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Hi Reader,

This week was the third week of a class I’m taking with Dr. Molly Gebrian. She’s a professor at New England Conservatory who’s passionate about applying neuroscience to music practice. Since learning her methods, I’ve seen my own progress speed up—and my students’ too.

We revisited a strategy I learned in my very first class with her about two years ago: spaced repetition.

Here’s the basic idea: once you’ve played a section correctly a few times—usually just 3 to 7 reps—it’s in your short-term memory. That’s your cue to stop. If you keep going, you’re just spinning your wheels.

And here’s how you know when to stop: the moment your brain stops feeling focused and alert—if you're bored, frustrated, zoning out—it’s time to switch. That little bit of forgetting that happens while you’re away? That’s where the real learning starts.

This goes hand in hand with interleaving. What do you do between repetitions? Something different. Spaced repetition creates the gaps. Interleaving fills them with contrast. Together, they make your practice more efficient and more memorable.

In class, we broke our pieces into short sections. If you know the music well, 8–16 measures might work. But if you’re just learning it, 1–4 measures is usually better. When in doubt, make it smaller.

I’ve been teaching this for two years now, and almost every time I ask a student how they’re practicing, the section they’re working on is too long. Just yesterday, a student finally nailed a measure that had been shaky for months. What changed? He said, “I stopped starting at the beginning. I worked on one beat at a time—starting with the last one—and then put them together.” That’s the kind of shift that actually works.

Want to see how this looks in action? I made a short video that breaks it down:

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Warmly,
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Rebecca

P.S. These are exactly the kinds of strategies we explore inside my community to help you practice smarter, enjoy it more, and play better. You can join us here: https://www.skool.com/pianowithrebeccab​

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