Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Losing my place

Forgive me for this obviously vague question. I've been practicing this morning and I keep losing my place on the music. I glance down at the keys for a brief moment and look back at the music and I've lost my place completely.

I'm thinking maybe I need to look into getting glasses, maybe the music is too small. Does anyone have any tips (besides practice, practice, practice) to help me keep my place on the page better?

I've found a number of things that help. I only look down when I have a long skip and really can't find the key without a visual; I try to never look down just for a security blanket. I focus on only glancing at the one key I need to find, and not trying to completely orient myself on the keyboard. I would say one thing you could practice is deliberatly looking down and then back up very quickly, don't let your gaze park on the keys.

I also found that different glasses helped me immensely because I don't have to move my head, I only move my eyes. Previously I had transition lenses that gradually range from distance to close up focus, but they had a very narrow range that focused at the right distance to read the music. I bought a pair of "occupational lenses" and had them set to focus at 30", so I can see the keyboard and music comfortably through any part of the lense, which means I don't have to bob my head up and down. They also work great on the computer.

Hi Preenocular,

Welcome to the forums.

Without further information, the only suggestion that I can make is to work on not looking at the keys. (I know, it's kind of like the joke: "Doctor it hurts when I do this." "Then don't do that.")

Unless you have other symptoms, I don't think this is a sign of needing glasses or the music being too small. With glasses, you would be just as likely (if not more likely) to lose your place.

Some ideas with this:
- Make sure you are sitting in the exact same spot every time.
- Practice your jumps and leaps over and over until you can do them blindfolded.
- Have someone hold cardboard over your hands so you cannot look at them.
- Train yourself to use your peripheral vision to see the keyboard or guide your hands to the right spot.
- Memorize the sections that you are having problems with.
- Memorize the whole piece and just look at your hands.

Unfortunately, this is something we all deal with to some degree. You look away from the music and you do lose your place.

Rich

Thank you very much for your replies!

I shall try to keep my eyes more on the music, and try to resist the temptation to look down so much. Hopefully, I can develop a better blind "memory" for the positioning of the keys.

You dont need glasses, (not at least for this situation )

Dragon is right.
As well if you keep looking at the keys when your lost, then it will take forever for you to read the music when the notes becoming demanding. Practise scales, without looking at the keyboard, even close your eyes. As Dragon mentioned, practise jumps. in The scale, C - miss D, and go to E, the most common ones would be to jump from C to F to G and down or up to C again, for beginning just go back down and you thumb should hit C you started on.

Bigger jumps up and down several scales, can be demanding, for this I suggest you read music fluently and read ahead a little bit to give you time to find your place on the keyboard and back to music again.

A good short term fix is to simply mark the spot where you seem to lose your place. You're probably looking down at the same trouble spot(s) -- so I'd put a pencil mark by it.

This serves two purposes. The first immediate one is to help you figure out where you are when you look up. The second will be to mark a trouble spot that I would then just practice the measure(s) over and over until I didn't have to look down to figure out where I was on the keyboard. I then know that I have good grasp of the piece when I can play through those marks without looking down.

I'm a firm believer in annotation. I write in or circle fingering, counts if it's off, notes to myself to not change hand position, sometimes specific notes if I'm always landing on the F rather than the F#. By the time I've finished a piece, it really looks like mine!

Another idea is to get deeper into your music - read along while you are listening to a recording (your playing or someone else's). So you can really focus on the score and memorise which phrase is where and what each spot "sounds like".

Sing from score without playing piano.

Look out for "landmarks", such as big intervals, trill markings, scales - everything that makes quick orientation on the page easier.

Practice stopping in random places, look away for a second and find your place back.