Practice
A 20 minute piano practice routine
Spend five minutes warming up with a scale or five finger exercise, five minutes on technical work, seven minutes on the specific bars you cannot play yet, and the last three minutes playing something you enjoy. Twenty minutes daily will take you considerably further than two hours once a week, because the skills consolidate between sessions rather than during them.
Click any key to hear it. Your computer's A to K row works too.
Why is short and daily better than long and occasional?
Because most of what you are building is muscle memory and pattern recognition, and both consolidate while you are away from the instrument, particularly during sleep. Six short sessions give you six consolidations. One long session gives you one, plus fatigue. This is why fifteen minutes a day beats two hours at the weekend by a wide margin.
What should I actually do in each part?
Warm up with a scale, slowly and evenly, listening to whether the notes sound the same as each other. Technical work means something deliberately repetitive: five finger patterns, hands separately. The main section is the bit that matters, and it should be spent on the bars you cannot yet play, not the ones you can. Finish with something you enjoy so you leave wanting to come back.
Should I play the whole piece every time?
No, and this is the most common wasted practice there is. Playing a piece from the start repeatedly means the opening gets excellent and the hard part in the middle stays broken. Isolate the difficult bars, loop them slowly, then join them to the bars either side.
How do I know if it is working?
By whether the hard passage is easier than yesterday, not by whether the run-through felt good. The practice room tracks which bars you keep missing and offers to loop them, which removes the guesswork about where the time should go.
Keep going
Read next
What BPM means, where to start, and how to use a metronome without fighting it. The tool m Open → ♪ How long does it take to learn piano?
Honest timelines: a simple tune in days, comfortable two-hand playing in months, fluent re Open → ♪ Treble clef notes: lines and spaces
Lines are E G B D F, spaces spell FACE. How to read the treble clef and find each note on Open → ♪ Bass clef notes: lines and spaces
Lines are G B D F A, spaces are A C E G. How to read the bass clef, and why it is not the Open →
Put it into practice in the practice room, or start at the beginning with the five minute walkthrough.
Questions
Common questions
How long should a beginner practise piano each day?
Fifteen to twenty minutes daily is ideal for most adult beginners. Consistency matters far more than duration.
Is it bad to practise for hours?
Long sessions are fine occasionally but produce diminishing returns and more tension. Break them with real rests if you do.
What if I miss a day?
Nothing bad happens. Start again the next day. Streaks are a mirror, not a punishment.