Piano Technique: General Principles

Lesson Goal: To internalize the critically important insights that will get your whole attitude toward piano technique moving in the right direction…

Piano Technique: General Principles YouTube

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“Piano Technique: General Principles” Video Highlights

Symptoms of Poor Technique

1. muscle tension.
2. muscle fatigue.
3. feelings of awkwardness.
4. inaccurate timing.
5. the lost sense of where your body is with respect to the piano.
6. missed notes.
7. flying pinkies.
8. unintended accents.
9. little or no dynamics.
10. rhythm that feels stiff and doesn’t seem to flow.
11. fingers that forget the music.
12. difficulty coordinating your left and your right sides.
13. the inability to play fast no matter how hard you practice.

If you’re experiencing any of the problems above and can’t seem to solve them no matter how hard you try please don’t be discouraged. Please don’t conclude that you are untalented. Realize that expert piano technique is a very learnable skill available to anyone who’s willing to employ the proper study (emphasis study) and practice habits… but you have to know some things. You have to know how your piano playing body works, how your piano playing brain works, how the piano keyboard works, and how to interface your piano playing body with the instrument.

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Insights to Get Our Mindset Regarding Piano Technique Moving in the Right Direction

1. Technique and interpretation are inseparable. In other words how you move your body is how the music is going to sound and feel.
2. Playing the piano should never feel tense and it should never ever hurt. So, if you feel any tension or discomfort or awkwardness, or pain stop what you’re doing that’s your body telling you that there’s a better way, a way that doesn’t fight your natural capabilities.
3. Tension, fatigue, and awkwardness are typically the result of poor posture or using too much effort or the failure to make full use of all of your piano playing body parts.
4. Muscle tension is contagious because our bones and muscles and tendons and ligaments are all interconnected with each other tension in one part of your body easily spreads to other parts of your body.
5. Muscle tension does more than merely feel unpleasant. It has multiple destructive effects. Muscle tension slows your muscles down, distorts your body image (and causes you to miss notes), disrupts your rhythm, prevents you from playing with musical dynamics and articulations
6. Muscle tension is eliminated by yielding to your body’s natural capabilities, not by fighting them and not by trying to change them.
7. Any sudden starts and stops and jerking motions will immediately cause tension. What you want to do is move smoothly in arcs and curves, always anticipating and preparing for what happens next. Think of waves of non-stop momentum that are going to and through and in between one musical place and the next.
8. A few simple adjustments in how you position and move your body parts will absolutely liberate your technique.
9. Gravity is your friend and the failure to work with gravity by fighting it either by resisting it or trying to help it are guaranteed to cause enormous amounts of tension.
10. Never stop moving. Never stop moving before the notes, during the notes, after the notes, and in between the notes. In fact, what you do before during after and in between the notes will absolutely make or break your performance.
11. Musical piano technique is best described as a state of flow. Not relaxed and certainly not rigid but alive and always moving. In fact when your piano playing muscles are in this state of flow meaning always moving they will not become tense and fatigued because they cannot become tense and fatigued.
12. Each of your piano playing body parts has certain capabilities and certain limitations which are for all practical purposes anatomically. That’s okay because you never need your body to do something at the piano that it is not already naturally capable of doing.
13. Technical freedom is never the result of doing things incorrectly over and over and over again until by some miracle they become easy.
14. You cannot make beautiful music if you play using just your fingers, no matter how strong, fast, independent, well trained they might be. Your whole body contributes to the fluent phrasing, coherent rhythm, controlled dynamics, and the crisp articulation of every musical idea, large and small.
15. Your fingers are indeed very important but but they are only one of the many parts of your total piano playing body. Your hands, your forearms, your upper arms, your shoulders, your torso, and even your head make indispensable contributions to your total piano technique
16. Your fingers are already strong enough, fast enough, and independent enough to play with freedom and ease, but only if you use all your other piano playing body parts to make it easy for your fingers to do their job.
17. Any attempt to make your fingers stronger… by doing physical exercises or using some kind of crazy contraption is not only unnecessary and unproductive but doing so will actually hurt you… because doing stuff like this actually cultivates tension.
18. If your posture is unnatural it doesn’t matter how much or how hard you practice if your posture is unnatural you might make incremental progress over the course of years and years and years, but you will never master anything.
19. Learning to play the piano is not like training to be a weightlifter by building your muscles. It’s not like training to be a long-distance runner by building your endurance. Learning to play the piano is like learning to dance… with a partner.
20. Every pattern you play at the piano suggests a certain choreography that engages the natural coordination of ALL your piano playing body parts… from your head, torso, shoulders, arms, hands, down to your fingers.
21. The solution to a technical problem is never to do physical exercises. The solution to a technical problem is always found by mindful experimentation… with the goal of discovering an appropriate choreography for the musical pattern in question.
22. The control, timing, dynamics, and articulation of every musical idea flows from your center outward… from your head and torso through your shoulders, through your arms, through your hands, through your fingers, and then through the keys.this is always expressed as a coordinated sequence of integrated gestures.
23. It’s a huge mistake to think that you have to do physical exercises in order to play the piano. Because the goal of studying and practicing is not to change your muscles. The goal of studying and practicing is always (emphasize always) to change your brain.
24. Study first, practice second. Study first in order to discover an appropriate fingering and choreography for the pattern in question and then and only then practice it by repeating that choreography enough times so that it becomes a permanent and automatic part of your long term memory.
25. The more of your body that you use to play your music with, the more of your piano playing brain will be engaged in the music you’re making. So, instead of just using the finger part of your brain to learn and perform you’re also going to be using the hand and arm and shoulder and torso and head parts of your brain to learn and perform. In other words, when you play with good technique (that is, with all your body parts engaged) you give your brain a lot more ways to remember and perform the music with.
26. You cannot play fluently if you think and execute the music one-note-at-a-time. Grouping the notes both physically and mentally into meaningful musical chunks is absolutely essential to playing with technical freedom and ease.
27. Accuracy and musicality are achieved by engaging all four musical memory types: aural (how the music sounds and feels), analytical (your theoretical understanding of the patterns involved), visuopatial (the sequence and arrangement of the notes on the keyboard), and kinesthetic (the fingering andchoreography).
28. Piano players have the particular challenge of having to play two completely different patterns in both hands simultaneously, a remarkable accomplishment of both coordination and independence. The bad news is that our capacity to pay attention to all these things happening at the same time is quite limited. The good news is that we can expand this capacity to pay attention by doing at least two things: first by grouping the notes into meaningful mental and physical musical chunks and second by making sure we learn the music using all four musical intelligences.
29. If you study and practice the right way (with all four musical intelligences fully engaged) your musical intentions will automatically trigger the appropriate choreography when you perform.
30. If you study and practice the right way you should expect IMMEDIATE breakthroughs in performance. In other words technical ease is not some distant goal, achievable only after years and years and years of arduous physical exercises. Technical freedom and ease is your immediate goal… something you can achieve today by the mindful experimentation at the piano to discover the appropriate choreography for the musical pattern in question.
31. As you come to discover and master the choreography for each musical pattern it’s going to feel less and less like you’re doing battle with some kind of mechanical monster and more and more like the piano is an extension of your own musical mind!

Don’t overread what I’m saying here. I’m not saying that playing the piano is easy. In fact, playing even the simplest of pieces is a phenomenal human accomplishment. But even though playing the piano is not easy, it’s not the kind of hard that most people think. And if you study and practice the right things the right way, you will liberate the artist trapped inside you and i guarantee that you will be able to play music at a level far beyond anything you ever dreamed possible!

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learn more… Piano Technique: Body Awareness Training