I'd like to hear everyone's tips for developing speed. I am talking about those dazzling runs up and down the keyboard. Assuming that I have the fingering worked out and the music memorized, how do I speed things up?

Gradually with a metronome?

A lot of notes at once or just a few?

Should my finger motion be the same no matter the speed, or does it change as I get faster?

I tried searching for this topic but didn't find a thread that addressed it. I'm currently without a teacher for economic reasons, so any help is appreciated.

Practice, practice and more practice!

Take care,

Rick

To elaborate on Rick's excellent advice, I think it's generally the case that you get fast by playing slow. If you just try and play a section as fast as you can, you'll make a million mistakes and - even worse - you'll train yourself to play those mistakes.

You're building both agility and muscle memory. Take a particular section that you want to learn to play quickly, or a Hanon drill or a scale. Work on playing smoothly and evenly and at a pace that you can play several times mistake free. Then try varying the tempo in different places i.e., fast three notes, slow three notes, fast 4 notes, slow 2 notes, etc. Move it around, don't always play the same notes fast or slow. This will help build some agility in different finger/thumb patterns, then try to put it together at a steady tempo again.

And as Rick said, practice, practice and more practice!

I realized I didn't address one of the questions you asked about finger motion. One of the things that happens as you play faster is you move your arms more rapidly. You're not "walking" up the keyboard with your fingers, instead you're moving your arm and hand so it's in the right place.

Think of a typewriter as an analogy where your arm/hand is the platen (the round thing that you rolled the paper around for those who've never seen a typewriter ) and the keys are flying up from below to hit the paper that's in your hand. You have to move your hand and arm smoothly and rapidly so the spacing between each letter is even - too fast and the gap will be too wide, too slow and the letters will overlap. That's what you're trying to do with your hand and arm as you play. As you move up or down the keyboard, your hand and arm move more rapidly as you play faster so they'll be in the right place for your fingers to depress the keys.

Hope this helps.

Hey, Sam, my teacher has me do exactly what Greg recommends in his first answer; even then vary tempo then even again. I do it with Hanon and scales; works miracles, sometimes

Good luck.

Thanks for the help everyone.

I also found Speeding Up and Polishing a Piece over in the pianists corner that has some more helpful advice

You need to read chang's section on speed walls before taking that advice.

This is one of those ideas that seems intuitively correct, but often doesn't work. Playing slowly (grammar!) can lead to speed, but it can also lead to near permanent blocks, if at any point the technique has to change to play faster.

Playing slowly after speed has been acquired is necessary, to develop precision and control. Playing slowly before speed has been acquired may in some cases make it impossible ever to achieve speed. YMMV, but understand what you're doing and why.

There are 2 suggestions I have gotten from my teacher. They are similar. Both use the fact that, in order to get speed, your fingers have to react very quickly to the impulse from your brain to play. Both, which you might find odd at first, include playing very slowly.

One big danger of trying to 'go fast' (especially for me!) is that it can lead to tension. For me...this results in my shoulders ending up around my ears. This is bad.

The first I think of as the "impulse staccato". The 'rate' at which you play the notes is very slow, (or sounds that way to someone listening), but what you are actually doing is playing, very fast, one note at a time, with long pauses in between. I don't know if that makes sense...try it at first with a scale. Put your hands in place to play, take a deep breath, get calm, and then "attack" the note very quickly (by 'attack' I don't mean a violent or loud motion...it is just a very fast response). Then return to a resting state. then play the next note, the same way. Then return to the resting state. The trick is not only the fast response, but the relaxation afterwards.

The other is a form of playing in rhythms. Say you had an 8th note run of even note values...but you play like a run of quarter note-16th note-quarter note or even half note-32nd note-half note. The first time you practice the run, the first, third, fifth etc notes in the run are the 'long' notes...the second time, the 2nd, 4th, 6th notes in the run are the long notes. As you go along with this you can do it in 'clusters'....the first note in the phrase is long, the subsequent couple, or 3 or 4 notes are 'quick'. This trick lets you practice going between individual notes or groups of notes quickly, but helps keep you from tensing up and gives you 'breathing room' in between quick notes. When you are doing this...Do Not get 'lazy' and do it like triplets or something...the point is a very quick response to the impulse to play, on the 'fast' notes.

I don't know if I've worded this well or made sense but it really works.

Except a lot of practise I think the relaxation and psychological aspect is important. You know you only comprehend what your brain can understand. So when you have learned something fast it wont be fast in your own head longer.

I've been posting in the thread in the Pianist Corner that Sam Smith referred to, but this one is equally interesting and helpful.

This whole topic is especially important for those of us without teachers who want a measure of confidence that we're making informed choices about what's most efficient and effective. I greatly appreciate everyone's input.

Steven