A Practice Routine That Survives a Bad Day
Most practice routines fail on the evening you are tired, it is late, and you have twenty minutes. That is exactly when improvising the session turns into playing the thing you are already good at. The fix is not discipline. It is deciding the order once, while you are fresh, so the tired version of you has nothing to negotiate.
Reviewed August 2026. Written for exam students, AMEB included; for the scales, studies and tempos your own grade requires, check your current syllabus, which is the document that decides it. Not affiliated with AMEB.
Build a routineWhy the order matters more than the length
Twenty focused minutes in a fixed order beats an unplanned hour, for a reason that has nothing to do with willpower: every decision you make at the piano is attention not spent on playing. Choosing what to do next, remembering which scale you did yesterday, deciding whether that was good enough - all of it competes with listening.
A routine spends those decisions once, in advance. It also stops the two failure modes that quietly eat months:
- Practising what is already good, because it is pleasant and it sounds like progress.
- Always running out of time at the same point, so the last item on the list - usually the hardest - never gets practised at all.
A shape that works
Adjust the minutes to the time you have; keep the order.
| Part | Roughly | What it is doing |
|---|---|---|
| Warm up | 3 min | One or two technical exercises, slowly. Not a workout - you are waking up the hands and finding out what kind of day it is. |
| Scales | 7 min | Two or three, not twelve. Rotate so everything comes round over a week rather than doing all of them badly today. |
| The hard thing | 7 min | The one scale or passage that is not working. Put it here, in the middle, while you are warm and still have attention left. |
| Rhythm or reading | 3 min | A rhythm drill or some note reading. Short, and different enough to feel like a break. |
The hard thing goes in the middle, not at the end. At the end it gets cut every time you run late, which is precisely the item that must not be cut.
Building one you can run
A routine here is a list you assemble once and then press play on. Each entry can be:
- A scale of your choosing - the key, the scale or arpeggio form, how many octaves, and which hands. Not a fixed grade list: you decide what belongs.
- A technical exercise from the Hanon, Lemoine and Czerny shelf.
- A rhythm drill, for the timing side rather than the finger side.
Each entry carries a repeat count, so "C major, two octaves, hands together, three times" is one line in the list rather than something to remember. Then the session runs itself in order, and every take inside it is graded the same way a single scale would be - so a routine produces a record, not just a feeling that you did some practice.
Make your first routineAcross a week, not a day
The most common mistake is trying to fit everything into every session. Twelve scales daily means twelve scales practised badly. Spread them: three or four a day, rotated, so each gets real attention twice a week instead of a token run-through seven times.
Two things are worth doing every day regardless, because they decay fastest: a short warm up, and whatever is currently broken. Everything else can wait a day.
When you do come back to a scale, the practice log is the honest record of whether the last session moved it - which is a more useful question than how long you sat there.