Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum moving eyes from sheet to hand and back to sheet

"...Anybody having the same problem? Any suggestions about the best method to train the switch between watching the sheet and watching the hands?"

It is true that practice is necessary to pick up this very handy knack, but I would also say, have confidence in your brain: it already has this natural ability to make use of its short-term memory. We use it all the time: it guides many movements, the course of conversations, the way our eyes know how to scan lines of text, where we put our feet next, how our hands 'know' where we put down that cup of coffee.

We don't 'think' about these things, because the 'thinker' part of our brain has other business, and it is kept clear of these tasks.

There are techniques. We can 'tell' ourselves that this will happen. We can relax, and 'notice' that it happens. We can 'ask' it to happen. We can take a little exercise before sitting down to play (a walk, for example), so that the muscles and reflexes are toned, and the body has plenty of circulating oxygen--- this helps all the centers of the brain, higher and lower. We can discover that the brain can take many useful clues from our peripheral vision, and that it can often tell where our hands are without pulling the eyes entirely away from the score. And there are practice techniques: for example, making the movement over and over until it 'jells' and the body just knows--- this will be very familiar to any pianist.

I would say that if you have gotten this far with being able to read music, you already have good reason to be confident that your brain, body, hands, and that your musical and kinesthetic sense can work together.

memorizing (visual, kinesthetic, and aural) should be an active part of your practice routine - and not an after-thought - and could easily be incorporated into one whether you intend/want to memorize the piece in question or not

When I had this problem, I resolved it by not moving the head, only the eyes when looking down and up. Just giving a quick look to the keyboard and not following my hand or finger movement with the eyes either.

Marco M, JUST WAIT...until your eyes start "to go" and you realize they're not focusing as fast when you glance at your hands and then back to the sheet music- which is now blurry!
Adds a whole other element of FUN....

Advancing only means to encounter new problems at a different level

Here is my approach, in case it might be useful. Full disclosure, I'm still very much a student, but here are some things I've found useful.

Through much much much practice, you can cultivate a keen sense of measurement with your hands. It's something that I'm still working on, but I've made a lot of progress with it. Here's an example of a drill that I do. Put your R thumb on middle C. Close your eyes and play middle C, then immediately span up and play the C one octave above middle C with your pinky. Open your eyes and see if you got it right. Pretty soon you should be able to tell without looking (just by the sound) if you spanned the correct distance. You want to practice this until you can reliably span one octave with your hand. I also just (in the air) stretch my fingers to the span of an octave and put them over the keys to make sure that my sense of an octave's measurement is correct. The idea is to get the feeling of an octave ingrained in your muscle memory. That then becomes a sort of measuring stick. Now, with your eyes closed, play middle C and span up one octave so that your pinky is on the next C up but DON'T play it -- without playing the note, quickly replace your pinky with your thumb (just by touch, don't look) and span up a second octave and play the C two octaves above middle C. Practice this over and over until you can quickly jump two octaves without looking at your hand (and actually jumping 3 octaves is easy once you get two down). Repeat this with your left hand moving down the keyboard. If you get this skill down, you'll be able to move rapidly up or down the keyboard in octave jumps without looking at the keys.

I do similar drills to establish the feeling of other intervals. Ive recently started making my own scores with just the intervals I'm working on. For example a score that's just jumps of 4ths (or 4ths and 6ths, or 2nd's and 5ths, or 3rds, 4ths, and 5ths, etc....). I practice with different fingerings and such, moving up and down the keyboard in different intervals (and teaching myself to recognize those intervals on the score by sight). I'm convinced that this practice has helped me a lot with awkward jumps, I can work out what my new hand position needs to be for an appropriate fingering after the jump and just move by touch the appropriate interval (or combination of intervals - for example, I might need to span up an octave, replace pinky with thumb, span up a 3rd -- or whatever, it's easy for me now).

Here's a caveat. Even though you can make big jumps pretty quickly with practice, sometimes this is too slow to do at tempo (for me anyway). So, sometimes I simply must look at my hands for a jump. But when I start a piece and am practicing at slow tempo, I can always do it first by touch/measurement (at least so far . It lets me work through a score without having to look down at my hands. Once I can do that, bringing the piece up to speed isn't so bad when I switch and allow myself to look at my hands when I need to.

----------------

Here's another drill that has been very useful to me and might help you with both memorizing and getting your eyes to track back to the score.

Start with the first measure of a piece (or section). Play it (from the score). Immediately close your eyes and play it again. You'll likely screw it up, don't worry about it, in fact plan on getting it completely wrong at first. But don't stop, keep playing even if you're playing completely incorrect or dissonant notes or incorrect rhythms. Open your eyes and play it from the score again (since you're just closing your eyes and not actually moving your head it should be easier to track back to the score). Close your eyes and play it. Keep repeating this alternating pattern until you can play it correctly and repeatedly with your eyes closed (but keep alternating looking/not looking). Now do the next measure the same way. When you have the second measure down, play the first two measures together in the same way, now do the third measure and keep going until the end of the line. Then start at the next line and repeat the process. This helps you build your working memory, and it gets you used to tracking your eyes to different spots in the score.

As you practice this drill, you'll get better at it. You'll be able to start with multiple measures. (When a piece has phrase markings, I try to do it for the whole phrase, otherwise I start with 4-8 measures depending on how complex the piece is.) And of course, you can start in the middle of a piece, like in a spot where you're having trouble having your eyes go back to when you look down at your hands.

Anyway, hope some of that might be useful.

Fizikisto, thanks a lot for your comprehensive description of the drills!
... I will need some time to report if this or one of the other recommendations worked for me. There´s a lot of practicing to be done!

Try to link the notes you see on the sheet and the music, so you can virtually "hear" the music in your mind then you look into notes. It is easier to do then you are really playing the music.

This way you will be able to find the place in the music sheet pretty easily - like you can find a place in a book what you read before.

Fur Elise consists from very different passages which can be easily separated from each other, so you should be able to find them in the sheet.

The other way is to learn the harmony - play arpeggios in the same tonality as the musical piece you are learning - so you won't get the notes wrong as they usually follow some pattern (it can be learnt from the theory).

PS. I am now trying to learn a Christmass piece in jazz arrangement and find it really hard - there is a lot of hand movements between octaves, the harmony is not familiar to me, so I guess without learing the jazz theory it will be difficult for me to play jazz.

I find that sometimes I memorize the sheet music, or to be more accurate the layout of the sheet music. I wonder if this comes into play when moving eyes from hand back to sheet. On a new piece I definitely have more trouble.

Probably as you become more adept at this piece you will find it easier to switch your eyes between your hand and the sheet music.

Yes, my suggestion was similar to yours, just other way around.

Also, if cannot memorize the entire piece yet, I try to constantly scan it then I am playing, to keep up with where I am and to easily find the place I am playing. Just a very quick look forth and back.

And as you learn the piece, you hands memorize the right position, so you need not look at them all time.

The more you play the piece, the more your hand remember and you will be fine.

Yes, a week after my initial post I can confirm, as everybody would expect it, that having played the piece again much more often and of course especially concentrating on the weak measures, that it´s getting better. The trend is going towards sticking with the eyes on the hands throughout the difficult measure, and keeping them there until the next phrase/pattern begins, the start of which [the start of the changing layout, as some of you would call it] is more easy to find in the sheet. There my eyes jump into the sheet again. Just glancing quickly towards my hands still confuses me too much.

I'm struggling with this right now too. I have a tricky measure that has a big old chord that's hard for me to land on cleanly in the left, at the same time as a two octave jump in the right. So, I'm wanting not only to look down at the keyboard, but to look in two places at once. It ain't working!

I'll try to memorize those couple bars and find myself an easy "resume reading" spot on the page. Thanks for that advice. And as for the split vision, I guess it's really just practice, practice, practice!

LizAnne, and I thought that I would be in trouble! Wish you all the best!

I get this a lot, LizAnne.

The trick is to briefly look where you're going to go just before you go, by about a beat or two, and the hand goes there just as if you were still looking although in my case that may be from years of experience but I don't remember ever having a problem in that area.

I once had a leap that was driving me nuts, and I put a sticker on the key so I could feel it. Then I got used to it and the sticker came off.