Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Help me speed up this part

I was wondering if the forum might be able to help me play a particular passage a little faster.

Here's the score:



Split into small chunks, nothing is hard. Playing the entire section however, is tricky.

The goal is to play this very fast. I'm playing it here somewhere between 100 and 200, but I'd like to execute this closer to 300.

I think I figured out the only fingering that works. You can't really see but it's basically 1 2 3 4 5, trilling on 4 and 5 and back down.

There I am:
[video:youtube]9dwICcBC05w[/video]

Any suggestion to help speed this up would be appreciated.

Lift your hand higher?

To me it looks like your fingers are almost bending the wrong way when you are trying to play the trill. I don't know how comfortable you are with your technique, but I would suggest you try changing that and see how it works...

Hi Knotty
it could be worth experimenting with some different fingerings to get the fast turns on stronger fingers, maybe 231/ 2321etc
It can be good to experiment with several different fingerings before deciding which is best.

Lento,

thanks for you comment, this is very interesting. Do you mean to sit about 1/2 an inch higher ?

Dave,

I've experimented with a few. Keeping the hand wide open seems to work best in this case. I'm totally convinced that the right fingering makes all the difference.

The difficulty for me at this time is stretching the hand, while staying relaxed. I have a small hand, and I am very stiff in general.
Maybe this comes down to a very simple problem I've had since day one. How to keep fingers 1 and 5 on an octave, and let them relax. Stretching has always been a source of tension.

new take. I raised the bench a significant amount.
Dave got me thinking, and I simply did a bit of stretching before playing.
These two things got me an instant 40bpm or so.

[video:youtube]j-AYd4roBLw[/video]

However, my fingers are still bending the wrong way. I'll see if I can do something about that. Coming up all stretched, it's hard to find the time to re-curve the finger. I'll try.

Knotty -

Looks to me as if you need to curve your 4th and 5th fingers more - and play on the tips of those fingers. Right now 4 and 5 are laying "flat" on the keyboard - compared to your 2nd and 3rd fingers - and it is making you play unevenly.

First of all, I'm very hesitant to make suggestions about hand position and such, because I think everybody is a little bit different and I think form will follow from function, i.e. try to make it sound right and you will end up with the right playing technique, whatever that is for you (except in extreme cases). Also I'm not a teacher or so take it with a grain of salt.

That being said, I notice your hand position is more like Horowitz:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=e8PJsjO1u5w#t=28s

where as a more standard position is something like Tiempo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=7LnLLt-PiCY#t=14s

So for me personally, if I tried to play that excerpt with the hand and finger position you have I would feel sort of restricted and tense, but then again I'm not you and I haven't been practicing that way.

And as for the finger bending, I just know my fingers don't bend that way. I play with more finger bend (in the "regular" fist making way) but we each have our own anatomy.

Whenever I find something that's tricky to play I like to experiment with my hand position and technique anyway to see if I can find something that makes it feel easier to play.

I hope that helps, and I don't wish to be held responsible for any hand injuries or ruining of a piano career that results from the following my amateur suggestions

it looks like carey is saying the same thing I am about the finger bend as well knotty

Carey,

The reason is because I am stretching the hand to reach.
So let me try shifting the hand a bit more and coming straight down. I'll see if that help.

I'll try that slower and see how I can keep it up at higher tempo.

You play with flat fingers even before the stretch. So I don't think the stretch is necessarily the problem. You should practice a couple of simpler exercises in the five finger position with each finger curved more and play with the tips rather than the flesh of your fingers. Do that for sometime, and come back to this. You will probably observe a slight improvement. If you do, continue doing those five finger exercises over the next couple of weeks, and you will probably end up seeing tremendous improvement at the end of 2-3 weeks. These are suggestions that one can try out. Not guaranteed to work for everybody.

Other than the flat fingers it seems to me that at one point in the second video you bend you wrist to play the thumb comfortably. I would suggest trying to move your whole forearm from the elbow a little bit inside the keys, towards the black keys area, then come back again when you've finished playing the thumb. You can do this for the little finger too if it doesn't feel comfortable right now. This is movement should be small and gradual, not a sudden jerk. For more info search for Taubman's "in and out" movement (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H3O0AyvJm8).

PS: I'm but an amateur who saw the Taubman tapes and liked most of the ideas presented there. Experiment and draw the conclusions yourself