How can I tell if a piece is too difficult for me?
In my last post, I talked about ways you can support yourself when learning a new song on piano. (If you missed that post, you can read about my 5-step process here.) One of the things I mentioned in that post is knowing when it might be a good idea to step away or hold off on learning a new song if it’s too difficult for you. But I didn’t explain how exactly you can know if a song isn’t right for you, so I thought I’d expand on that today.
Why it pays to evaluate your music from time to time
All new songs are difficult when you first sit down to them. From one perspective, that’s a good thing! It’s good to be challenged by a new song so that our skills improve.
But if you have such a steep learning curve that you never feel like you accomplish anything — or if you feel your “wins” don’t match the effort you put in — you may face discouragement, frustration, and even lowered self-esteem.
This would be bad for anyone, but is especially dangerous for kids, who are in their formative years and are building their beliefs about themselves and their capabilities. While their experience of the world is still so limited, I believe it’s important to calibrate their new challenges so that they have ample opportunities to experience a positive feedback loop of effort and success.
But a lot of people learning piano — or supporting their children in learning piano — don’t know how to tell when a piece of music goes from being “hard” to “too hard.” This has led to several students and parents asking me for a threshold they can use to know if a song is right for them.
Thankfully, my training in teacher education has prepared me well for this! I had to learn how to evaluate new learning materials so I could set my learners up for success, in every subject. Combining my lived teaching experience with insights from education research, I have developed strategies that help me find that educational sweet spot. In a school, I might use these strategies to help pick out the next book for a student to read, but in piano lessons I use them to help me pick out a new song (or hold off on an existing one). I’m excited to share these strategies with you :)
Here are the two main ways that I evaluate new music. I hope they’re helpful to you!
Approach #1: The familiarity factor (percentage of new learning)
Let’s explore my percentage approach first, because it’s an objective way to evaluate new music and can be used earlier on (as in, when you’re picking out new music to play). Basically, you want to figure out what percentage of the new song is going to be unfamiliar to you, and then keep the “unfamiliarity factor” under 10%.
At this point, you might be thinking, “But Sarah, every new song is 100% unfamiliar!” and in a sense you’d be right. But if you think about it more closely, you’ll realize that most new songs are simply an unfamiliar combination of notes and rhythms that you do already recognize. The trick is to learn how to scan your music and identify the individual components that are truly new learning for you. So your thinking might go something like this:
Notes - Do I recognize all the notes in this piece or will I have to learn some new ones?
Rhythm - Do I understand all the rhythmic patterns or am I unsure how they’re to be carried out?
Fingering - How complicated is the fingering notation, and are my hands agile enough to adapt?
Pace - Does this song require me to play at a speed I’m comfortable with right now, or will this be stretching my capacity?
Expression - Does the song need to be played a certain way or with a certain feeling, and am I capable of giving that?
Every one of the above instances where something is new to you should be counted towards the 10% difficulty factor.
And how do we calculate the percentage of new learning? It’s actually really easy.
For every single thing that is difficult for you,
there should be nine other things that are easy for you.
In other words, for every element of the song that you’d have to work to figure out, there should be nine other things that are so easy you don’t even have to think about them. Music that meets this nine-to-one ratio has a familiarity factor of 90%. Aiming for a familiarity factor of 90% is a guaranteed way to ensure your learning curve is gentle enough to be sustainable while also pushing you to learn more.
If you evaluate your new music this way, you may be surprised how well it helps you understand why a particular piece has been giving you so much trouble, or why you seem to fly through certain new pieces and not others. The familiarity factor is the first strategy I reach for because it helps me assess a song in the context of my student’s skill level and gives me improved predicting power when selecting new music for my students.
This leads me to the super bonus benefit of this strategy — you can use it when picking out new music for yourself or your child and feel confident you’re not wasting money on sheet music that will be too difficult to play!
It’s important to remember, however, that statistical certainties never have the final word when it comes to human potential! There is always also an emotional component to learning that must be considered. That leads me to my next strategy…
Approach #2: The enjoyment factor (scale of discomfort)
If you’ve ever been to the doctor or hospital complaining of an illness, one of the things they’re likely to ask you is to rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10. While it’s not the most objective measure of someone’s problem, it does give insight into the impact of that problem on a person’s emotional well-being.
While I certainly don’t want to associate physical agony with piano lessons, the truth is that there is always a level of emotional discomfort present because learning is difficult and vulnerable work. Many people try to ignore the discomfort, either forcing themselves to work through it at one extreme (“No pain, no gain!”), or at the other extreme trying so hard to “Make learning fun!” that they water down every lesson until there’s no chance of encountering discomfort.
I think it’s better to respect the discomfort and learn to wield it. That means that rather than trying to ignore or suppress learning discomfort, I try to identify it, weigh it, and gauge how far we are from a “Goldilocks” zone where the discomfort level is not too low, not too high, but just right.
So, while I’m teaching, I’m constantly scanning my students’ words and body language to determine, “What’s their discomfort level currently at?” On a scale from 1 to 10, a 1 would be they’re completely relaxed to the point of being bored, a 5 would be they’re working something out but not emotionally invested in it, and a 10 would be they’re so frustrated that they’re absolutely suffering and about to quit piano forever.
The answer I’m looking for is about a 7. A discomfort factor of 7 is a reasonable challenge that encourages some new growth in addition to applying what you already know. A 5 is too low — I associate that with how I feel when I see a song I already learned but haven’t played in a while: I can do this, I just need a minute or two to get my bearings. No real achievement unlocked. An 8 is too high! 8 is too close to 10 to be enjoyable. But a 7 just gives you that edge where you know you can do it but you’ll also grow in your musicianship as a result.
If I notice a student is frequently falling below a 7, I know it’s time to add some more challenging pieces to their repertoire. If a student is pushing 8 too often, I’ll stop what we’re doing and talk about the reason for their struggle. I think it’s important to talk about the struggle to ensure they don’t internalize any negative messages about themselves or their capabilities. As I’ve said in my previous piece, you can only learn piano when you’re confident in your ability to learn. Any belief to the contrary isn’t just bad for morale; it’s inaccurate. So if I sense this confidence is jeopardized, perhaps because they’ve been pushing an 8 for too long, I’ll infuse some “real talk” into our lesson to remind them of all their great achievements so we can get back on track. We might talk about why this musical passage is more difficult than it looks. And, if we deem it necessary, we might let this tricky song go.
I suppose the only drawback to the discomfort scale is that it can be hard to apply to a song ahead of trying it for yourself. You’re measuring a lived experience, so you might need to bring a new song home to figure out where you sit on the enjoyment scale. It’s easier to use the percentage method if you’re picking out a new song to learn. But with enough experience learning piano, and enough mindfulness on your own tendencies while learning new music, you do start to get a sense of what you’ll enjoy or not ahead of time!
Once you have picked out a new song, though, it pays to check in with yourself from time to time and ask, “Where am I on the discomfort scale?” and keep making sure you’re always sitting around a 7!
Combining the two approaches
The neat thing about using the enjoyment factor in your evaluation of new music is that it gives you some flexibility to play around with the percentages approach mentioned above. Let’s say there’s a new song you’re interested in, but it has a familiarity factor of only 50%. Normally, this means there will be a steep learning curve to the song and it will take longer than usual to learn. Does this mean you necessarily have to hold off on learning it? Not at all. If your motivation to learn it is high, and if you feel so much joy and accomplishment while working on it, it’s very possible that your good feelings towards the song and your growing skills can help you sustain a level 7 while you learn, even if it takes longer than usual.
I myself have chosen songs way beyond my actual capability because I was so motivated to learn them. In these cases, I just had to keep an eye on the level of my growing pains — if I felt over time that the extra effort was eroding my enthusiasm and confidence, I would have ended up worse off than before I started the overly difficult piece. Thankfully, I had a piano teacher who was an excellent judge of my capability, and I’ve worked hard to be the same for my own students!
What do you think? Can you see yourself using the familiarity factor and/or the enjoyment factor in evaluating new music? You might find one approach works better for you, and that’s okay, but the real magic is in trying them out together. Good luck!