So what's your biggest problem with practicing piano?

We can use this thread to help out our fellow members, and also get guidance from other members too. If we see another member's problem that we know how to solve, or have solved in the past, we can reply to their thread and help them out. Hopefully someone will do the same for our problem's as well!

Jie

Wearing my I'm still learning the piano hat, either self-motivation or getting disturbed by other family members who don't realise that I'm actually concentrating really hard and don't want to be disturbed.

It's a 50/50 split.

Biggest gripe when trying to practice piano ? Being distracted by all the lovely piano music there is out there (and in my collection), and not concentrating on what I should be practising - i.e. diploma stuff ;(
denmark

Not focusing enough on what I "should" be doing, practicing mindlessly, and of course just plain not practicing

"should" is usually a moralizing word and not to be trusted

I prefer to use it only in the construction:

"if" you wish to gain a diploma in 201x "then" you "should"

which is an objective statement, free of moral judgement, and difficult to misinterpret.

My biggest issue is stiffness and tension in the fingers some days when I play ornaments.
I used to play trills effortlessy as a teenager once I had learned them, but now I find them more unpredictable.

Do other mature players have this issue? Some days the wrists feel supple and I can play for hours, but then I'll have a bad day and I end up stopping practising because it seems to be going nowhere. Frustrating when you are trying to master a tricky Mozart sonata. It's like a constant 2 steps forward, then 1 or 2 steps backwards!

Don't know what you count as "mature" - I'm a couple of decades away from being a teenager, but I've got this problem. In my case I know it is because I type a lot in my day job and that is probably overworking the delicate bits of the hand. I try to stretch my hands gently a lot, sometimes using one hand to stretch the other, and also massage the joints regularly.

My current problem is trying to play very fast runs and getting my fingers stuck between the black keys. And I have small hands, so I don't have the excuse of fat fingers..

Having family members tell me it is time to: eat/ go out/ tidy up etc. Can't they see/hear that I was reaching the climax of the piece, or a very emotional part?!

Concentrating on one piece long enough to actually finish learning it. I can play half of a lot of my music and all of very little of it. In particular I decided to learn Chopin's first Ballade, so I learned as far as the spectacular chordy bit in the middle, and now I have no motivation to learn the rest. I keep going back, and at the moment it's progressing at a rate of approximately a bar a month...

Me too. Maybe I need to take on some performing opportunities to give me the motivation to get a piece really 'finished' - after my Grade 8 it's going to be very weird not plotting the course between the last and next grade and I wonder how I'm going to push myself further (obviously diplomas - teaching and performance are the plan but that's a much longer term path than grades).

To combat this a teacher at Chets this summer told me to always work from the end of the pieces backwards by a bar and a beat! This way you are always heading into increasingly familiar territory, rather than going from familiar into increasingly dodgy bits! I found it very revealing and helped me to get to know the piece I was working on far more thoroughly, especially making myself start with last beat of the bar, as this was often an ornament where I would not have chosen to start! My biggest barrier to practising at the moment is husband who has installed himself in my practice room and is always working in there when I want to play. We need a loft conversion!

Getting back to the original topic of this thread: My current biggest problem is not pivoting so much from the wrist, I am trying to play more "with the whole arm".

But please, let us keep out of the philosophical quaqmire of moral relativism, and stick to matters musical, where we can distinguish clearly between objective statements, and moral directives.

The example you give is quite different from saying (for example) "You 'should' keep your fingers gently curver when playing your piano". In fact, to just about every commonly held belief about "correct" technique you can find good pianists that do something different, and it is often impossible to tell whether they are good because of what they do differently, or in spite of it.
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Turn being distracted by lovely piano music into a positive and use this as sight reading practice.

Good technique has to fit the physical constraints of each pupil. As long as the basic ergonomics are correct, there are bound to be variations as we come in a variety of different shapes and sizes.

Pianists are very unlikely to be good inspite of a technical flaw. They are much more likely to be good because of good technique. However if despite poor technique they have a phenominal ear, this can mitigate. Consider then how much better they will be when their technique catches up.