Is it possible to practice the piano for long hours?

ranjit · 2026-01-15T05:38:03+00:00

At least on the surface, it seems like professionals work 40 hours a week or more in various fields (engineering, medicine, etc.). However, this seems pretty unrealistic for piano practice. Has anyone tried to practice the piano for long hours consistently? Is it even possible? Personally, I've found that I tap out after anywhere between 2-5 hours in a day.

rogerch

ShiroKuro @rogerch and @ranjit have you ever tried taking a walking break?

Definitely! Most days I either run, walk, paddleboard, bike or ski. I’ve had lots of musical, work, and personal breakthroughs while out in nature getting my exercise!

ShiroKuro

ranjit reading your post, yeah, napping is probably far better than going for a walk or a run for piano. When I'm working (e.g., doing analysis or writing) it's different because I'm doing something I'm already really good at, so the walk clears my head and helps me focus when I get back.

But piano learning is different, at least for me as an adult-beginner (no longer a beginner player).

Anyway, five hours a day is completely out of the realm of possibility for me regardless, so it's moot! 😃

BartK

The guy at whose house Yunchan Lim stayed during the Van Cliburn competition says he would practice all waking hours of the day. Even when not at the piano he would be sitting with a score open and doing some mental practice. I can't imagine being so obsessed and being so focused all the time!

iternabe

I am reading Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing by Josef Lhevinne. Here is what he wrote about practice, on p. 43:

Four hours a day of practice is good measure. Over-practicing is just as bad as under-practicing. It should be the younger student's aim and desire to get done with technic as soon as possible. There is no short cut. One cannot go around or under the mountain. One must climb straight over it. Therefore in the earlier lessons more attention must be given to technic than in the later lessons when a really masterly technic has been developed. The trouble is that most students seem to look upon it the other way. Two hours a day for those who are not advanced in music (not beginners by any means) are not too much for technic. I do not see how one can climb over the great mountain of modern technic at a less speed than two hours a day. Otherwise, they would be old men and women before they could hope to compare with others in these days of enormous technical competition. Everybody knows that technic is only a means to an end; but without this means one does not reach the end. There may not be anything very beautiful about the great, grimy engine of an automobile; but if one would get to the journey's end—to the dreamland of wonderful trees, gorgeous flowers and entrancing beauty-he must have the means. You must travel just so many scale miles and arpeggio miles and octave miles before you arrive at the musical dreamland of interesting execution and interpretation.

Always divide your practice periods. Do your technic at one time and your pieces at another. Approach the two sections with different aspects.

Animisha

BartK he would practice all waking hours of the day. Even when not at the piano he would be sitting with a score open and doing some mental practice. I can't imagine being so obsessed and being so focused all the time!

Sounds like great piano playing and very meager life.

pianoloverus

iternabe I am reading Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing by Josef Lhevinne. Here is what he wrote about practice, on p. 43:

Four hours a day of practice is good measure. Over-practicing is just as bad as under-practicing. It should be the younger student's aim and desire to get done with technic as soon as possible. There is no short cut. One cannot go around or under the mountain. One must climb straight over it. Therefore in the earlier lessons more attention must be given to technic than in the later lessons when a really masterly technic has been developed. The trouble is that most students seem to look upon it the other way. Two hours a day for those who are not advanced in music (not beginners by any means) are not too much for technic. I do not see how one can climb over the great mountain of modern technic at a less speed than two hours a day. Otherwise, they would be old men and women before they could hope to compare with others in these days of enormous technical competition. Everybody knows that technic is only a means to an end; but without this means one does not reach the end. There may not be anything very beautiful about the great, grimy engine of an automobile; but if one would get to the journey's end—to the dreamland of wonderful trees, gorgeous flowers and entrancing beauty-he must have the means. You must travel just so many scale miles and arpeggio miles and octave miles before you arrive at the musical dreamland of interesting execution and interpretation.

Always divide your practice periods. Do your technic at one time and your pieces at another. Approach the two sections with different aspects.

I think advice like this is not relevant for 99% of those studying piano, and it's not clear who Lhevinne was speaking to In the article. Four hours is more appropriate for those thinking of applying to a conservatory or for those already in a conservatory(probably more for them) or professional pianists. IMO two hours would be a reasonable amount for an ultra serious high school or junior high school piano student who loves the piano but is not thinking of a career in music. My guess is two hours of practice still puts someone in the 99th percentile.

ranjit

iternabe I have heard this quote, as well as others by different concert pianists. They mostly tell students what worked for them and aren't meant to be read literally imo. In the early 20th century, pedagogy was less advanced and more people seemed to have held on to the 'enlightenment optimism' that students could follow the master and mostly do what they did. It's now far more established that students have their own strengths and weaknesses, and so modern texts read differently.

For instance, Hoffman says you shouldn't practice more than 3 hours a day in his book, but the intensity of focus with which he suggests practicing (like the negative of a photograph where every sound and gesture is kind of committed to memory during practice) is well beyond most people. Ashkenazy suggests 6. Richter apparently practiced 10 hours a day often. The discrepancies between what people say and do should also be noted.

thepianoplayer416

Depends on the pieces you’re doing. A movement out of a Rachmaninov concerto or the whole thing would probably take a few hours practice.

A short piece under 3 min. you can run through it a few times in an hour. Once you can play it with confidence once through don’t need to repeat it many times. In a 3 hours practice you can probably work on 5 short pieces.

ShiroKuro

@ranjit I will be curious how your thoughts about this, and your thoughts about your own practicing style etc., evolve when you start music school.

For example, will you find it getting easier to practice for even longer stretches, or will the intensity of your practice sessions ramp up so much that you’ll practice for shorter sessions…. There are probably other variations. And of course the other thing is, will you find yourself doing activities during practice that are wholly new to you, or will you find that your practice sessions don’t change all that much…. It’s interesting to think about! 🙂

pianoloverus

thepianoplayer416 Depends on the pieces you’re doing. A movement out of a Rachmaninov concerto or the whole thing would probably take a few hours practice.

A short piece under 3 min. you can run through it a few times in an hour. Once you can play it with confidence once through don’t need to repeat it many times. In a 3 hours practice you can probably work on 5 short pieces.

The length of a piece has little to do with how long one could/should practice it. Practicing does not usually mean playing it from start to finish. Practicing does not necessarily mean playing it at performance speed. Of course, if two pieces are of equal difficulty but of very difficult lengths, the longer piece will take more time to learn but that's a different question.

thepianoplayer416

Go back to the 10,000 hours rule proposed by Malcolm Gladwell. If you reached 10,000 hours practicing anything including piano, a foreign language, you would become an expert. Of course you need to have mindful practice, do things correctly and make progress. Repeating hello & good bye in a foreign language day after day wouldn't make you fluent. You need to be adding new words & phrases every week.

Learning a 2 minutes piece in an hour you'd have already run through it at least 10 times and have all the wrong notes fixed. If you repeat the same piece for an hour for the whole week, you'd be able to play it easily but not making more progress.

As you learn more pieces, you learn them faster and vice versa. The faster you learn pieces, the more pieces you can learn. Putting in more hours you're not repeating the same things over & over.

ranjit

thepianoplayer416 Go back to the 10,000 hours rule proposed by Malcolm Gladwell. If you reached 10,000 hours practicing anything including piano, a foreign language, you would become an expert.

I will push back against this. I probably haven't put in 10,000 real hours at the piano yet but certainly upwards of 5000. But even when I put in 500 hours, the progress that I made was substantial because I was trying my best to learn very effectively put me ahead in the learning curve than many who spent over 2000 hours. Likewise, when I try to play at very high levels, I'm not thinking about number of hours, because even with 20,000 hours, the likelihood that I can do what Yuja Wang does is slim to none.

thepianoplayer416

ranjit

Malcolm Gladwell used 10,000 hours as an average more an artificial number. Some people are quick learners. I'm sure people who are tracking their progress can learn faster than those who just go to lessons and learn at the pace the teacher is going. People like myself who practice regularly everyday would move quicker than ones who practice a few times a week.

ranjit

thepianoplayer416 I don't think 10,000 hours is an average, either. Most people don't become experts even when they put in that kind of time and effort.

KevinM

ranjit Perhaps it also depends on the type and intensity of the practice on a particular day. This evening for example. Certain exercises recently have allowed me to play scale runs faster than previously. So I've been pushing up the temp of the piece I've been learning, achieving results with the metronome I've not known since childhood 50 or so years ago. But the wall I've now hit is my brain is overloaded keeping up. I'm mentally fried after this last practice session of less than an hour in a way I've not experienced before.

Also we all have good and bad days, on a good day 6 hours practice might be possible, other days much less.

As I write this response I'm more coming to the conclusion that there are so many variables, people are different, the same person can do something one day but not the next, what you are practicing is a factor. That there is no one answer to this question. Just that everyday you should push that envelope a bit if possible, but only you can recognise when you should perhaps stop and you have done enough for the day.

thepianoplayer416

Once you learned a piece and can run through it, you don't need to repeatit as much. During the learning stage we spend more time repeating the same phrases to lock in the muscle memory. If we stick to the same level of pieces we don't challenge ourselves and get a sense of satisfaction.

ShiroKuro

KevinM the wall I've now hit is my brain is overloaded keeping up. I'm mentally fried after this last practice session of less than an hour in a way I've not experienced before

These experiences are always interesting. Sometimes, at the end of my piano lesson, I’ll feel that mental exhaustion because of something we’ve worked on. Sometimes I feel it at the end of a practice session at home.

What I’ve not done is made a note of it (e.g., written down what I practiced, what the problem I was trying to solve was etc.) and then checked over the next few days and week to see if, or when, that mental strain correlated to a big jump forward or a noticeable improvement etc. in some way that was different from practice sessions where I’m not as mentally exhausted at the end. (Obviously, this would be hard to track and it would be hard to pinpoint “ok, the practice session on Monday led to the results I saw on Friday” or something…)

ShiroKuro

To the 10,000 hour rule, I think it’s been pretty firmly established that how one practices is far more important than how long. Obviously time spent is an element, but time well-spent is essential.

pianoloverus

ShiroKuro To the 10,000 hour rule, I think it’s been pretty firmly established that how one practices is far more important than how long. Obviously time spent is an element, but time well-spent is essential.

AI says "Focused, "deliberate practice" with specific goals and error analysis—even in short sessions—is significantly more productive than hours of mindless playing or repetition." But the obvious problem with a statement like that is that it assumes the worst possible kind of practice. The quality of one's practice isn't necessarily either very good or very bad. Both quality and quantity come in a huge range of possibilities. If someone was asked to compare 5 minutes of very good practice to an hour fairly good quality practice most would say the comparison makes little sense because the quantity is so small.

Both quality and quantity are important.

thepianoplayer416

Deliberate practice is definitely a good thing. In order to know what we need to work on, we should be doing certain things including counting with the metronome, checking with the score to find wrong notes. Listen to online recordings of the pieces you're working on.

When something is technical, I'd try different fingerings to "discover" what the things that work best. The last thing is a quick recording with a phone and listen to the playback. A good 1 minute recording we'd be able to pick out the spots that need work than repeating the same sections aimlessly.

Many of us play music as a hobby. 10,000 doesn't mean much unless we're aiming to become a professional. Practicing just 1 hour a day for a year would take 27 years to reach the magic number. Your progress is relative to the time you put in. If you put in just 10 min a day, the progress won't be as significant as someone who puts in 5 hours a day.

My last practice session was at a public piano in a shopping mall. Had copies of scores on my phone. I wasn't playing through entire pieces than just a few bars I had trouble with. Practicing in public lose the fear of people after a while. Most would walk by without paying much attention.

I came across a short video from a piano teacher who suggested the fastest way to make progress is to play in front of people regularly... can be a game changer. I know some people made comments before they have been taking music lessons for years but never played in front of anybody or feel the need to play for anybody except for a teacher or the examiner if they choose to take conservatory level music exams.

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