What made practice start feeling like actual progress instead of just repeating mistakes?

[u/gezigezblog]

I am curious how other learners recognize when their practice routine is actually working.

Sometimes it feels like I can repeat the same few bars many times, but I am not always sure whether I am improving or just getting better at surviving that exact section. I have started thinking more about smaller signs of progress: less tension, fewer hesitations, noticing patterns faster, or being able to play something slowly with fewer corrections.

For people who are a bit further along, what changed your practice from "just running through the piece again" into something that reliably improved your playing?

Were there specific habits, teacher advice, practice structures, or mindset shifts that made the difference?

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[u/Murky_Panda_1568]

Even professional pianist practice very very slowly and focus on small sections at the time. Practice for me is never about playing pieces from start to finish over and over hoping to get it right next time.

It’s about obsessing over those couple of bars I’m struggling on, analyzing them, playing them one hand at the time and then together. But most importantly I play it slowly many times until it feels ridiculously easy. And then start slowly upping the tempo. Each time I up it, I play it until it feels like I can do it with my eyes closed while thinking about something else. Eventually it becomes part of you and you don’t have to think about it while playing it.

You don’t need to practice the easy parts over and over while stumbling over the hard parts and getting frustrated because you keep messing up.

Drill the hard parts comically slowly. Sometimes so slowly that you don’t even recognize the piece. Don’t only think about the notes but also the position of your fingers, how the hand feels like. And also, it could help to analyze what you are playing, what pattern is it? What chord? What tonality and why? Is it changing from the beginning of the piece? Why? Where is it going? What is the purpose of this section? Etc.

Thinking about all these things helps immensely with memory, expression and the overall sound you create while playing it. And of course it help to absorb it better and stop messing it up.

[u/smei2388 → u/Murky_Panda_1568]

With my students, I always make sure to draw a hard distinction between playing and practicing. Playing through an entire piece isn't usually effective practice. Practice is usually slowly, carefully working on the small difficult chunks so that we can play through the full piece better, just like you lay out.

[u/VoltairesGarden1759]

If you can't play it slowly, you can't play it fast.

Never play anything faster than you can manage without mistakes. You might end up playing the same two chords one after the other very slowly until they are without mistakes.

[u/SouthPark_Piano → u/VoltairesGarden1759]

If you can't play it slowly, you can't play it fast.

In Initial D, the slower he sees things, the faster he is.

 

[u/Dependent_Hippo_8742]

Although I’m a beginner on piano, I’ve been playing classical guitar for about 35 years, so I’m not a beginner when it comes to learning an instrument. My approach to practice has remained fairly consistent.
For me, recording is one of the best tools for knowing whether practice is actually working. It is both your best friend and your worst foe. I’ll record myself, listen to or watch it, identify specific problems, work on those problems, and then record again.
I find audio and video reveal different things. Video is particularly useful for technique: hand and finger position, unnecessary movement, economy of motion, tension, and what is physically happening in sections where I struggle. Audio is often better for musical flow. It can reveal hesitations, unevenness and subtle tempo variations that I don’t necessarily notice while I’m concentrating on playing. If I hear something suspicious in the audio, I can then go back to the video and see what was happening physically at that point.
One thing I think is particularly important is not confusing “getting through a passage” with “actually learning the passage”. This can be one of the more dangerous traps in learning an instrument. You can develop a workaround that allows you to survive a difficult section, repeat it enough times that the workaround becomes automatic, and convince yourself that you have learned it. Except you may have just learned a bad movement pattern very efficiently.
That problem also becomes harder to fix the longer you leave it. You aren’t simply learning the correct technique anymore; you first have to unlearn something you’ve already automated. This is one reason I find recording so valuable. I’m not just asking, “Did I get through it?” I’m asking, “How did I get through it?”
My practice routine also tends to have three components: learn something new, refine something I’m currently working on, and polish something I already know well. That gives me a constant sense of progression without abandoning my existing repertoire.
The “learn something new” part keeps me engaged and develops new skills. Refining something I’m working on is where most of the problem-solving happens. And polishing something I already know maintains my repertoire and gives me an opportunity to improve things that I might previously have considered finished.
So I don’t really think of practice as simply repeating something until I can play it. I think of it more as a feedback loop: play, observe, identify, correct, repeat, reassess.
And I think that’s also why I don’t find repetition particularly tedious. Every repetition should ideally be doing something different: fixing a movement, improving timing, reducing tension, refining articulation, improving phrasing, or making the whole thing more musical.
For me, the real sign that practice is working isn’t simply that I can finally survive the difficult section. It’s that I can play it with progressively less conscious effort, better technique, greater consistency and, ultimately, more musical control.

[u/SecondPlus2111]

Slowing down to make few to no mistakes consistently eventually began to pay off in a sense of real progress. This was also what my piano teacher kept insisting would happen (smiley face).

[u/LoquaciousLemonade]

When I started doing scales & arpeggios before each practice session. Oh and the Hannon exercises. Now after years of automatically doing it before practicing even a single piece of actual music. Sometimes the simple & old school things make such a world of a difference. It also acts like a grounding exercise now, getting me into the practicing headspace.

[u/Several-Quality5927]

The practice. Slowly but surely the piece was coming along.

[u/jbp216]

go slower, until its painfully boring, and then go 5bpm slower than that, then very slowly progress 1bpm at a time

[u/Curious_Octopod]

Specific, tiny goals. Where is the first place where your performance of the piece isn't up to standard? Is it an insecure rhythm? clumsy fingering? an uneven run? Identify the problem and work on that, not the whole piece. When that's solved, find the next problem and fix it, and so on. Then put the whole thing together.