This is why any pianist can outrun a sumo wrestler on the keyboard, even though the wrestler has more muscle. The fast muscles control the basic rapid finger stroke and these muscles are driven by a brain which has also been speeded up; see i. Most of the muscles that move the fingers are in the forearm Prokop. There are some reports claiming that the most important piano playing muscles are the lumbricals Jaynes and the interossei in the hands , but these are minority views that must await further research to carry any weight.
Because those who designed exercises in the past had little idea or research results on what the exercises need to achieve, most of those exercises are only marginally helpful, and how useful they were depended more on how you used them than their original design. For example, the main objective behind most exercises was to develop finger strength, which is wrong. Another concept was that the more difficult the exercise, the more advanced technique you learned.
This is obviously not true; the only truth is that if you are advanced, you can play difficult material. Some of the simplest exercises as we shall see can teach the most advanced techniques, and that is the kind of exercise that is most useful. For exercises to be useful, they must be able to identify weaknesses and then strengthen those skills.
We need a complete set of exercises, and they must be arranged in some logical order so that an exercise that addresses a particular need can be quickly located. I propose that the concept of parallel play provides the framework for devising a universal set of exercises. Parallel sets PSs are groups of notes that can be played simultaneously, like a chord. Any arbitrary musical passage can be constructed from combinations of PSs.
Of course, PSs alone do not comprise a complete set of exercises; conjunctions, repetitions, jumps, stretching, etc. Apparently, Louis Plaidy taught exercises resembling PS exercises in the late s. All the PS exercises are HS exercises. However, you can practice them HT also, and in any combination, even 2 notes against 3, etc. At first, try a few of each exercise, then read c. There is no need to practice PSs by themselves because, if expanded, there will be an infinite number as they should be, if they are complete , so you will never practice them all. You will never need all of them either, and probably over half are redundant.
Use these exercises only when needed all the time! Once the problem is solved using a particular exercise, there is no need to keep repeating it, because you have acquired the desired skill. PS exercises should not be practiced every day like Hanon exercises; they are to be used for diagnosing difficulties and correcting them. PS exercises are designed to test your technique.
A beginner with no technique should fail all of them. Most students will initially have no idea how to play them correctly. It would be very helpful if someone could demonstrate a few for you if you had never done them before. I will make videos available as soon as I find the time.
Intermediate students with 2 to 5 years of lessons should be able to play over half of them satisfactorily. Thus these exercises provide a means for measuring your progress. This is total technique development and therefore involves tone control and musical playing. Advanced students will still need them but, unlike developing students, they will need them only briefly, often for just a few seconds of practice and experimentation. This exercise teaches the basic motion that is needed for all following exercises.
Play one note, for example, finger 1, e. Remember, one reason for practicing exercises is to save time. This repetition motion is needed in most PS exercises. The idea is to play them as fast as possible, up to speeds of over one quad per second, with complete relaxation. When you can play a quad to your satisfaction, try two: The comma represents a pause of any arbitrary length, which should be shortened as you progress.
Then string three, then four quads in rapid succession: Play them softly, relaxed, and not staccato, as explained in more detail below. If you pass the 4-quad test, you should be able to play the quads as long and as fast you want, with control and without fatigue. This seemingly trivial motion is much more important than appears at first sight because it is the basis for all velocity motions, as will become apparent when we come to PSs involving many fingers such as those in fast Alberti accompaniments or tremolos.
That is why we devote so many paragraphs below to this exercise. The thumb has four major ways to move down; the other fingers have three. The first motion is finger motion: The second motion is wrist motion: The third motion is arm motion. With the fingers and wrist rigid, you can lower the finger by moving the entire forearm down.
This motion originates at the shoulder. The fourth motion, which applies mostly to the thumb, is forearm rotation. Practice each of these motions separately, eliminating all stress. First, practice each slowly, with large, exaggerated motion. Then increase speed by decreasing the motion. You can further increase speed by combining the motions, because when you combine them, you need even smaller individual motions to accomplish the same key drop.
In all of the following, stretch the thumb out comfortably; do not tuck it under the hand. Now combining motions 1 and 2; you should be able to play faster than the maximum of either motion. Every part of the body must be involved: This does not mean that every part must move by a visible amount - they may appear stationary, but must participate. Try to isolate only the necessary muscles for each motion and relax all others. The final motion may give the appearance that only the finger is moving. From more than several feet away, few people will notice a 1 mm movement; if each part of the body moved less than one mm, the sum of those motions can easily add up to the several mm needed for the key drop, even without finger movement.
These positions will resemble those of famous pianists playing at a concert — after all, that is why they can play it. Therefore it is important, when attending concerts, to bring your opera glass and watch the details of the motions of professional pianists. To the untrained observer, a concert pianist may seem to be doing nothing unusual, but if you know the hand motions as explained here, you will see them executed beautifully. Beginners, in their first year, may not be able to play at one quad per second. Do not force yourself to practice at speeds you cannot handle without stress.
However, periodic, brief, excursions into your fastest playing are necessary for exploration purposes. Even students with over five years of lessons will find some of the following exercises difficult. Those practicing PSs for the first time should practice exercise 1 for a while, then practice 2 below ; if 2 becomes problematic at certain speeds fatigue, stress , those problems can be solved by practicing 1 again try it; you will find out what I mean. Then briefly examine the other exercises, but there is no need to do them all now, because there will be plenty of chances to practice them as the need arises when practicing with real music later on.
Practice Exercise 1 until all stress disappears and you can feel gravity pulling the arm down.
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As soon as stress builds up, you will not be able to feel the gravitational pull. As stress builds up, the quads will start to slow down; therefore, the slowing down is a sign of stress — it is time to switch hands. Get one quad down well before adding another. The reason for stopping at four quads is that, once you can do four, you can usually do a large number in succession.
However, exactly how many are needed, before you can play an indefinite number in succession, depends on the individual. For the first few days of practice, there should be some improvements during practice because you are rapidly learning new motions and eliminating wrong ones. For PPI, instead of pushing for speed during practice, wait for the hand to automatically develop quickness so that you play faster the next time you practice; this can happen when you switch hands, or when you practice the next day.
This is technique acquisition, not muscle building. Technique means making music and these exercises are valuable for developing musical playing. Do not bang away, like a jack hammer. One key trick in controlling tone is to practice softly. By playing softly you get yourself out of the mode of practice in which you totally ignore the nature of the sound and bang away, just trying to achieve the repetitions.
Press down on the key completely and hold it down momentarily very short — a fraction of a second. Tone, Rhythm, Legato, Staccato basic keystroke which is mandatory reading before you do any serious PS exercises. In order to increase speed and accuracy, and to control the tone, keep the playing finger near the key as much as possible. If the finger does not touch the key once in a while, you lose control. Do not rest the finger on the key all the time, but touch the key as lightly as you can so that you know where it is.
This will give an added feel for where all the other keys are, and when it comes time to play them, the fingers will find the right keys more accurately. Determine the minimum key lift needed for repetition and practice playing with as little key lift as possible. The key lift is larger for uprights than grands. Faster speeds are achieved with smaller key lifts. Experiment with controlling the tone using finger sliding: Sliding increases control because you are creating a small key drop using a larger motion. The result is that any errors in the motion will be decreased by the ratio of key drop to total motion, which is always less than one.
Therefore, you can play more uniform and softer quads by sliding than by coming straight down. Sliding also simplifies the finger motion because the finger does not have to come straight down — any motion with a downward component will do, which increases your options. The thumb may be the easiest finger to slide.
Play with the tip of the thumb, not the joint; this will enable the thumb to slide and the wrist to be raised, thus reducing the chances of the other fingers accidentally hitting some keys. Playing with the tip also increases the effective range and speed of the thumb movement; that is, for the same thumb movement, the tip moves farther and faster than the joint. Knowing how to slide the fingers will let you play with confidence even when the keys are slippery or if they get wet from perspiration.
Do not develop a dependence on the friction of the key surface to play the notes because it will not always be there for you. Playing with a raised wrist will cause the fingers to slide towards you during the key drop. With a low wrist, the fingers will tend to slide away from you, especially for fingers Practice each of these sliding motions: At an intermediate wrist height, the fingers will not slide, even if the keys are slippery!
Repeat Exercise 1 with all the fingers, one at a time. Some fingers typically, 4 and 5 may be slower than the others. This is an example of how to use these exercises as a diagnostic tool to find the weak fingers. Proper regulation of the piano action and voicing of the hammers is critical to successful execution of these exercises, both for acquiring new skills and for avoiding non- musical playing. This is because it is impossible to produce soft or powerful, or deep musical tones with worn hammers and defective actions.
You will need expert guidance to avoid acquiring bad habits if you practice on such pianos. The 2-finger Parallel Set exercises: The idea is to play them rapidly, but under complete control. Obviously, the methods of Sections I and II will needed here.
Practice with the beat on the 2 as well as with the beat on the 3. When that is satisfactory, play one quad as in exercise 1: Again, bring the quad up to speed, about a quad per second. Then increase the number of quads until you can string 4 quads in succession. Repeat the entire exercise with each of 12, 34 and All the comments about how to practice for exercise 1 apply.
In this and subsequent exercises, the comments in preceding exercises almost always apply to succeeding exercises and will not generally be repeated. Also, I will list only representative members of a family of exercises and leave it to the reader to figure out all the other members of the family. The total number of exercises is much larger than you would initially think.
Furthermore, if the different PS exercises are combined HT, the number of possibilities quickly becomes mind boggling. For beginners who have difficulty playing HT, these exercises may provide the best ways to practice HT play. One objective of PSs is to teach the brain the concept of extreme velocity, up to almost infinity. Once the brain gets used to a certain maximum velocity, all slower velocities become easier to execute. Perform all the exercises initially using only the white keys. Once all the white key exercises are done, work on similar exercises including the black keys.
In the beginning, you may be able to play the 2 notes in succession very fast, but without much independent control. One easy way to do this is to curl 2 a little more than 3. The phase angle is the delay between successive fingers in parallel play. Eventually, you must play with finger independence. The initial phase locking is used only to get up to speed quickly. This is one reason why some teachers do not teach parallel play, because they think that parallel play means phase locking, which is bad technique. One reason for this problem is that after phase locked play, both fingers stay on their keys and the two notes overlap.
It is as important to lift the finger at some precise time as it is to lower it. For independent finger playing, the first finger must rise just as the second finger plays so that successive notes are clearly separated. Therefore, the ability to play 23 quads rapidly is not enough. What takes time to develop is the independent control of each finger. Once you can play fast PSs relaxed, slow down and work on playing each note more correctly. Beginners will have difficulty lifting the fingers at the right time to control the note duration.
In that case, either wait for technique to develop further, or practice the lifting exercises of d. Repeat all of the procedures as in exercise 2. Then work with the group, and finally, the sets. With these large sets, you may have to slow down the quad repetition speed slightly. The number of possible exercises for these larger sets is very large. The beat can be on any note and you can start on any note.
For example, can be practiced as and When coming down, the can be played or ; - all six are distinct because you will find that some are easy but some are difficult. If you include the beat variations, there are 18 exercises for just three fingers on white keys. These sets also include the 14 fourths , and 15 fifth and octave , type groups.
Then there are the 3-note expanded PSs: Here, there are several choices for the middle note. Then there are the expanded sets played with Then do the 1. I have often found sets that are easy going up but difficult coming down, or vice versa. These compound sets will require quite a bit of skill. Unless you have had at least several years of lessons, do not expect to be able to play these with any proficiency. This is the end of the repetitive quad exercises based on exercise 1. In principle, Exercises 1 to 5 are the only exercises you need because they can be used to construct the PSs we discuss below.
Exercises 6 and 7 are too complex to be repeated in rapid quads. In most cases, they should be broken up into simpler PSs that can be practiced as quads; at least, initially. Clearly, there is a large number of these. Now practice connected PSs; e. Now these sets cannot be played infinitely fast because the speed is limited by your ability to connect the PSs.
The objective here is still speed — how fast you can play them accurately and relaxed, and how many of them you can string together. This is an exercise for learning how to play conjunctions. Play as many notes as possible during one motion of the hand. For example, practice playing in one down motion of the hand. Therefore, look into these Inventions for some of the most inventive and technically important connected PSs.
As explained in c. This has limited the popularity of playing Bach, and limited the use of this most valuable resource for acquiring technique. Therefore, this book should greatly increase the popularity of playing Bach. The nearly infinite number of PS exercises needed demonstrates how woefully inadequate the older exercises are e. There is one advantage of the Hanon type exercises, however, which is that they start with the most commonly encountered fingerings and the easiest exercises; i. The PS concept allows us to identify the simplest possible series of exercises that form a more complete set that will apply to practically anything that you might encounter.
As soon as these exercises become slightly complex, their number becomes enormous. By the time you get to the complexity of even the simplest Hanon exercise, the number of possible PS exercises becomes intractably large. Even Hanon recognized this inadequacy and suggested variations such as practicing the exercises in all possible transpositions. This certainly helps, but still lacks whole categories such as Exercises 1 and 2 the most fundamental and useful ones , or the incredible speeds anyone can readily achieve with PS exercises.
It is easy to bring Hanon up to ridiculous speeds by using the methods of this book. This is clearly the biggest advantage of PS exercises: As one illustration of the usefulness of these exercises, suppose that you want to practice a four-finger compound trill based on exercise 5 e. By following the exercises in order from 1 to 7, you now have a step-by-step recipe for diagnosing your difficulties and acquiring this skill.
When these are satisfactory, try 1.
My practice routine with tandjfoods.com - Piano finger exercises in all keys
Then work on the reverse: The rest should be obvious if you have read this far. These can be rough workouts, so remember to change hands frequently, before fatigue sets in. It is re-emphasized here that there is no place in the methods of this book for mindless repetitive exercises.
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Such exercises have another insidious disadvantage. This can give the wrong impression that the wonderful playing condition was a consequence of the mindless exercises. It is not; the limbered up playing condition is the same regardless of method. Therefore, the pitfalls of mindless exercises can be avoided by using more beneficial ways of limbering up. Scales are useful for loosening the fingers and arpeggios are useful for loosening the wrists. And they are useful for learning some very basic skills, as we saw in 5.
Scales, Arpeggios, and Chromatic Scales above. PS exercises are not intended to replace the Hanon, Czerny, etc. The PS exercises were introduced because there is no known faster way to acquire technique. The PS exercises are to be used in the following ways:.
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- Improve your piano technique with Hanon exercises!!
Procedures 1 and 2 will solve many problems in playing difficult material. Listen to recordings carefully, and you will find that even the most famous pianists have difficulty with this LH and tend to start it slowly and then accelerate it, or even simplify the score. This accompaniment consists of the compound PSs 2. Acquiring the required technique simply boils down to perfecting these PSs and then joining them. For most people, one of the above two PSs will be difficult, and that is the one you need to conquer. Trying to learn this by playing it slowly and accelerating it HT would take much longer to learn and brings no guarantee of success, because it becomes a race between success and building a speed wall.
Instead, practice HS and change hands frequently to avoid stress and fatigue. Also, practice it softly in the beginning in order to learn to relax. In summary, the parallel set exercises comprise one of the main pillars of the methods of this book. They are one of the reasons for the claim that nothing is too difficult to play if you know how to practice. They serve both as diagnostic tools and as technique development tools. Practically all technique should be acquired using PSs during HS practice to bring up the speed, to learn to relax, and to gain control.
They form a complete set of necessary tools. They are ideal for practicing to play without stress and with tone control. In particular it is important to get into the habits of sliding the fingers over the keys and feeling the keys before playing them. Sliding the fingers caressing the keys provides tone control and feeling the keys improves accuracy.
Without breaking up a difficult passage into simple PSs, it is impossible to incorporate these extra refinements into your playing. We now move on to other useful exercises. Scales and arpeggios must be practiced diligently. Scales and arpeggios must be practiced HS; practicing them HT all the time will place them in the same category as Hanon. Learning to play them well is very difficult and you will certainly need PSs, see b.
Playing with Flat Fingers and 5. Scales, Arpeggios, and Chromatic Scales for more details. The finger independence and lifting see below exercises are performed by first pressing all five fingers down, e. Then play each finger three to five times: While one finger is playing, the others must be kept down. Do not press down firmly as this is a form of stress, and will cause fatigue very quickly. All the depressed keys must be completely down, but the fingers are resting on them with only enough downward force to keep the keys down.
The gravitational weight of the hand should be enough. Beginners may find this exercise difficult in the beginning because the non- playing fingers tend to collapse from their optimum positions or lift involuntarily, especially if they begin to tire. If they tend to collapse, try a few times and then switch hands or quit; do not keep practicing in the collapsed position.
Then try again after a rest. One variation of this exercise is to spread out the notes over an octave. This type of exercise was already in use during F. They should be done using the curled as well as all the flat finger positions. For the finger independence exercise, try to increase the speed. Note the similarity to PS exercise 1, b. For general technique development, exercise 1 is superior to this one.
The main objective of exercise 1 was speed; the emphasis here is different — it is for finger independence. Some piano teachers recommend doing this exercise once during every practice session, once you can play it satisfactorily. Until you can play it satisfactorily, you may want to practice it several times at every practice session. Practicing it many times at once and then neglecting it in subsequent sessions will not work. All the practice methods and exercises discussed in this book deal mostly with the muscles used to press the key down flexors.
It is possible for those muscles to become far more developed than the ones used to lift the fingers extensors , especially for those who practice loud all the time and never develop the art of playing fast, thus causing control problems. Eventually, the flexors can end up overpowering the extensors.
Therefore, it is a good idea to exercise the relevant extensors by performing lifting exercises.
Technical variants on Hanon's exercises for pianoforte
The flat finger positions are valuable for exercising the extensors for lifting the fingers and, at the same time, relaxing the extensors near the fingertips. These two extensors use different muscles. For finger lifting exercises, repeat the above exercise, but lift each finger as high as you can, quickly and immediately down. The motion should be as fast as you can, but slow enough that you have complete control; this is not a speed contest, you just have to avoid growing the slow muscles. Again, keep all the other fingers down with minimal pressure. As usual, it is important to reduce stress in the fingers that are not being lifted.
Practice rapid relaxation immediately after a hard lift. Everyone has problems with lifting the 4th finger. There is a mistaken belief by many that we must be able to lift the 4th finger as high as all the others and therefore they expend an inordinate amount of effort trying to achieve this. Such efforts have been proven to be futile and even harmful. This is because the anatomy of the 4th finger does not allow it to be lifted beyond a certain point.
The only requirement on the 4th finger is not to depress a key inadvertently, which can be met with only a small amount of lift. Therefore you can play at all times with the 4th finger barely off the keys or even touching them. Practicing difficult passages with inordinate effort at lifting this finger higher can cause stress in fingers 3 and 5. It is more productive to learn to play with less stress as long as the 4th finger is not interfering in any way.
The exercise for lifting the 4th finger independently is performed as follows. Then repeat with 2,4,2,4,2,4,. Then 3,4, then 5,4. You can also do this exercise with 4 on a black key. Both the finger independence and lifting exercises can be performed without a piano, on any flat surface.
This is the best time to practice relaxing the extensor muscles of the last two phalanges the nail phalange and middle phalange of fingers 2 to 5; see b. Playing with Flat Fingers for more details. During the entire exercise, those two phalanges for all the fingers should be completely relaxed, even for the finger being lifted. Gravity Drop, Chord Practice, and Relaxation the gravity drop was used to improve chord accuracy. However, if there is still unevenness after using the gravity drop, then there is a fundamental problem that must be diagnosed and treated using the PS exercises.
Chords become uneven when the control over individual fingers is uneven. Suppose that you are playing a LH C. E interval against a G in octave 3. E3 and G3 are played with the fingers 5. These two fingers do not land simultaneously. The way to diagnose this problem is to try the 5,3 PS, and then test 3,5. If you have a problem, chances are that you have more of a problem with one than the other, or both. Typically, 3,5 is more difficult than 5,3 because of the bone structure in the forearm. Work on the problematic PS s. Once you can play both PSs well, the interval should come out better.
There is a smaller possibility that the problem lies in the 5,1 or 3,1 PSs, so if the 5,3 did not work, try these. One set mainly opens the palm and the other mainly spreads the fingers apart. When stretching the hand to play wide chords, use mainly the set of muscles that open the palm. The feeling is that of spreading the palm but with free fingers; i. The second set of muscles simply spread the fingers apart. This spreading helps to widen the palm but it interferes with the finger movement because it tends to lock the fingers to the palm.
Cultivate the habit of using the palm muscles separately from the finger muscles. This will reduce both stress and fatigue when playing chords, and improve control. Of course, it is easiest to use both sets of muscles simultaneously, but it is useful to know that there are 2 sets of muscles when planning exercises and for deciding how to play chords. In order to test whether the fingers are fully stretched, open the palm to its maximum and spread the fingers for maximum reach; do this on a flat surface with the wrist touching the surface.
If the pinky and thumb form a almost straight line, the fingers will not stretch any more. Another way to test this alignment is to place the palm on a table top at the edge of the table with the thumb and pinky down the edge, so that only fingers 2, 3, and 4 are resting on the table top. If the thumb and pinky form a triangle with the edge of the table, the stretch can be expanded. Perform a spreading exercise by pushing the hand towards the table edge so as to spread the thumb and pinky apart. You can save some time by stretching one hand using the top edge of the piano while practicing HS with the other.
Need to embed palm stretch photo: It is more important, but more difficult, to stretch the palm instead of the fingers. One way is to place the right palm over the left palm, right arm pointing left and left arm pointing right, with the hands in front of the chest. In this position, thumb meets pinky; interlock the thumbs and pinkies so that fingers 2,3,4 are on the palm side and 1,5 protrude on the back side of palm. Then push the hands towards each other so that thumbs and pinkies push each other back, thus spreading the palm.
This is illustrated in the photo III. Also, exercise the palm and finger spreading muscles while simultaneously applying the pushing force. This is not an isometric exercise, so the stretching motions should be quick and short. This ability to quickly stretch and immediately relax is important for relaxation. Regular stretching when young can make a considerable difference in the reach when you get older, and periodic maintenance will prevent the reach from decreasing with age.
The webbings between fingers can be stretched by jamming them against each other using the two hands. For example, to stretch the webbings between fingers 2 and 3, spread those 2 fingers on both hands to form Vs. Then jam the vertices of the 2 Vs against each other. For maximum effectiveness, use the palm and finger spreading muscles to stretch the palm with every jamming motion. Most people have a slightly larger left hand, and some can reach more by using fingers 1,4 than 1,5. When playing wide chords, the thumb should be curved slightly inwards, not fully stretched out.
For those who have thumbs that can bend backwards, pay attention to this thumb position for maximum stretch; if you form the habit of bending the thumb all the way backwards, this habit will be almost impossible to reverse and make TO difficult. Alfred Music Customer Rating: Rate this product's difficulty level: Review Guidelines Explain exactly why you liked or disliked the product. Do you like the artist? Is the transcription accurate? Is it a good teaching tool?
Improve your piano technique with Hanon exercises!
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