your first short two-hand piece, start to finish
last lesson was follow it twice, once to see it once to do it. that's the method. this lesson is where you actually use it on something whole.
we've been building toward this for weeks. right hand melody. left hand bass. hands together at half speed. hands playing different rhythms without your brain walking out of the room. all of that was scaffolding. now we take it down and see if the building stands on its own.
so. a full piece, start to finish, both hands. here's how you get there without it turning into a mess.
pick something short
four to eight measures. that's it. if your book has a "beginner's first piece" type thing with a simple melody and a left hand that's mostly whole notes or half notes, that's your piece. don't reach for something longer because you're feeling good about last lesson. length is the enemy right now, not difficulty.
step one: hands separate, one more time
i know. you're sick of playing hands separate. but do the right hand alone, all the way through, three times. then the left hand alone, all the way through, three times. not because you can't already do this, but because your hands need the whole shape in memory before you ask them to cooperate with each other. this is the "check your work" part happening before you've even made the mistake.
while you're doing this, pencil in your fingering. every hard measure gets a number written over the note, not just the ones you think you'll forget. i showed clyde my practice book once, all penciled up with fingering numbers over nearly every measure, and he said it looked like a crime scene diagram. fair. it does. but three years in i still do this on anything new, because the fingering decision made once, in pencil, in daylight, is a better decision than the one your fingers make in a panic halfway through measure five. show me the fingering before you play it. if you can't say which finger goes where, you don't know the piece yet, you've just gotten lucky a few times.
step two: hands together, half speed, first two measures only
not the whole piece. two measures. metronome on, slow, slower than feels necessary. get those two measures solid, both hands landing together, before you add measure three. this is the same rule from a couple lessons back and it still applies here: slower and even beats faster and lopsided, every single time. i will die on this hill. everyone hates the metronome for the first two weeks, myself included, and then it becomes the thing you can't practice without.
step three: chain it
once measures one and two are steady, add measure three. play one through three. once that's steady, add measure four. play one through four. you are not practicing the piece front to back over and over, you are practicing the front, then the front-plus-a-little-more, then that whole thing plus a little more. it's slower to set up and much faster to actually learn. this is a preference, take it or leave it, but it's the one that's worked for every piece i've gotten through.
step four: the first full run
when you've chained through the whole piece this way, play it start to finish, no stopping, even if you fumble a note. don't go back and fix it mid-run. finish it. then go back and fix whatever fell apart. a full run with a couple of wrong notes tells you something true. a perfect run of the first four measures because you never got past them tells you nothing.
a caution about tempo
resist the urge to speed up once it starts sounding like a real piece. that's exactly the moment it falls apart, because your hands are pattern-matching now instead of thinking, and pattern-matching under a tempo it can't handle is how sloppy habits get permanent. keep the metronome where it is for at least two more days after it starts feeling easy.
what "done" looks like
it doesn't mean flawless. it means you can play it start to finish, at a slow steady tempo, without stopping, twice in a row. that's the bar. not recital-ready, not smooth, just solid. i'd rather be accurate than smooth, and at this stage accurate is the whole job.
when you get there, notice what that felt like. that's the same feeling as the first hymn i ever got through both hands, "come thou fount," years ago. nathan wandered in halfway through and sat on the stairs without saying a word until i finished. that was his version of a standing ovation. yours doesn't need an audience. but it's worth noticing when a piece of paper with dots on it turns into a thing you can actually do with your hands. that's the whole reason any of us are doing this.
before next time: pick your piece and get through step one, hands separate with fingering penciled in, before we meet again. don't start hands together yet. let the separate hands settle first.