Joyful practice, Student empowerment Sarah Cashmore Joyful practice, Student empowerment Sarah Cashmore

Study your music before sight-reading

It’s really common for my piano students to just start reading a piece of music from the beginning, with no preparation or planning. But just launching into sight reading with no preparation is an easy way to get lost and frustrated.

You can set yourself up for breezier success if you find some relationships between your notes before you start to play.

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Where can you build some relief into your practice?

When we're constantly challenging ourselves and trying new things at our pianos, it can be easy to start thinking that our piano journey is nothing but one big struggle. But I want to encourage you to purposefully build times of rest or relief into your piano practice.

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Practice the skill of piano performance sooner rather than later

I've noticed a misconception that learning your piano pieces better is the key to becoming comfortable with performance.

While it's certainly important to know your pieces well, performance is actually an entirely different skill that needs to be developed separately.

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Joyful practice Sarah Cashmore Joyful practice Sarah Cashmore

A game plan to play a song by ear

If you’re learning piano so that you can figure out how to play a song by ear, you might benefit from a little road map to help you get there.

Here’s the road map I use to figure out songs as quickly and easily as possible. I hope it’s helpful to you, too!

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