Practice Schedule

[EIS]

One of the advantages of a real teacher is that the teacher assigns a practice schedule for the week. Having an assigned practice schedule is a huge incentive to accomplishing one’s goals.

Since Playground Sessions does not have assignments, has anyone come up with a good method to proceed through the lessons with weekly goals in mind, short of just marching through them one-by-one? I would like to mix in some songs with the bootcamp lessons.

What do you use for incentives to maintain good practice habits?

Regards...
Earl Staley

[andrewwegierski]

Earl,

Thanks for posting. One thing I've thought of is, once you play through a Bootcamp lesson, which uses a small chunk from a song in our song store, then it would be a good idea to try playing one of your favorite songs from the song store. The song store has full versions of all the songs that appear in bootcamp, so then you can build on your learning experience from the bootcamp segment!

I'm eager to see what anyone else has to say.

[sw1tch73ch]

I made my own schedule.

Practice every day (nearly) for about an hour. I'm doing piano lessons for enjoyment. I don't want to make it stressful. So I don't have any deadlines. I get there when I get there.

[Dave Teo]

i just try to play for an hour each day, sometimes shorter.
But the key is to keep playing everyday even when it's only 10 minutes.

Keep practicing every day.

[andrewwegierski]

Right on, Dave.

Playing every day is so important. Lots of short sessions are better than one large session.

[bassman63]

1/2 hour a day minimum. If you feel inspired to go longer, go for it. Opinions may differ on this. If you're performing on a given day, don't practice the day of the performance. Your first take is always your best!

[cvanegas]

I try practicing between 2 to 2.5 hours a day, a bit more during the weekends. I do other things besides Playground. Probably 60% of my time is with Playground, the rest of the time I do scales/arpeggios/cords and about 2 months ago I started working on Hanon (Junnior).
I do very little songs for now, I figure I need to get the basis first and feel more comfortable with the instrument before I embark on more complex things such songs. I started playing the piano in March 2019, so I have way to go before I get the "comfortable" feeling. I do like Playground's teaching methodology with its immediate feed back and I love the fact of playing with other instruments, I think this will help a lot in the long run.

[rj3711]

I'm jealous! 2 to 2.5 hours of practice a day would be fantastic. I had 2 weeks vacation at the end of the year and loved to practice for an hour when I got up in the morning, and possibly another 30 minutes later in the day. But now that I'm back to my normal work week and only have 3 hours in the evening to make food, eat, get some form of exercise, and do all of the other misc. things that need to get done during the week, I've had to go back to shooting for 30 minutes a day but still feeling good if I get by with an occasional "just let me just get 15 minutes in." But I love that Playground's format is flexible enough to handle both intensive/longer sessions and shorter sections of a song that I can feel like I'm still making progress on those days that I can only get 15 minutes in.