How to Break Through the Intermediate Pianist Plateau
1. The Stages of Learning 🪜
At the beginning of learning the piano there is a lot to learn; what the notes on the piano are, how to read notes and note rhythms, how to get your fingers to cooperate with you and some of the theory behind how we understand music. So, at the very beginning it can be very exciting because not only do we already have the motivation to learn, but we are also taking on so much information and we can see how we are improving day-by-day.
However, for most players, some time between grade 2-5 level we reach “the intermediate plateau” 😱. This is a time where the way that you were once learning is no longer as effective as it once was and you are seeing much slower improvements. It’s also a time when you know most of what you are seeing when trying to learn a piece of music, but it still feels like you aren’t improving as much (or as fast) as you should be and you cant see how you are going to get to that next level with your playing.
Well, this happens to most musicians and it is often the time when many students give up on learning. However, in reality there is another way and it simply requires a change of how you are approaching learning to push past that plateau and reach the advanced level.
2. Tidying Up 🧹
I’m hoping that throughout this post you will notice a theme, and that theme is a change from learning holistically to learning specifically. The first way in which you can do this and start to push past the plateau is to focus on fixing the small things in your playing.
When you are in the early stages of playing the piano you can see quite big improvements by just playing through pieces of music. This means that you can practice a piece without any real attention given to your specific weaknesses or problems that you are finding. However, when you reach the intermediate level, much more time is needed actually evaluating what needs to be practiced and spending some time focussing on those particular issues.
This means selecting pieces, scales and technical exercises that are best going to improve your weaknesses. Let's say you have trouble playing arpeggios. Well, find a piece that uses arpeggios a lot, play arpeggios in your scale practice and find some technical exercises that are arpeggio focussed….or perhaps you have trouble understanding chords? Well, find pieces that use chords and try to work out what the chords are, once again practice arpeggios in your scale practice, and find technical exercises that use chord inversions.
As you get better at the piano, it's important to realise that the issues wont fix themselves like they once did. If you want to get to the advanced level, you will need to seek out the problems and deliberately extinguish them.
3. Finding Love in Mastery 🥋
At the beginning, it can feel like a race to accumulate information and skill, however, to get to the next level it requires a much slower and long term approach.
It’s important at this stage to realise that music is a lifelong endeavour and the enjoyment is really in the process of acquiring skill and knowledge rather than the end result of learning a specific piece of music.
Thinking this way will allow you to live with a piece of music for a little bit longer and instead of skipping over those bars that you will fix later in favour of learning more notes, you decide to fix the problems now and learn new notes later. In time you will get to the end of a piece of music, but in the mean time, enjoy the process of tackling a tricky bar and solving the problem. Fixing these small problems as they arise is what is going to make you a much better player in the long term.
4. Reading, Writing, Listening, Feeling 📚
Learning the piano requires a lot of different skills and this means that no pianist has them all to begin with. Yes, some players may have a more innate ability to play by ear and another player may learn to read music much quicker than most people. However, I am yet to meet a pianist that began with equal strength in each skill that makes up being a pianist. This means that more often than not we tend to lean into our strengths, but it is in fact our weaknesses that are making us feel like we’re reaching a plateau.
So if you are a particularly weak reader, now is the time to dedicate a period of time to doing some reading specific practice, or if you are particularly weak at understanding and interpreting music, now’s the time to dig into pieces and analyse them. When you come across something that you are struggling with, lean into it, because that is what is going to make you a better player.
As you get better at the piano it becomes much more about finding the problems that you are having and tackling them head on rather than avoiding them or hoping that over time they will fix themselves. This may be a very different way to how you were approaching piano playing before.
So next time you are playing a piece of music, working on a scale or doing some sight reading and you find a problem, remember that it is the act of fixing these problems that will make you a better player, not the notes that you were able to play successfully.
Matthew Cawood
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