Practice · 5 min read ·
How to plan 20 minutes of piano practice that pay off
A little practice every day usually beats doing it all at once. It isn't talent, it's how we learn.
Picture two students. Ana practices for two hours on Sunday. Bruno, twenty minutes a day. By the end of the week, both have practiced for about the same time. But Bruno usually arrives at the lesson more confident.
Why a little every day works
Every time you come back to the piano, you have to retrieve what you learned the day before, and that retrieval makes the memory stronger. Psychologists call it spaced practice, one of the most studied effects in memory research.
Breaks matter too. In a long block, fatigue builds up and performance drops, even while you’re learning. Recent studies with finger-sequence tasks show that much of the “improvement after a break” is that fatigue wearing off. In short sessions, you always practice rested.
What research still doesn't know
There are few studies with the piano: the strongest results come from memory for words and simple motor tasks, and one piano study that tested breaks of a few minutes found no difference.
It was also said that sleep “consolidates” a practiced skill on its own; more recent reviews show this effect was overstated. Sleeping well still matters, but it won’t practice for you.
It’s not how much, it’s how
A study at the University of Texas watched pianists practicing a hard passage. Total practice time and the number of repetitions didn’t predict who played better the next day.
What made the difference was practicing accurately: the more often the passage came out right during practice, the better the result the next day. So it pays to isolate the hard spot and play it right, again and again, instead of running the whole piece with the same mistakes.
The 20-minute recipe
Slow on the hard spot is my advice as a teacher: at the speed where you get it right, you practice it right.
Want to build your own plan?
In lessons, we put this plan together, sized to your routine. The trial lesson is on me.
Sources
Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer. Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 2006.
Wiseheart, D'Souza and Chae. Lack of spacing effects during piano learning. PLOS ONE, 2017.
Gupta and Rickard. Dissipation of reactive inhibition is sufficient to explain post-rest improvements in motor sequence learning. npj Science of Learning, 2022.
Pan and Rickard. Sleep and motor learning: is there room for consolidation? Psychological Bulletin, 2015 (meta-analysis).
Duke, Simmons and Cash. It's not how much; it's how: characteristics of practice behavior and retention of performance skills. Journal of Research in Music Education, 2009.
Sylvia de Morais. Informational content, reviewed with sources.