klavierspiel' (faulty piano performance) on this page and you'll see the exact excerpt in both English and German. --IIBewegung (talk) 05:22, 9 December 2015 (UTC)"

Update: I have been practicing one piece over and over again, Schumann's Melodie, and this time I stuck with ONE fingering. No changes on the fly, no nothing. And it is beginning to pay off already and that after only 3 days. I didn't practice for hours and hours, just played the piece over and over again for 15 minutes or so a few times a day and gradually I am getting the feeling I am beginning to master it. I sometimes still make odd mistakes but I already played the piece without ANY mistakes a few time and today I did so at least once every session. At other times I sometimes made a minor mistake (wrong key) but I managed to keep the speed and not hesitate anyway which to me is already progress. Of course I also sometimes still make big mistakes and stumble, it's only been 3 days, but I am feeling more and more confident with the piece. I am getting the feeling I can actually master it and that feels good! When I go sit behind the piano now I don't fear playing the piece anymore but I know I will have a good chance I can pull it off! Seems to me that when I keep on doing this for a few more days the piece can be called mastered!

I think my main problem was not sticking to one fingering and changing things on the fly. It obviously is a very good thing to figure out WHY you are making mistakes! Another problem may have been a too high speed and simply thinking I'd mastered it while I hadn't: this forced me to think too much about what was coming next instead of 'simply' playing the piece without thinking about it (but with a good focus, of course). I can now play the piece more automatically but without sounding like a machine.

I do have to say that I can't imagine doing this with long pieces... Luckily I am a short-piece-man, one page will do, two pages max, but I can't imagine practicing a longer piece this way: that would become too boring. Luckily no one is forcing me to do so.

Yes, it's important to stick with just one fingering. But you want that to be the best fingering for you. So, you have to try a few and see what works. Start with the hardest parts, get them optimized, and fill in the in-betweens later.

Oh, and be sure to write in all your fingering numbers. Make a Xerox if you don't want to write in the book. If you come back to a piece after a few months or years, those numbers are vital to make sure you re-learn what you did before rather than un-learning and starting over.

Write the fingering in pencil, not pen.

This is an interesting thread. I make mistakes quite often while learning a new piece. I usually find one or two spots (fractures as mentioned above) that I struggle to play correctly and if not careful they can become an almost inevitable trigger to failure. I can even feel the tension building up as I approach the "fracture" point. So now when I recognise a potential "fracture" point I stop trying to play through it, slow the tricky section right down and drill it until it starts to become more comfortable. At some point I usually crack it and then I can continue to play the rest of the piece. I like the bean bowl concept and may try that approach to clearing tricky sections.

Over the last week I've been learning "Blow the Man Down" from Alfred's 1 and that threw up the most issues I've had with any single piece to date. Firstly I really struggled with the LH rhythm as many people seem to do with this piece. But once I cracked the ryhthm and thought I would be done with the piece in a couple of practice sessions, I found two transitions irritatingly difficult to get right (especially the last few measures at the very end). It took me almost a further week of dedicated practice sessions to iron these two "fracture" points out and play the piece complete without mistakes and I'm still a bit dubious on the ending. But every day I make less and less mistakes and can now probably play it through with only about a 50/50 chance of making a slight error - usually at the end. I still have a little tension approaching the second fracture point which sometimes still trips me up, but it's getting better with more practice of that section. It's not a piece I wish to retain, but I will continue playing it once or twice in each session for the experience and to gain confidence that I can really master it.

When I began piano, I thought fingering was a necessary nuisance, which distracted me from playing the music, so I just used the editorial fingerings, occasionally dropping a different finger because it seemed more convenient, perhaps due to hand size differences between me and the editor. Eventually I, too, realised that changing things on the fly was putting hurdles in my own path, because these are things that need to 'disappear' into the unconscious, to let me focus on other things.

Once I realised I needed to pay attention to fingering and understand why a fingering that initially seemed odd was actually there for a reason (generally preparing for another fingering a few moments away), my attitude to fingering changed dramatically. It now became a part of the puzzle-solving process of approaching a new piece. Trying alternatives became intriguing, and added a real sense of progress once I found what worked for me. Occasionally, when I show my teacher what I've figured out, she'll draw my attention to still other possibilities I hadn't thought of, and I love that. Once I have one that works, it's marked in pencil in the music, so that I don't have to reinvent it when I come back to the piece a few months (or weeks!) down the line.