But too often our musical practice suffers from problems:
- We play the fun parts over and over, neglecting tricky parts that need more practice
- We play a piece from start to finish, ignoring mistakes or maybe correcting them once, even though this is effectively “practicing” the mistakes and reinforcing them in muscle memory
- We try to cram a passage into memory by playing it over and over all at once, even though this has been shown to be ineffective
- We allow our old favorite to become rusty, and it takes much more work to polish than if we had just revisited it even once every few months
- We allow ourselves to plateau, rather than constantly push at the edges of our abilities
- We practice without concrete goals in mind, with no feedback cycle in place, and without countless other well-studied elements of effective practice
Piano Practice Assistant is designed to help with all of these obstacles and many others. If you use it to keep track of your repertoire and practice sessions, it will intelligently suggest when, what, and how to practice. Research tells us that techniques like
can improve our learning and memory, yet often we do the exact opposite, to the detriment of our music. The skills involved in self-directed learning are necessary to build effective practice habits. We’ve taken this research and used it to design a tool to help amateur and professional pianists alike improve the quality of their practice and bring better music to the world.
New users: check out our tutorial on getting started with PPA.
