Hi everyone,

I'd really like some input here as I've been hitting my head against the wall for several years with this issue.

I've been playing piano for 11 years now, and I've managed to learn some demanding repertoire - but my scales and fingerwork are still very sloppy. I've definitely put the time in to practice Czerny, do slow fingering exercises, and play scales over and over, but scales still take WAY too much concentration to execute and never feel clean at even moderate tempos. I have very little trouble with intricate fingerwork, but unless there is a lot of time to prepare each finger, I don't have much power or dexterity. I'm able to play the Chopin Op. 10 no. 1 etude well enough, but the Op. 10 no. 2 etude feels absolutely impossible, even at slow tempos.

Can anyone recommend any exercises or drills? I definitely have the patience for tedious work! I'm a bit worried that I may not have the dexterity simply because I started learning piano when I was 15... :-/

How is the flexibility in you forearms? Flexibility is a major problem for me, and my hands and fingers feel so much lighter when I'm stretching consistently.

Hi Synival: I started piano when I was 6, but played just what I’d describe as typical children’s pieces. I didn’t find a good teacher and undertake the study of classical piano until I was 18, so I can relate to your concerns about getting a late start. Over the years, I’ve had to interrupt my piano playing several times, sometimes for long periods and it’s just been in the last year or so that I’ve resumed a serious effort to get back into playing and really working on improving my technique.

There was another thread on PW recently about the sometimes difficult-to-resist urge we sometimes have to work on pieces that are beyond us technically. The OP had been working on Chopin’s Etude Op. 25, no. 11, after viewing a tutorial on learning this piece on YouTube. That etude is not one of my particular favorites, but I went looking for the tutorial and found the same guy, Paul Barton, also had a tutorial up for the Chopin Etude Op. 10, no. 2 which is one of my favorites—I just never thought any mere mortal human could ever play it.

Well, lo and behold, after just a week of working on the first eight or ten bars or so, I’ve already gotten it up to close to speed. It does make my right hand hurt some, so I’ve only practiced it to the point of achiness and not to the point of pain, but I think it’s already started to work some wonders on the strength of 3, 4, and 5 of my right hand which became apparent to me while performing some other pieces I'm working on. Among the tricks I’ve used to work on this etude are playing chromatic scales with just 3, 4, and 5 of each hand, hands together and separately. I would suggest you go and check out Mr. Barton’s tutorials on Op. 10, no. 2 which you can find here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zw0wk-OZUY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSbDwhLyGso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8zaSaNqFMI

The first link is a video of him performing the etude, and the two other links are to the two tutorials he’s put together. While he doesn't make light of the difficulties of this piece he really managed to convince me that with diligent effort, I too could learn to play it. So far, so good.

BTW, in case the edition you've been using is something else, I would suggest you try to use the fingering in the Mikuli edition which I believe is Chopin's own. You can find a public domain copy of that here:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

Best of luck.

These tutorials are great I'm glad there was a follow up to the first one. Simply speeding it up little by little is easier said than done! This etude is certainly beyond my ability right now, but I'm interested in it as a long-term project for my weaker fingers. It will probably take years to play up to tempo

How long have you been working on it, Krummholz? Are you practicing it as he suggests, one hour or so at a time?

So far, I've just been working on it for about a week or so. I probably work on it for close to an hour a day, but broken up into 3 or 4 sessions. Otherwise my right hand starts to hurt. One of the things he warns of is practicing it to the point of pain. I've waited all these years to get to work on this so I'm in no rush. Besides, it's the piano I like to play, not the pain-o...

Coincidentally, I was discussing finger speed at my lesson this afternoon. I can play fast but I want to be able to play even faster when I need to. My teacher told me to look for hidden tension in my arms and shoulders. He said you must be completely tension-less to play fast. He suggested I stop playing the moment tension creeps in, shake out the tension and then to restart.

For evenness, he suggested playing slowly and forte to make sure you are balancing your weight over every key. If you are reaching for a key, you are not balanced over it and the sound will be uneven. We talked about making tiny circling motions over each key to establish that balance.

You also need to remember that different fingers will naturally have different amounts of strength. Thumbs often poke out notes because they are strong. Many people have strong second fingers and those notes poke out. Different people have different lazy fingers. My 2nd finger is lazy in my LH and my 3rd in my RH. If I pay attention and am careful to balance my weight over each note, I can compensate for this.

Exercises and scales are fine but there is no reason you can't work on technique within your music as well.

I agree with everything that Deborah said in her post. Tension is not only the enemy of speed, but of musicality as well. I think it was Schnabel who said tension belongs in the forehead only.

I mainly use a few random scales for warmup but I find scales and exercises in general all too easy to execute without the necessary mindfulness and concentration. Creative practicing techniques applied to real music are, I think, the best way to work out the technical problems of real music. Music engages the mind but technical exercises often engage nothing but the fingers.

Back on the subject of the etude Op. 10, no. 2, I think you may find yourself pleasantly surprised that it won't take you a couple of years to be able to play up to speed. In any case, you don't need to be able to play the entire piece up to speed to get some technical benefit from it. I've noticed significant benefits from just working on the first few bars. As I mentioned above, I think working on chromatic scales in both hands with 3, 4, and 5 rather than the usual 1, 2, and 3, not only has great benefits to strengthening the fingers, but also challenges the brain to learn to play outside the box.

I listened to your performance of the Beethoven Op. 2, no. 3 that you posted elsewhere on PW, and musically I think it's coming along nicely. Yeah, there are a number of rough spots, but applying some creative practicing techniques to those will start to show results. It's always that last 10 percent that sometimes seems the most elusive. Are you working on the other three movements of this sonata for your audition, as well?

Regards,

John

Thanks for listening to the Beethoven. I am working on the other three movements, but I've been focused on the first and Chopin 10/1 and 10/2, so they're nowhere near ready. I've been doing intensely slow practice and various finger exercises, rhythmic displacement, etc. I'm also working up some accompanying material, so there's no shortage of things to work on!

I personally never use scales for warm ups. I use several patterns over a series of chords that are altered chromatically, one note at a time, slowly progressing up the keyboard in every major and minor triad in every inversion: (C, Cm, Ab/C, Caug, Am/C, F/C, Fm/C, then repeating the pattern with Db). I'll play alberti bass patterns in each hand, two-or-more octave arpeggios, ostinatos with the full chord, trills with various fingers, etc.

JerryS88 on this forum suggested a few fingering exercises - one that's helping build power is to hold all fingers down on the keyboard except for one I'd like to work on. I've noticed that I can barely move my RH 4 finger when 1,2,3,5 are already on the keyboard. As he suggested, I'm practicing monotonous exercises like this while reading a book, listening to the radio, or watching a movie. It may seem counter-intuitive, but having something else to focus on relieves some stress and lets my finger do the work, not my eyes and ears.

'poke out' - a very excellent way of describing finger volume dominance gooddog.

Personally, I've concluded that exercises designed to equalize the fingers are largely futile. The fourth finger will never have independence or strength comparable to the others which is simply a function of the anatomy of the hand and its flexor and extensor muscles and tendons. Rather I think that achieving equality among the fingers is sometimes a question of "throttling back" the stronger and more independent fingers and sometimes a question of using combinations of wrist and arm motions to compensate for the weakness of a particular finger.

There's an interesting discussion on the usefulness of technical exercises, finger independence and the anatomical constraints on the latter here:

http://www.music.sc.edu/ea/keyboard/PPF/2.3/2.3.PPFp.html

Of course, as with everything, the contrary may be shown, so I'd be interested in hearing the opinions of more advanced players on this subject.

Regards,

John

Well, yes and no. Throttling back is effective to a point but if you are truly playing with relaxed arm weight and not finger pushing, the individual finger strengths don't dominate the sound and it becomes more even.

By the way, John. You've written some excellent posts. Welcome to the forum!

Maybe you can try Hanon Revisited. After going through all the rhythmic variations of the scales you should notice a great improvement.

Excellent link noted. It drives me crazy that there is disagreement over the use of Hanon/Czerny and such.
I like the known, not the unknown.

Hi Deborah:

Thank you kindly for the welcome. I've been lurking here for awhile. Like perhaps a lot of PW'ers, I have almost no friends who are classical piano music lovers, certainly none who play themselves, and it's still a bit astounding to me that we can come here and talk about this passion we share with folks from all around the world.

BTW, I'd also like to tell you how much I enjoyed your post of the Waldstein on the Member Recordings Forum. I think it's coming along wonderfully and I'm looking forward to hearing the whole thing later this year.

Regards,

John

I know just what you mean. For most of my life, classical music and classical piano have been extremely important to me but I had no one to share them with. Through Pianoworld I have made wonderful online and in-the-flesh friends and I don't feel so isolated. Thank you for listening to the Waldstein. It's getting much better.

Stretch out your forearms! You have co-contracting muscles on the top and bottom of your forearm, and you can't lift your 4th finger because the flexors (underneath) are too tight.

Like Gooddog and her teacher said, the moment you feel tightness stop playing and stretch. If that's only after 5-10 seconds of playing then so be it. Stop and stretch. This will make your fingers considerably "lighter" and faster. You may even want to do VERY light stretching between the actual fingers (i.e not related to the forearms).

Gooddog, I like what your teacher said about rolling the fingers over the keys to make sure they are balanced. That is a really good idea. Thanks for sharing!

Tony

John,

It sounds like you're quoting Chopin (which I can appreciate!).

And playing the chromatic scale with 3,4,5 is part of my warm-up everyday (along with 1,2,3 in chromatic).

I agree that "equality" of the fingers is not really a goal worth pursuing, since they obviously are not equal and can't be made to be equal, no matter how hard one works at it.

The problem is that the focus is on the wrong thing - it's not that the fingers should be equal, but that the notes played can be equal if that's what is called for. And that is a totally different issue. If I play a scale, I want to have the ability to make it sound like a all the notes are equal, or are in a nice smooth crescrendo, or whatever, regardless of whether my fingers are "equal" or not. To do that, I need the maximum control over each finger I can manage.

While the fourth finger has some physical limitations, there's still a lot it can do. I think it is worthwhile to develop it to make it as usable as possible. IIRC (and FWIW), Horowitz once said something to the effect that working on the fourth finger was the single most important aspect of technique.

Last year on PW, there was a rather lengthy and at times heated discussion about the Taubman technique. One of the comments included a link to a post over on Pianostreet which can be found here:

http://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,7226.msg72166.html#msg72166

In this post from PS (which discusses the various hand and arm movements needed to play rapid scales), the point was made that paradoxically, in playing the piano one must frequently make movements which are uneven in order to produce music that sounds even.

I think it's undeniable that the larger the muscle, the easier it is to control. So therefore it's easiest to control forward and backward movement of the upper body, the shoulders and arms are still quite easy to control and the individual fingers are the most difficult of all.

Years ago, I used to do an exercise wherein I'd place my hand with all fingers in contact with the keyboard or a table. Then I'd try to raise each finger individually as slowly as possible to its maximum height and then lower it, again, as slowly as possible. It is extraordinarily difficult to do this smoothly. Fingers tend to want to move digitally (pun intended), i.e. to move in a series of discrete, jerky steps, rather than smoothly and seamlessly.

I think this tendency can be improved upon up to a point, but I suspect that it is those of us who started studying the piano at the earliest age, who are blessed with the best fine motor control. To compensate for my deficiencies in this area, insofar as is possible, I try to limit my finger movements to moving them into the right position and then rely on larger muscles (i.e. wrists and arms) to actually initiate the playing of the notes.

Ultimately we all seek to develop a real time facility of critical listening which enables us to immediately reproduce from our fingers, wrists, hands, and arms, by whatever means available to us, that which we hear in our mind's ear. It all sounds so very simple. I only wish it were.

Just to clarify, I didn't say to stretch. I said to shake out the tension hands.

Krummholz, I think I have the similar concern that you do, also starting piano from a later age. I've always tended to rely on weight from my wrist, arm, and body to produce sound because my fingers don't obey my commands as well as I'd like them to. Passages that involve lots of leaping with the arm have never been that difficult, but rapid scales are virtually impossible without using a few "tricks".

I've just had another hefty practice session with Chopin 10/1 and 10/2 - several hours, but nothing is sore. In fact, I feel great, like I just had a good workout Anyway, I had an observation that's some good food for thought:

Somebody please chime in if this sounds like awful advice

When working up a difficult passage or etude, the target tempo can theoretically be reached with slow, careful, and attentive practicing. However, in my case, as the metronome clicks faster and faster, it takes more and more concentration to give commands to my fingers quickly enough that the notes are executed, even after days, weeks, or even years of patience.

However, the tendency is always to practice from left to right, thinking of each finger individually as it comes. There are limits to the speed of each finger, and when playing 16th notes at fast tempos, there simply isn't enough time to give commands to each finger and expect them to move the same way as they did slowly.

Take the 10/1 etude, for example. At tempo, the fingers will work themselves out in no time if their entire execution is crammed into the space of one 16th note, but each finger actually has the entire length of the beat to rise and fall.

The fingering is essentially 1,2,3(or 4),5 or 5,3(or 4),2,1 from beginning to end. Because this fingering is so straight forward, I've begun practicing this etude by following one individual finger each play-through, paying careful attention to its preparation, execution, and release. Once a key is struck, I immediately begin preparing to play the next using a smooth motion. The goal is to train each finger, one by one, to use as much time as it needs to strike its target in a relaxed manner.

I'm strongly considering applying this method to the 10/2 etude, which sounds like a daunting task because the fingering is excruciatingly complex Placing accents an on individual finger each play-through my seem like overkill, but I'm curious to see the results. Of course I'll practice slowly, stop immediately if I cause myself any pain, switch fingers often to avoid repetitive motion injures, blah blah blah My hope is that practicing this way will teach each finger to prepare itself early so I can safely crank up the tempo.

Hi Synival. First let me say, I'm not a teacher so take what I’m about to say with several grains of salt.

There is, I think, an absolute limit to how fast anyone can play with finger movement alone. If you hold your hand on a table top and just try moving your index finger up and down as fast as you can you’ll see what I mean. In my own case I probably top out at about 5-6 oscillations per second. Things really get pathetic when you try this with your fourth finger. You'll notice that if you just hold your thumb on the table and try moving your index finger up and down, but now allowing your whole hand to pivot at the wrist, that things get somewhat faster. Now I suppose unless you’re trying to play the Prokofiev Toccata the hard way this doesn’t prove anything, but it’s just meant to demonstrate that there is a limit to what fingers alone can do whether you’re Argerich or you or me.

If you place your right hand on the keyboard with your thumb on C and pinky on G and hold your wrist absolutely static you can probably play that five note scale fragment from C to G pretty fast, but with a relatively large expenditure of effort and using only small muscles that are more difficult to control. If you try playing the same scale fragment by holding your fingers in a curved, arched and relatively static in position over those same keys and this time just rotate your wrist and forearm you can probably play this same scale fragment as fast or faster with much less energy, using the larger muscles of the arm and with greater control.

I don’t play the Op. 10, no. 1 etude, but if you position your right hand over the appropriate keys so as to play the opening C-G-C-E figure and try playing it with purely finger action while keeping your wrist static versus by having your fingers over the keys and just rolling your wrist and forearm from left to right, you can see how much easier, more accurate and even it is. The trick then is that while you’re in the midst of this rolling action, to start moving your thumb (using mostly lateral finger motion) into position over the C below the E you just finished playing. Then a quick wrist roll to the left off the E gets your thumb to play that C and while you’re rolling your wrist to the left, you simultaneously use mostly lateral finger motion to position your other fingers over the next G-C-E, roll to the right and repeat this process to the end of this figure.

If you use just finger motion to press the keys, it’s difficult to play evenly because it’s difficult to control these small muscles. But, if you’re using finger motion above the keys just to position your fingers you only need to control their position not the amount of force applied and that's a lot easier to accomplish. As I tried to describe in one of my posts above, I try as much as possible to use finger motion to get myself into the position I need to be in where I can then use wrist and arm motion to do the actual playing. As you know, I am working on Op. 10, no. 2 and I use this same method of playing on that etude, albeit with smaller movements and in a more confined and less expansive way than I would on Op. 10, no. 1. Fortunately, the chords played with the thumb and index fingers in the right hand are only sixteenth notes for otherwise the chromatic scales in the right hand would have to be played entirely with finger action. That would really be tough!

I hope some of this made sense.

Regards,

John

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that everything be played with the fingers alone. There are so many elements to consider: pivoting motions, weight from the wrist, arm, shoulder, etc. I'm simply pondering how to make finger motion as efficient as possible.

Honestly I never thought you were playing with the fingers alone. The performance you posted of Op. 2, no. 3 is enough evidence of that.


Sometimes though, you can't practice a fast passage slowly in the same way you would play it if it actually was a slow passage, and then expect to gradually speed it up to full tempo. There are ways you can play slow scales, tremolos, or trills for example that reach a speed barrier if you just try to gradually increase your speed.

What I guess I meant to suggest (and utterly failed to) is that you try to identify how you're going to have to play a passage at speed technically, and then either practice that technique more slowly or, practice fragments you can manage at speed (even if they're only 3 notes at first) and gradually start stringing them together. Using Op. 10, no. 1 as an example, it's pretty easy to play the C-G-C-E figure at speed, the problem is stringing multiples of this figure together, so I'd concentrate on just the fragment E-C-G (using 5-1-2, respectively) until you can get it up to speed, etc.

Anyway, now you know why I'm not a piano teacher!

Regards,

John