I saw this video about the tausig exercise. I've never heard of it, was wondering if any of you have and how effective it really is!

It's in book two of the Tausig's Daily Studies, Exercise No. 91. You'll find it on ISMLP.

Regards,

I don't know it, but it reminds me a lot of Dohnanyi's rather more compact no. 31, which uses the same basic idea. And that one does does provide a very nice workout for the hand. Whether practicing that figuration makes technique "skyrocket" I don't know, because I've never isolated it from all the other technical stuff I do.

I can't see that one particular exercise devoted to one aspect of technique is going to drastically improve ones technique. If that were so, I wonder why Tausig wrote 108 other "Daily Studies."

Cautions from the video about playing this exercise correctly may be well-advised, but I don't necessarily subscribe to his contradictory statement : "No pain, no gain." While he adds that there is "good pain" and "bad pain," I think that the use of the word "pain" - particularly in a public-access instructional video - is mis-guided.

Regards,

It's a good exercise - I do a version of it with a different chord progression.

But Bruce is right - no one exercise will dramatically overhaul anyone's technique, and one should be able to do it without any pain at all. A bit of fatigue in the beginning, perhaps, but never pain.

It is also somewhat similar to Pischna's #29 and #30, and numerous others throughout Pischna and Joseffy.

They are all good, if done correctly, which means no pain at all. Ever.

I tell my students to stop not when they actually have pain, but before that, when they feel the pain coming from afar, over on the horizon.

Words to live by.

I don't think that one size fits all when it comes to pain. Some people simply don't feel it as quickly as others, for one thing. And, being an older person, I can tell you that there are pains that may arise while playing the piano that may not be caused by doing something wrong. If I followed a strict pain-avoidance doctrine, I'd probably just never play at all.

And I'm not even sure that we all are talking about the same sensation every time when we use the word "pain" - something may be somewhat uncomfortable that one person will describe as pain, but another might not.

So I think that while it remains good advice to be aware of pain and what may be causing it, it's also not a good idea to get overly simplistic about it.

Ahh, you must have watched "Bach Scholar's" video, yes? I watched that one too and wondered about this exercise.

I have actually tried it and did feel a bit of fatigue but certainly no pain. I did, however, experience pain when switching from my digital piano to an acoustic grand this past month. My wrists/hands have been truly hurting lately from the switch =/...but not from the Tausig exercises.

Are you sure? I've downloaded the book of Tausig's Piano Exercises and can't find it. No. 91 is a series of ascending block triad chords. I'm very interested in getting a print version, since I'm pretty fuzzy (I took lessons a long time ago) about the diminished and the inversion of the dom. 7th of all the keys. I imagine it will be much easier to read everything from the page than to figure out each chord.

No. 91 is a series of two-note chords in each hand, each hand mirroring the other in direction : when the right hand goes up the left hand goes down and vice-versa, but the overall progression is a chromatically upward one.

On IMSLP the studies are listed under "Daily Studies." Exercise 91 is in Bk II, page 34 of the Steingräber edition.

The first four chords in the RH are :

C/G, E/A, G/C, E/A while, underneath that the LH plays :
G/C, E/A, C/G, E/A (chords are written bottom note then top note.

Regards,

Do you or does anyone else think that the Tausig method can prepare my fingers for when I transfer from a Yamaha YPG-625 to a more acoustic feeling piano? I simply can't afford to upgrade my digital piano to a more realistic keyboard. I do have trouble when I go to a Yamaha dealer up the strreet from me and play their acoustics and grands. It really has me a bit down and concerened, especially after all the hours I put in trying to learn.

These are good exercises, but must be done lightly, very lightly. My teacher many years ago gave me a whole series of variations of this exercise. Starting in a closer position...

C D E F G
C D Eb F G
C Db Eb F Gb

then to Db and so on...

there were a number of different note patterns, such as 12121234 54545432 or 13243524 31425342 and a bunch more, before moving onto the double note version, then doing all the same in the extended octave version shown in the video.

FWIW, I belive it's number 36 in my Tausig book...