How long does it take you to get from never seeing a sheet before to playing at the recommended tempo? Just wondering what’s typical.
It typically takes me several weeks at a minimum, with the caveats that I have little time for practice and am self-taught because I don’t have money for a teacher.
My process is this: practice each hand independently in chunks, bring each hand up to the ‘normal’ tempo, then put the hands together at sloooow tempo and gradually raise the tempo. The last part takes the longest. Does anyone have suggestions for improving my process?
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It depends on the piece. I play a lot of jazz, rock, funk, and adjacent styles, and so I’m typically going off of chord charts or just by ear, and in those instances, I can get something passable hacked together in a few minutes. If I’m playing an accompaniment part for a vocalist or soloist, those are usually simpler so as to not step on the toes of whoever is in the spotlight, so I can usually put that together in a week or two, with the caveat that that’s not a big part of what I do on the reg. When I was doing a lot more classical type playing, particularly in college when I was getting my piano degree, I would do it pretty much the same way as you and it would take a similar amount of practice time for a relatively short but difficult piece, like a Gershwin prelude or a Joplin rag, or even longer for something like Danzon No. 2 by Marquez, which I did with my university orchestra, with the caveat that because I was spending multiple hours a day doing it, my overall turnaround time was quicker.
It totally depends on what type of music (classical, pop, jazz) and the difficulty.
Over time with a lot of practice, it won’t take long at all. I can sight-read a lot of music nearly at full tempo, both hands - then it’s just a question of interpreting and perfecting it. But for sure I can’t do that with most difficult pieces.
