If we could give a student one habit, it would be this: listen to the piece before you try to play it. Not once. Many times, until you can hear it in the room without the recording. Most students approach a new piece as a decoding problem — read the dots, work out the notes, play. The piece arrives sounding like an exercise because that is how it was learned.
Hear it first
The musicians who improve fastest are the ones whose inner ear already knows the piece before their hands touch the instrument. When you have heard a phrase a dozen times, your hands are trying to match a sound you love, not a symbol on a page. That is a completely different kind of practice, and it produces a completely different kind of playing.
This is why we ask students to listen, actively, to recordings of the pieces they are learning. Not as background music — as study. Where does the phrase breathe? Where does it push? What is the difference between the recording and what came out of your hands today?
The one-question practice
Before you practise a piece, ask yourself one question: can I hear the opening in my head? If the answer is no, listen again. If the answer is yes, then the practice has somewhere to go.
You cannot play a phrase you cannot hear. Reading is not hearing.
Parents often worry their children are "just listening" instead of practising. We gently suggest that listening is practising — perhaps the most important kind.