Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum I'm frustrated on how mechanical I sound :(

Lately I realized I'm just pressing the right keys in the right order.

Here's a quick recording so you can hear what I mean:

http://soundcloud.com/fellipe-de-paula/andante-in-d-1

IMO I sound totally mechanical and I'm frustrated... How can I improve this? Will I ever improve?

Please, share your thoughts!!

Thanks

Hi there.

I personally don't hear any serious defects in your playing. I think that part of it is that the piece, in some sense, isn't that musically interesting, so there isn't much room for expression. (Maybe I'll get flamed by more experienced players for saying this!) As you move into more advanced or generally more expressive pieces, you'll probably have more opportunities to work on your musicality.

Keep up the good work, and good luck!

At 26sec you can't just repeat 3 times without some variation. Try 1st time mf, 2nd p, 3rd f.

I think at the start you could do with just a touch more in the right hand to get the balance right, just to make sure the tune is crystal clear.
At 0:06 there seems to be a bit of an awkward gap - I don't know the piece well, maybe there is a rest there? Either way the pause doesn't seem to fit rhythmically to my ears.
As chopin_r_us said, at 0:23 they can't just all be the same though I would personally crescendo through them into a very confident and firm finish.
For each new phrase, think of it as a completely new idea, trying to say something completely different to the last one. It might seem like overkill to do it every time a new phrase is brought in but this might help you think of variations on how you're playing that can make it more interesting to listen to. It might also help to imagine you're singing each phrase, and what kind of shape you would sing in - would you crescendo slightly in the middle of phrases? Add feminine endings? Lean on certain notes?
Hope this helps!

You will improve, Felipe, and you've overcome the biggest hurdle just by recognising the problem.

There are two aspects to the solution. The first is mechanical; having the technical equipment to achieve what's in you head. Do you have a teacher and have you been shown how to press the keys, squeeze them, stroke them or brush them? Do you lift off, roll off or jump off the keys? It's very difficult to get this from books, you really do need one on one with a teacher for this. Watching You Tube videos of the great keyboard performers can be helpful but I mean watching not listening. Watch how the fingers and hands move over the keys, on them and off them.

Try these ( I don't know how to put links up but you should find them by searching)
"Pogorelich plays Scarlatti K20"
"Pogorelich plays Scarlatti K159"
"Horowitz Scarlatti L224"
"Horowitz Scarlatti L23"
"Valentina Lisitsa plays Traumerei"
"Franz Liszt - Consolation Nr. 3 - Daniel Barenboim"
"Mozart Andante from Piano Sonata No 16 C major K 545 Mitsuko Uchida"

The second aspect is musical. You have to imagine how the music should sound. Put words to the music if it helps and sing the piece to yourself.

Don't learn Mozart's Andante after listening for a month to Tchaikovsky and Wagner.
Listen instead to the early baroque composers for a couple of weeks, or Palestrina. Mozart's dissonances are very subtle and will be lost to an ear familiar with the chromatic thunder of the late Romantics.

Yes, that's certainly the idea. Play with them (geddit?).

I like what you've said here about how a phrase would be sung .. but I HAVE to ask. What are feminine endings?? I've never heard anyone say that before.

feminine ending is when the phrase ends on an unstressed note or even a tiny decrescendo. it might help to think of if as a comma instead of a period.

kurt

Ok, that's what I figured. My teacher refers to it as "rounding off". It just seems a bit odd in this day and age to term it as "feminine". what would a masculine ending be? one that ends with a accent?

Fe - Hello again. I often feel the same way. All my playing sounds even/same/boring. I also use the word mechanical when I play. I listened to your post and it sounded nice to me. I wouldn't call it mechanical but it was all fairly even in tone. I do the same thing when I play but so much interest can be added to a piece with just dynamics (playing louder and softer in various parts). So, I have been really focusing on changing my touch and dynamics when I play for the last few weeks and I am starting to hear a bit of a difference. I say a bit because I really struggle to play soft and to properly balance my LH and RH. But slowly I think I am able to get more expressive in my playing. But I find I can only do this when I have a firm grasp on the piece I'm playing. Then I can start to add more dynamics. Well I try to add them in from the beginning but somewhere along the way dynamics get lost/forgotten!

So, as others have said, maybe if you try adding more dynamics into your pieces they will start to sound more musical.

My 7 year old was doing this the other day on one of his simple pieces and hearing this really hit home how different the same piece can sound with dynamic contrast.

I know some prefers it to be tempo strict especially with baroque and classical pieces, but I find adding a slight delay during each cadence gives it a bit more life.
And also as others have mentioned, dynamics. Whenever a pattern is repeated, as it often does in classical music, play the next one in a contrasting dynamic. So it can sound either like an echo, or the opposite, going from p to f.

I was thinking about this before I read this thread.

In theory, if I manually entered every note from a musical score into a midi sequencer, using all the info given to me on the score, doing things like altering note length to give legato effect, velocity for when it should be played louder/softer etc, if I did this and played the result back, surely it would still sound extremely mechanical and unnatural, almost like recording a piece into a sequencer and over quantizing it.


I brought a cheap blues intro course that included downloable MP3 files showing you how each exercise should sound. I tried without this and was getting all the notes right, right length etc but mine sounded nothing like it should. Once I heard how it should sound, it took very little time for me to adjust my playing and get into the swing of the piece

With the advent of the internet, you can pretty much find out how any well known piece should sound, hence know what you should be aiming for.

But, how is a beginner supposed to know from just the score alone how a piece should sound?

fe2008's piece sounds to me like they've learnt the piece as presented in the score, right note lengths, rests etc and I can imagine if I learnt that piece without ever hearing how it should be played, I too would be playing it in the same sort of way. Even if I played around with the repeated parts at 23+ secs playing each one at different volumes, unless this is on the actual score, am I playing it how the composer intended?

Not sure if I'm succeeding in making my point/asking my question or not

best

Joe

Joe, I hope you don't mind me "attacking" this notion of "should sound like" but here goes...

When I started out I thought that the most service I could do to the music was to play it as closely as possible to that of the rendition that I liked the most. To be a copycat, essentially. The result was always mechanical playing with very little life to it, so today I view this as a sure way to freeze you up and imprison yourself, both in body and mind.

There is enormous liberation in opening up to the possibility that there is no should, but only play and intent listening. From intent listening we can then make up what we feel is right for this day, and/or adapt to how we started out the piece, like an improviser. Many of the masters (Horowitz among others) have said that they never play a piece the same way twice, so why should we aim for this? After all, we PLAY music, we don't manufacture music.

Btw. to my ears OP's piece didn't sound especially mechanical, however I agree with the advice about adding a tad more dynamics into the equation and add a tiny more space between the ending of phrases and the beginning of new ones as a way of breathing little more life into a piece that in it's very nature is mechanical (and perhaps this is part of the attraction of it, so actually, why not lift this aspect to the forefront instead of hiding it?)

Hi,
Inky already suggested treating each phrase individually.
I'd like to add: try thinking in whole phrases (musical units) - like you are talking in whole phrases, not single words. As you work with longer units, you'll find that there are only few notes that get stressed and others that just "go by".

This video was posted here before, but the beginning illustrates what I mean (of course you sound way better than those kids he parodies! )
TED talks Zander

Keep up the good work.

It's just what I've been taught to call it over the years, I've never heard anyone refer to a masculine ending, only ever feminine so I'm afraid wouldn't know =P

Hehe, attack away, I'm here to learn.

I want to emphasise that my wording on my post wasn't it's best, I wasn't meaning to say that I thought the Ops piece was extremely mechanical, more that I understood the point they made and I would be playing it similar.

What you say makes sense and I will try to take it onboard.

However Had I not heard how the swing etc should have sounded in the blues tracks, they would simply have never sounded blusey in the way I was following the score, it's more working out that aspect that I meant. Very hard to put into words what I mean. Another bad example would be to imagine never hearing a waltz and having a piece in 3/4 time. Unless you hear the waltz being played, you would never get the swing of how the waltz was meant to be heard.

Maybe with me, it's more that when I hear how others play a piece, it gives me ideas on where to add emphasis. allowing me to bring the piece to life rather than it being me hearing it how it should be played.

For example me playing the few bars of the very simple blues rift, then hearing how the course is playing it, was like a light bulb going off as to how I should be approaching it. I mess around with the bars putting my own feel to it, but I needed that original experience of how the blues rift sounds, to break out of the box I was stuck in.

Still not sure I'm explaining myself that well

Either way, it's a skill I need to learn.

best

Joe

Or how you could be approaching it ;-) But yeah, I definitely see your point. We need to know the rules to break them, sorta... And perhaps our increased ability to rely on our own hearing really comes from experience more than anything. Still I think it is beneficial no matter what level we are at to always be open to the possibility that our own ears could indeed give us more answers than we sometimes give them credit for. And that in learning to trust our own hearing it develops at a much faster rate than if we become too involved with, or even enslaved, by other recordings.

By the way, I am not talking not letting ourselves be influenced by those recordings, only that they are not the be all and end all of that piece, the holy grail (which I believed some years ago).