One piece at a time?

[knucklebrain1970]

Do you guys/girls practice one piece at a time or multiple pieces. I'm sort of a work on one piece and one piece only till it's at least memorized before moving on to another piece. Do you find it's best not to jump around from one to another. My fear of this is that I'll be a jack of all songs, master at none. Whadayas think?

Kevin

[Todd]

Whassup Knucklebrain,

I think working on no more than 3 pieces at a time works well.

Dont get yourself to scattered!!

Toddk

[MatthewB]

I'm going to firmly and decisively say: depends. At the moment, for example, I'm working up the Bach fugue BWV 1000. It's a piece I love, so I'm highly motivated, but it's going to take me many, many months to get it down. So I'm learning other, much easier, things too, so as to have some new music to show for myself should anybody ask.

But I agree that 3 at a time is plenty.

Cheers,
Matthew

[dap22]

Hey Kevin,
well i now find again in my second post it is a response to yoru question. You have posted some GREAT questions here, and please keep do. All of us can definitely tell that you are working hard on the guitar and you are thinking of some very important things. I don't reccomend only learning and practicing one piece at a time. The problem with this is that you will overwhelm yourself when its time for you to perform a recital since you will be used to only playing one piece at a time, and also, lets say after you learn 20 pieces....you will have already forgotten the first 10 by they tiem you are learning the 20th! This also doesn't mean to try and learn 20 pieces at a time. Its hard to throw out a specific number of pieces to be workign on at a time. Start off easy on yourself, learn one, then move on to the next, but continue working on the first piece as well.
I thought by learning two pieces at the same time would cause me to confuse the two, but luckily for us, that is not the case, if it were, we would be playign a Villa-Lobos etude and halfway through accidentally continue by playing some movement from a Bach cello suite! Todds advice of no more than 3 pieces at a time is great. That way you will not overwhelm yourself, but will also not become bored with a single piece. But remember that as you progress to spend some time going over old pieces as well. That way, when you are preparing for a recital, it won't be like having to relearn everything over again. Learn a piece, and during the time you spend becoming more proficient at it, start looking at another piece, and keep the cycle going. If you do too many you will not have enough time to master the older pieces, and if you do too few it will take FOREVER to build up a repertoire.

Best of luck, keep up the good work!

Doug.

[Libre]

I also say it depends. Each method has its attraction. I might get the idea to work on a specific piece. It might be something new that just strikes me, or else I think of a piece I'd always meant to work on but forgotten about. Then I get the music and start to work on it and if it gets its hooks into me, that’s it. It's all I want to work on, or occupy my mind with. Other music ceases to attract me, or even to exist. (I think obsession is seriously underrated. At least as an artistic tool).
But at other times, when I’ve been less single-minded, I’ve developed 2 or more pieces at once. It’s very efficient, in terms of building repertoire. It often happens naturally, as in working on a suite or sonata. I would not work on Movement 1 to performance level and only then progress to Movement 2. No, I would be learning all or most of the movements simultaneously – more or less.
Even if the pieces are not related, it’s useful to study more than one at a time. The learning curve plots our improvement over time. Each piece has its own learning curve. Studying 2 pieces would give you 2 learning curve plots. One might be at a plateau where the other is on a positive incline.
Is this making sense to anyone?
Of course, you need lots of time to practice to do this – or to get much better at all for that matter.