Piano Students Beating Themselves Up

Sometimes I run into piano students who get really discouraged by making a few mistakes on songs they practiced at home. They start to really beat themselves up or feel like they're not doing good enough.

I am very much a perfectionist when it comes to many different things. Sometimes I will obsess over the littlest details. However, when it comes to piano playing, I don't obsess and I don't strive for absolute perfection. We're human. To play a song with absolute perfection is asking A LOT. I do, however, try my best. There's a difference between playing a song perfectly and a playing a song very well (but a typical audience listening can't always tell the difference).

Let's switch gears and think about basketball. Professional basketball players should be able to make every shot they attempt in a game, right? After all, they're professionals who have likely been playing the game for about 20 years or more! So why do they still miss free throws? Baseball players certainly don't hit home runs every time either, despite the millions of times they've practiced swinging a bat. The fact is, they are performing an action that takes precise accuracy and involves a lot of muscle groups in the body, all while they're multi-tasking during a game. The same goes with piano. Except with piano we are adding in a complicated mental aspect of learning how to read an entirely new language written down on the page. So you are asking your body to first translate foreign messages into something that makes sense and then expecting your brain to relay those commands to your limbs and hoping all of your muscles can work together in perfect timing to hit all of the correct notes. Don't forget to add expression into that too-- dynamics, articulations-- wow! Did you ever stop to think how incredible our bodies are just to be able to play piano at all?! 

So if you are one of the (usually adult) piano students who is beating themselves up for not being able to play a song well enough--- stop!  You should continue to practice a song until it flows smoothly, you feel comfortable with the notes, and you lose the sense of struggling to get through it or racking your brain when you get to certain spots. However, when you're performing that song in a lesson on a piano that feels slightly different (or a lot different) than yours at home and you have a little anxiety because there is a teacher listening, you should relax and know that your teacher is looking for a general understanding of concepts and not a completely flawless performance. Besides, muscle tension only creates more problems and mistakes! Take a deep breath, concentrate, relax, and enjoy your playing!