Do I really need to practice piano tonight?

The answer to this question depends on whether you want to get better at playing piano.  Do you want to eventually be able to play more complicated songs? To play faster and more confidently? To read music better? If so, then you really do need to practice.

The key to practice is that you want to do it often enough that you aren’t forgetting much in between your practice sessions. 

If you practice only once a week, you are going to be forgetting a lot of what you learned in between your practice sessions.  So, over 3 weeks of practice, you will get better, but only slightly better. You will have to spend a lot of time in each practice session just refreshing what you’d worked on learning the week before. 

If you practice every day, you can remember a lot of what you learned the prior day.  So, you will end up making faster progress across your practice sessions.

Sometimes, you might even find that you improve in between practice sessions! 

If you play an instrument, or a sport, maybe you’ve had this experience, where you are struggling to improve at a particular aspect…and then…as if by magic, the next time you sit down at the piano, or approach the soccer ball on the field, you discover that you’ve improved at the skill.

How did that happen?  It turns out that our brain keeps rehearsing how to perform the actions. Even if your body isn’t carrying out the skill, your brain is!  This type of brain-practice is especially likely to happen while we’re sleeping.