Dealing with Frustration
Just venting... Who gets frustrated with practicing that seemingly goes no where? I teach my kiddos to practice smarter. Look for patterns. Isolate trouble spots. Never start from the beginning. Chunk practicing into phrases. Piece together... yada yada... And I take my own advice... but then I plateau.
What do you all do when you plateau (or feel like you are)? I am older, so maybe I just don't have the resiliency I once had? (been playing since 5) I would love hear what you all do.
I walk away and try shorter bursts. But sometimes I just force my way through. Either way... I have been hard charging in the saddle for nearly a year. My other half, a professional pianist, says he can definitely hear progress... but I do not. I suppose it's like not noticing your hair growing or losing a couple of pounds.
Ok... middle aged rant over 
!
~Denise
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I write an etude about it.
I used to play heavy metal electric guitar pretty seriously. Whenever I hit a difficult Steve Vai solo, I forget about the piece, I take the hard passages and I write an etude about it so I can loop it forever. Then, I play it reversed, then inverted. Then I move that shape/etude everywhere on the guitar neck. I used to that 1h/day for 2-3 weeks. It used to fix my plateau's most of the time...
But that's on guitar; I don't know if it works on piano...
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Thanks Mat. Interesting idea!
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I feel your pain! I鈥檝e been playing since I was 6 (I鈥檓 not a pro and I took a big chunk of time off from it due to... life!). I did recently hit a huge wall/plateau but managed to make progress after investigating the Taubman method (rotation, efficient movements). Quite often I find I struggle to make progress if my movements are inefficient. And I鈥檝e only recently discovered rhythmic variation as a method of practicing fast or complex passages because none of my piano teachers in my youth ever mentioned this method to me! That does help too.
