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Piano Street's Instructive Editions

The new concept “Instructive edition” was introduced as a complement to the existing types of scores published by Piano Street - PS Edition and PS Urtext. Piano Street is now offering Instructive Editions for several of the most popular piano pieces on all levels. The two parts included, Practice Guide and Practice Score, cover extensive and universally applicable information teachers would give during the lessons with the piece. Designed to be used both during lessons and while practicing at home, the Practice Guide will save time and effort by guiding and structuring your practice. Using the Practice Guide is like always practicing with a teacher next to you; demanding but incredibly effective!

PS Instructive Edition is designed to support in the beginning stages of the learning process. It will ensure that you approach a new piece in a structured, intelligent and efficient way. Here’s an overview of what it contains:

Part 1: Practice Guide

Introduction: a brief presentation, with basic analysis and some historical background, in order to give you relevant clues to interpretation.
Preparatory questions: A few easy questions and exercises, encouraging you to look through the score and get to know it in a relaxed but observant manner, even before you start practicing at the piano.
“Mastering the piece”: A list of the main musical and technical challenges of the piece, to give focus and clearly defined goals to your practicing.
Practice plan: An overview of what you will focus on in each practice session. A Practice Guide typically contains 5-6 sessions, to be completed one each day.
Preparatory exercises: Short exercises directly based on the actual piece, making you practice all its technical features in a logical sequence of very small steps – each taking you closer to your goal.

Part 2: Practice score

This is a complete score with printed advice and information. It includes detailed fingering with alternatives for small hands, pedal instructions, technical tips and advice on musical interpretation.

How to Practice Piano with the Guides

The first time you use one of our Practice Guides, the many pages of exercises may look daunting. But try to focus on one task at a time, and you’ll soon discover that most of the things we ask you to do are really easy. Yes, there are lots of exercises and it is going to take some time to do all of them properly, but there is no way around this if you want to practice like a professional.

After reading the introduction “About”, we recommend listening to one or two recordings of the piece. A convenient way to do so is to look up the piece in Piano Street’s Audiovisial Study Tool (AST) where you will find several carefully selected recordings. Then work on the Preparatory questions away from the piano. We hope that you will find them easy. This isn’t a test, only an exercise in the important skill of scanning a score for the information you need to practice correctly and to get an overview of the piece.

Under the title Mastering the piece you’ll find a list of some of the most important things to strive for when working on the piece. Hopefully, this list will make more and more sense the more you get to know the music. Return to it now and then, especially when you have completed all the sessions and you are ready to put the piece together.

Many of the musical and technical terms used in the list (and in the following exercises and Practice Score) are explained in more detail on the piece’s web page at pianostreet.com.
All Instructive Editions are assigned tags according to a pedagogical system keeping track of the technical, musical and stylistic elements that feature in the pieces.

Preparatory exercises: Work on one session a day. Read all written instructions and look at the fingering first. It’s a good idea to read the fingerings out loud, and to try them out silently on a table or the piano lid. If there aren’t written fingerings for all notes, the ones that are missing should be obvious. Write them in if you need to. Then play each exercise four times, as slowly as you need to be in control. If you keep playing wrong notes, slow down until you are able to play the exercise four times correctly.

A session is designed to take 10-20 minutes to complete. Should you find that 20 minutes have passed and you haven’t reached the end of the session, don’t worry! Have a rest, and try the same session again next time. When you have more time than 20 minutes per day to spend on piano practice (we hope this is often the case!), it’s often better to repeat difficult exercises or practice the corresponding section of the piece, than going on to the next session. This will give your fingers, body and brain time to absorb all aspects of the piece more thoroughly than if you try to run through the whole Practice Guide as quickly as possible.

Revisiting sessions and exercises: You are likely to find some exercises more difficult than others. These will need repeated practice over a longer period of time if you want to be able to play the piece fluently. If, for instance, there are exercises which you need to take at a much slower tempo than the others to be able to play them correctly, it will be a good idea to regularly revisit these to try to bring them up to speed. This can be done whenever you want - the important thing is to be patient and come back several times over a longer period of time. Don’t expect miracles to happen in a single sitting!

The next step: After finishing the Practice Guide, you will be very well equipped to learn the complete piece. Nevertheless, it can be quite a challenge to put all the different parts together, despite the fact that you have now practiced in the most structured way imaginable! Just spend a few more practice sessions working along the same lines, often revisiting the exercises you found most difficult, and you will soon be able to play larger and larger chunks more and more fluently. Use the practice score with its printed advice on technique and interpretation, and revisit the “Mastering the piece” list.

"Enjoy the great feeling of achievement you get from having learnt a piece thoroughly, and give your musical imagination free rein in the safe knowledge that the needed technical skills are all there!"

Instructive Editions for 22 pieces are now available for unlimited use for Gold members.
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