You know the passage. You play it fine ten times, then miss the same note for no reason at all.
Random piano mistakes are rarely random. There’s almost always a cause, and it often sits a note or two before the miss. Find it, and most of those misses go away. I used to make random mistakes too, until I learned the causes and stopped. That’s part of how I won the competition that led to my Carnegie Hall performance.
Below are 5 ways pianists train mistakes by accident.
1. Practicing the mistake
Many students tell me they start at the beginning and play until they make a mistake. Then they know which part to work on.
It sounds logical. Every day, you’re practicing making that mistake. Research on overlearning shows it takes 5 to 8 correct repetitions to overwrite a habit. Make one mistake and play it right 3 times. You still haven’t erased the one mistake.
It’s better not to make it in the first place. Choose a tempo and an amount of music where your brain can stay ahead of your fingers. Know clearly what you’re about to do before you do it. Slow practice helps, and so do small sections. (More on that in Chunking: Why Small Sections Learn Faster.)
Martina S. described the before picture: “I almost always played from the beginning until the first mistake. That was often very frustrating.”
2. A fingering that keeps changing
Surprise mistakes often come from not using the fingering you planned, or not planning one at all.
Mixing several fingerings is like throwing all your socks in a drawer and grabbing 2 in the dark. Sometimes they match. Often they don’t. With 4 versions of every measure, the odds that they all fit together are about zero.
Pick one fingering and program that one. If you find a better fingering later, that’s fine. That’s one new version, not five. A better fingering is usually not hard to learn. Snjezana K. put it this way: “I’m absolutely thrilled with your fingerings in regards to how much they’re helping me with the sections.”
3. A movement your body can’t do
Some mistakes look like note mistakes but are really physical positioning mistakes. It’s like running a marathon in cement shoes. No amount of training fixes the shoes.
In a big rolled left-hand chord in Chopin’s Etude Op. 25 No. 5, I often see the elbow far from the body and the thumb a long way from the G-sharp it has to land on. Practice all you like. You won’t land it reliably. Get your body out of the way, so the note before the G-sharp leaves you close to it.
One of my students said it’s like playing pool: each shot sets you up for the next one.
4. Leaping late
A student once told me, “I’ve got a whole beat to get there.” That’s not that much time. Train the habit of moving to the next note right after you play the one before it. Even better, find one flowing gesture that covers the notes plus the leap.
Fiona M. had a stubborn leap: “Rebecca suggested I just use the forearms and it was like magic.” I go deeper in How to Stop Missing Leaps at the Piano.
5. Gaps in how you learned the music
Playing every measure from the beginning, every day, slightly faster, and hoping it sticks doesn’t organize the music in your mind. Before you start, look at how the piece is built.
- Find the parts that are the same and the parts that are different. Similar sections get swapped without you noticing, so be very clear about how they differ.
- Know your chords. When I know a passage is a C dominant seventh, I know which notes belong and which don’t.
- Know how the hands fit together. Notice the moments both hands play at once. What does each hand feel and sound like?
- Chunk it. A phone number is easy in 3 groups and confusing as 10 digits. Music works the same way.
Memorizing a poem letter by letter is much harder than knowing the words and the meaning. That’s the difference.
Angela A. learned it over 28 days: progress “will happen a lot quicker if you don’t just play through with mistakes over and over but have a plan and stick to it.”
You can learn how to do all of this, step by step, in the 28-Day Piano Journey inside Piano with Rebecca B. Start your 7-day free trial.
Why mistakes show up under pressure
Playing for a friend, a teacher or an audience brings adrenaline. The piano is often unfamiliar. Your muscles are a little tenser. Anything on the edge of what you can do at home may not make it.
So make your physical plan easy to execute. If something goes wrong in a lesson, I tell students that’s good news. Now we know where it isn’t solid yet. Deborah W. took that view after playing for a friend: “It gave me an opportunity to see the places I need to focus on.”
Before Carnegie Hall, I did about 10 run-throughs for audiences and countless more at home for the video camera, in my concert outfit. I wore the fancy shoes for at least a month, so on the day I wasn’t thinking about my feet.
The mistake is a symptom
What’s underneath is your plan: how you’ve encoded the music. Change the plan and most of the mistakes go away. Watch me demonstrate each cause in Your ‘Random’ Piano Mistakes Aren’t Random. Here’s Why.
If physical positioning is the cause, start with the Pianist’s Body Blueprint, a $14 short course and ebook on bench, arm and hand positioning. Get the Pianist’s Body Blueprint.