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to stretching and dexterity is essential, just as it was when you had lessons. The teacher put you through scales for a purpose, and that purpose was to discipline the hands into movement across the keyboard that worked with the more technically difficult pieces. Here, putting exercise pieces together at the beginning of a session loosens up the hands and gets you motivated to learn new music.

For an opener, I use items like The Moonlight Sonata, by Beethoven. I know it by heart and love playing it, and what these initial exercises do is reinforce what you know and get you ready to tackle more. For a long while, I only knew the first movement, though little by little I disciplined myself to go beyond that and learn it all. Discipline is imposed when you have lessons because you need to achieve a certain amount between lessons and are expected to show progress. Just in the same way, disciplining yourself to a certain amount of time set aside for playing will make you a better player.

Incentive

At times when you are a lone player, you get to lose the incentive and direction, though here, I found that by carefully choosing the music that stretched my playing ability a little bit more each time, and interspersing it with that music that was relatively easy to play, I never lost interest. Here, a pencil is a handy tool. Taking those difficult pieces that you want to learn and marking the awkward notes that are hard to read helps you to recognize them better. Sharps and flats begin to make more sense with practice, and I would give myself the incentive of learning one more bar of a difficult piece at each session followed by reward of playing those pieces of music I loved. With a pencil, I marked the date that I had achieved that bar of music to such a degree that I made no errors and didn't hesitate to carry on from the bar that preceded it. The incentive is gained from that moment that the music flows together, as if all the pieces of the puzzle have suddenly become clear and in place.

Goals

Those goalposts that are set within the structure of lessons need to be carried on when you want to advance as a player though the only person that can impose them is you. By setting goals, you progress and get better at playing. Here, using the learning of special pieces of music for birthdays or Christmas or just giving myself realistic goals for learning pieces of music, I found that I always beat the goal set, and it made me more conscientious in my learning.

Spontaneous playing

Not

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