Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Practicing with your eyes closed?

Just curious to find out what you think about practicing with your eyes closed. Has anyone here tried it?

Personally, I think it is useful, because it allows you to focus not on where your hands are, but the dynamics of the piece instead.

hmm, nope. I prefer having my eyes open. Even if the piece is memorized, I'll look at either my hands or the score. Only time I'll close my eyes, maybe, is when I'm warming up or my eyes are just tired.

I don't close my eyes, that changes your balance and internal feelings too much (at least it does for me). But I do shut off all the lights and practice in the dark. It really helps in memorizing the topography of the keyboard imo.

RXB

I do this all the time. It helps me learn where the keys are without looking.

I do it sometimes - I find it helps me understand if I know what I'm supposed to be doing

It depends on your practice in a specific piece... It's like driving a car without having to be looking at the accelerator or brake. You just know where they are and how much force you should do.

I do this whenever I need to be able to play one hand blindly (e. g. when the hands are playing in different registers far apart from each other so I cannot watch them both).
And it's good to see if you really know a passage and to engrain it further.

The problem with this is it commits the movements to muscle memory as opposed to associating the phrase to the score. By closing your eyes, in a sense, you're not as conscious of your technique as well. It doesn't serve as much of a purpose as just simply looking straight ahead as opposed to down at the keys.

One can depend on muscle memory when playing eyes closed, but I find it much more helpful to use eyes-shut practice to work on visualizing my "inner keyboard", and building a kinesthetic or proprioceptive relationship to it.

I've also been finding that this work put into building my inner keyboard has been very helpful with the theory work I've been doing lately. I find it helps to double-check my answers by solving theory problems a couple of different ways, and one of my checks I do is visualizing the problem on the keyboard in my head.

I find that it gets clearer to visualize the more often I do so.

Aahhh yes. The muscle memory player. That is me to a tee! It's served me well so far..but..

I've been trying to change my ways, and trying not to look at my hands - especially for memorized pieces that I've been playing for over a year. I've also been trying to play from the score (even for memorized pieces), to ingrain and associate "the phrase to the score" as you put it...problem is..I don't nearly do it enough, and also my left hand, which I have to constantly peek at, has no clue what it's doing or where it is.

...and yes, I've tried eyes closed, and practice in the dark practice.