hello,

I'm wondering if this is a good thing...A few days ago I realized that the way my hands are built might be useful for learning. Particularly when learning a new piece and taking it really slow. Actually, I'm not sure, it might also be a bad thing if it's bad for my joints to keep doing this, but now that I am picking up on how to shift the weight of my arm, I'm realizing this might be good thing (i've only had a proper teacher for about 5 weeks now even though I started nearly a year ago with a bad teacher and then self taught for a while...i didn't even realize the first one was bad until the new one was so insightful about technique).

Anyway, I hope you get the idea...my thumb can snap back and forth, up and down in piano posture, I think this makes it easier if I'm holding down a key with my thumb and I went to press down another key, it's really easy to let go of the thumb without disturbing the rest of my hand. Make sense to anyone? I'll probably ask a doctor if it's unhealthy but really I do it involuntarily so I hope it's not.

We all have little quirks in our body, I'm curious if anyone else has this or if someone more experienced can tell me their opinion.

All what I know from my teacher that I have to relax the thumb after release of a key. If there is tension with the thumb, it will get in the way playing other fingers. I have to learn to hang loose my thumb as much as possible. I don't know if your snappy thumb is a good thing, but if there's almost no energy involved doing it and there is no tension afterwards, it sounds good to me. What does your teacher say?

The key for the thumb, wish I had known this a year ago when I wrote about "my big fat thumb", is to move from the joint that's at the top of the wrist (e.g. the third joint from the tip of the thumb). If it's snappy from there - whatever that means! - it has a good chance of working OK.