Also, when do you decide to move on to the next piece? Or do you work on multiple at a time?
This is highly dependent on where your skill is. You may play a piece and revisit it a couple of years later. As you gain skill and experience, nuances will improve. A general rule of thumb is to learn pieces in sections. These may be four measures, eight measures or more. The point is to isolate a section such that you can execute the section at a high level. Your goal is to string these sections together until you have a larger section under your belt. Rinse, repeat. Eventually the sections become a movement. Utilize rhythmic changes to lean complicated segments. Slow things down to get things correct and add speed over time. Record yourself and be critical with what you hear. Good luck.
Me personally I start by listening. I mean most of the pieces that I chose to learn were from listening so this step is really easy for me.
After you are familiar you start learning the piece. You learn how to play everything. At least get a feel of how this piece is like.
Next, you work on all the hard passages. Clean up everything. Work on your phrasing, rhythm, just clean everything up.
After this I usually have a concert or a competition or something. After this then I move on from the piece to something new.
First listen to it while I maps the notes and make notes then start slow listening while playing sections then once I can follow the music go with it
I think this really depends on the piece itself, and what I am doing. Before I started my degree program I kind of just sat down, listened to the piece as I followed along, then did that again trying to play some of the easier moments. Then I’d play through the piece in sections and before I was finished, if possible do a run through. I just kind of repeated this process haphazardly and I would say it was variably effective. I focused too much in my opinion on the whole piece and performing it instead of the individual moments and making them have higher quality. So I wouldn’t recommend.
For what I can recommend is the process I’ve learned through detective work with my colleagues at conservatory.
Now that I am playing harder repertoire and multiple pieces I need to be much stricter so I can learn everything more quickly and have it stick better.
I still start by listening to the piece and following along. I will then play the primary scale associated with the piece, slowly to try to get my ear closer to a sort of tonal center for that work. If it’s a an easier piece I will try to play through the whole thing once at 75% speed or so with metronome. For big works I just begin combing through it in sections to find what is difficult and what is easier.
Immediately after that it’s small sections on anything that felt uncomfortable or I could not play. Someone I looked up to last semester before she graduated told me that whenever she learns a piece, if something appears or feels uncomfortable she stops and works it out until it isn’t. That nothing should feel uncomfortable when we play and she worked on small passages until they felt good under her hand. I told her “I’ve never once played the cello and felt comfortable” it was a life altering bit of advice, so that’s what I do now
I do a lot of this comfort searching and it is the bulk of my preparation. I use a lot of methods to make it become better and more digestible to my body. metronome/tuner work slowly through the tougher spots. I sometimes try to work backwards through them. Then I connect sections together in a sort of patchwork way. I may repeat parts up to 15-20 times to make sure they are right. If I am struggling I use tools like playing in rhythms, subdivided metronome playing, removing or adding slurs. Lots of small learning techniques. Almost always playing slowly. Always trying to be conscious of how my bow needs to be used so it translates well once I pick up the tempo as well.
Then I will start to work up the metronome and get the speed to about 90% close to professional tempo. All the while I am heavily considering the bow and making sure my earlier usage still fits or adjusting. This when I really start recording and listening to the practice sessions of these pieces more or I may do full under tempo run throughs. I will also begin exploring character and interpretation choices here as best I can while pushing the piece towards final tempo. Anything that on the day starts to fall apart goes back a step to slow metronome and tools to rework it out and reteach my brain what to do. If I can’t get it, I stop working on it for that session to avoid teaching my body to do it wrong.
Finally, if all goes well, I’ll get it to a chosen tempo and start doing cold runs, so I’ll just stretch, play a related scale or two slowly and then turn on the recorder and play it. Sometimes with pre-recorded accompaniment when available. Now is when I’ll go back to listening to the piece and recordings and try to steal and upgrade my interpretation where I can. I’ll be preparing my mind for a performance mode version where I envision the actual audience and peformance itself. I start working on nerve preparation and getting ready to share what I can do with others.
That whole process can take as little as a week of intense work, or months. It depends and I let it happen organically while being conscious of due dates or expectations from teachers etc. the thing is to never allow yourself to get stuck or forget a piece and let it fall behind. Anything you are tackling you have to try to push it forward, even if it is just 1% each week. Make it 1% better.