Juilliard graduate helping dedicated adult pianists who love challenging repertoire practice less while learning more.
🎹 Six cards for their piano rack
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We just wrapped up our annual Beyond the Keys piano retreat and I sent every pianist home with six new cards to put on their piano rack. One idea on each. Play On! 🎹 Four days of workshops, performances and conversation. And this is what I wanted them to leave with. Not a notebook full of ideas they’d never reread. Six decisions small enough to fit on a piano rack. None of these is new. I’ve been saying them for years. But something happens when an idea fits on a card. It stops being advice. It becomes a decision. This weekend, during Be The Teacher, I played with mistakes on purpose. Then I watched talented pianists try to fix five of them at once. Wrong note, lumpy rhythm, muddy pedal, all in one breath. 🤦♀️ That’s not a talent problem. It’s a too-many-things problem. A card gives you one thing to focus on. 🎼 A tiny practice experiment for you Do only that for your whole practice session. You’ll be surprised how much the other five problems shrink when you stop chasing them all at once. That was the theme of the weekend. Stay tuned (pun intended) for video highlights.
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Lisa Spector, Piano Ninja
Juilliard graduate helping dedicated adult pianists who love challenging repertoire practice less while learning more.
Members of the Piano Ninja Tricksters Club are flying in from across the country for our annual Beyond The Keys piano retreat here in Monterey, California. A group of adult pianists, a lot of piano talk, and some unusual experiments. Let's just say this is not your typical adult piano camp. There's even a piano movie night. 🍿 (If we get to it. For the last two years, we've talked right through it. 🤷♀️) But the moment I keep thinking about is Friday night. That's when they'll walk into a room...
I'm wearing a back brace while a compression fracture heals, with strict orders not to lift more than 5 pounds. And I was about to fly from California to Toronto. ✈️I'm a lifelong over-packer. 🧳 🧳 Carry-on only was a stretch. Carry-on I wasn't allowed to lift? 🤦♀️ The trip was for Stu McLaren's 10-year celebration of The Membership Experience. Stu is my membership mentor and I've been meeting with him and his fabulous team for 5 years on Zoom! Before I knew Stu, my first attempt at a...
During my podcast interview with Rachel Ehring, host of The Topmusic Piano Podcast, she asked me about a sentence every teacher hears over and over... "I played it better at home." Sound familiar? 🤦♀️ Here's my answer. It's not your playing. It's your audience. All week, you play for nobody. Then you sit down for one person, and that's the first time you've practiced being listened to. Nerves are a skill. You have to practice them too. So I ask my students to climb The Audience Ladder. 🪜 1️⃣...