Life Lessons From Lang Lang—Part Two (July 17, 2025)

From left to right: Lang Lang’s Eight Golden Rules for Studying the Piano; “Chopsticks”, “Chopsticks” improvised  version featuring the late pianist Liberace; four hand version with Lang Lang and Jon Batiste.   

RULE NO. 2: One Hour a Day, the Right Way.  

The second rule Lang Lang has is that one should practice one hour a day, breaking it up into three  parts: twenty minutes for basic training, twenty minutes to practice small pieces, and the last twenty  minutes to improvise. 

This approach makes a great deal of sense to me, especially for someone who is just beginning to  study, because it can work for everyone regardless of age. In the case of a child it might be a good  idea not to do the full hour at once, but to break it up into three periods across the day, still have this  as a goal. 

By starting out with just twenty minutes of practice, it is easy to isolate the mind in order to focus on  building up your fundamental techniques for playing things like scales, and improving sightreading,  but also getting a sense of your own hands and how they respond to the keys. 

Once this awareness begins to develop, it is that much easier to go on to playing smaller pieces,  because then you are even more conscious of how “the basics” are being used.  

The twenty minutes of learning the basics at the piano is very similar to his process. It may seem  boring to figure out the notes by playing them one at a time, and using only two fingers of one hand  to sound chords, but you need to know how to do these things first in order to be able to do other  things later. How do babies learn to walk? They learn by crawling first, and then once they understand  this, they learn to stand, and finally, putting one foot in front of the other to walk is very easy.

The third twenty-minute period is also excellent because as you improvise you not only get to  experience a certain freedom at the keyboard, you also get a sense of what all of the basics will allow  you to do once you have mastered them. Remember my July 14, 2025 blog post called “The  Freedom of Discipline”? Taking what you are learning from the fundamentals of the piano will allow  you to then use them in order to improvise, and see what is possible the more you study, and the  more you improve, so that the process becomes one that gets more and more exciting every day. 

Every time I learn a new technique, or a new chord structure, I feel my skills as a pianist getting  stronger and stronger. The key to making these discoveries is daily, organized, consistent practice. 

Thank you, Lang Lang!