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Any suggestions for how to release some really engrained tension in my hands? It's choking off everything! I think I always played with too much tension, and then I stopped playing altogether.

I decided to start up again after 25 years about three weeks ago, and obviously nothing good has happened to my piano skills in the interim. (And I was not very good when I stopped). What is clear, however, is that for whatever reason, I just claw up and just do super weird things with my wrists and it just does not look natural. So, of course, nothing really gets down and out the fingers in a good way, resulting in some really bad uneveness. I don't sound notes that my finger is actually on, or I jab at it and then some random note gets accented without me intending to.

Anyway, any of you veterans have some exercises to do that helps? Part of it is anxiety (I can't even play for my teacher without getting nervous), but a lot of it is just 25 years of not asking my fingers, wrists and arms to do this. And because I'm pretty sure even at my best, I had some bad tension in there, it's not just a matter of getting my sea legs back. I will have to do some overt work to fix this. I really recall having a lot of trouble with velocity on runs and arpeggios that should have flowed easier, and I used to get searing pain between my shoulder blades. I wonder if my hand positioning was always this bad.

Here's video of me this morning, murdering a chopin nocturne. And some scales. I am a little better with hand tension in the scales, but they are uneven and off the beat, as you'll hear. At least they're marginally together on the same note, though. That was NOT the case three weeks ago. I could not play two octaves of c major with both hands together! Very depressing. So I'm sure things will improve, but if anybody has any suggestions for how to start working on the tension and hand positioning so I learn/relearn things better from the get-go, I would be enormously appreciative.

Scales: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/89452048/IMG_2076_small.m4v

Nocturne: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/89452048/Movie%20on%205-17-13%20at%2010.07%20AM.m4v

I haven't had a chance to look at your video, but I'd say that you should definitely ease back into it if you've been away from the piano for 25 years! Three weeks is not a very long time to get readjusted. There's some good general advice on the other technique thread someone posted recently.

Video doesn't work for me.

You get a muscle sensor from here: http://www.advancertechnologies.com/p/muscle-sensor-v3.html Maybe make the sleeve they suggest. Make a VCO with an NE 555 chip (about a buck's worth of electronics), put on the sleeve, plug in your 9v battery and hey presto! Every time tension creeps in you'll hear it loud and clear.

Oh, I know. I know three weeks isn't long. But I figure there's no need to settle back into old habits that weren't good to start with. I was thinking maybe now is actually the best time to seek the guidance, when my brain is more willing to accept a new way of doing things. Which is why I'm starting square one with some scales and arpeggios. I think the reason why the scales and arpeggios look (slightly) better than the rest of it is because I've changed something there by going back to basics. Give me a piece, even a new one, and I immediately go back to some patterns I recognize as having been problematic all those years ago.

Anyway, my teacher is helping some. But because this tension thing is very pervasive (even when I write!) I think I might need to really take a very intentional approach to eliminating it.

Does that make sense?

In other words, I'm not here, three weeks in, asking why I'm not doing this or that correctly. I know it takes time. I know my expression will come back. I know I will get my firm sense of which key I'm in back, I know my fingers will eventually be able to find the keys without scrambling on big chords. But I would very much like to have it relearn those things with positioning and tension controlled better, so when those things DO happen, I'm hitting the ground running.

LOL are you serious? If you are, that's hilarious, and my daughter, who is going to engineering camp this summer, would pounce on the project. Biofeedback! Heh. How does it discern between tension necessary to control the movement, and excessive tension that is just serving to clamp everything down?

My initial reaction to the scale video (the Nocturne took too long to load and I didn't have the patience to wait), is that you are playing your scales too fast for your current ability. You are evidently struggling to keep up with the metronome and that struggle, in itself, could be part - large or small - of what is causing your tension.

I would suggest that you slow down your scale practice to at least half the speed of those in the video, even slower, perhaps, and concentrate on relaxing before and after each and every note or groups of notes that you play.

Then play your scales in groups :
- relax, play two notes, relax
- relax, play the next two notes, relax
- relax, play the next two notes, relax

While doing this, play the two notes two ways :
1) Drop gently on the first, lift after the second; it should be a simple down/up motion, with a slight accent on the first note
2) Play the first note lightly and "land" on the second note, staying there while your verify that your hand remains relaxed, as though that second note were the "goal" you were aiming for.
Eventually you may be ready to move to three, then four notes at a time, finally leading to playing a full octave in a totally relaxed but controlled manner.

At all times (before and after) you should be concentrating on physical relaxation.

This may sound tedious - and it is! - but knowing that you are tense is only half the problem. I think you need to take initial steps that are small enough that your thought process continuously reminds you to relax and the physical actions are responding appropriately to that mental directive.

Speed should not be a goal at the moment, but playing evenly and relaxed should.

Regards,

As your life! Most people play with too much tension - it'll buzz like heck (forgot about the h*ll thing - just too bizarre). Experts will be able to control it. https://www.box.com/s/upun67r04ipe5i2ter3y Sorry about the pjs - I do my best inventing then.

Hmm, I will try that. I've been making a conscious effort to slow down, but clearly it's not slow enough. As some of the familiarity comes back in, the speed just creeps up, because everything used to be a whole lot faster. I'm sure my idea of a moderate tempo is calibrated to a time when I was able to handle it.

I can definitely slow it down. I have no other goal in mind than to build myself up simply to be a good pianist, whether or not that has anything to do with what I once was, whatever that was. I just want to keep the parts that are worth keeping and drop the stuff that probably was what caused me to ultimately give it up all those years ago.

I'm lucky in that I don't have to start from scratch, but the downside is that along with carryover skill comes carryover errors that need un-programming. As a result, it's often hard to figure out what's an asset, and what's a liability. That's making it hard to make an assessment of myself so that I can set reasonable goals for myself, and have reasonable (if flexible) expectations of progress.

Maybe I'm overthinking it, or this is just useless navel-gazing, but on the other hand, if I'm going to spend an hour or so a day practicing for the foreseeable future, maybe I'm actually underthinking it, lol!

I do like it, though. I wasn't wrong that I always loved piano, and while I was a fickle, unfocused young student, I'm not that way now. I like nothing more than having the time to work hard on something, as long as I'm working at it properly.

LOL, that's just crazy enough to try. And fun project with the kiddies. They will get a real kick out of it.

PJs are also the best way to practice piano. I've been practicing first thing in the mornings, of course, my PJs, with the result that often the day is really in full swing while I'm still wearing what I slept in. And, embarrassingly, I must confess that I have answered the door not once, but several times now in a bathrobe. I think maybe I should learn to at least upgrade to some yoga pants and a tank top.

The other time I have to practice is directly after ballet class, so that's an interesting get-up for playing piano. Nothing like a leotard and pink tights topped off with a wrap skirt to say "I'm not sure what classical art form I'm doing right now!" At least I'm not trying to pedal in pointe shoes. One has to be practical, you know.

In your initial post you mentioned anxiety and nervousness as being part of your issue with tension, but it hasn't been mentioned again in subsequent comments. I am left wondering to what extent your mental state could be a cause, as well as a symptom, of the excess physical tension you are feeling. (I realize that when there's a vicious cycle going on, it can be hard to separate cause from effect.)

I can't say I've had general trouble with excess tension specifically, but I have had anxiety at the piano. I had lots of periods when I wasn't actively playing, too, and it would seem worse when I was trying to get back into the routine. When I realized that fear of making mistakes was driving my anxiety (even when I was alone!), which in turn was causing me to make mistakes, I was able to rid myself considerably of that anxiety by just not worrying about errors. (Because anxiety about accuracy was actually causing me to make mistakes, I made fewer of them when I loosed up from it.) I don't know if this is helpful in any way to your situation, but I thought I would put it out there.

BTW FWIW, TwoSnowflakes, I find your writing style charming and entertaining!

All hail YouTube. There were several videos on there for how to reduce hand tension, keeping compact and low, economy of movement, etc. From people who seemed to know what they were talking about. I mean, not that these are revolutionary concepts, but I guess I never thought to figure out why sometimes things are smooth and why sometimes they are not, and to deliberately work on the overall look and shape and movement of how I am interacting with the keyboard, I guess is the point. Which probably how all that tension crept in there in the first place and stayed there to roost.

I'm taking Bruce's idea (especially with that speed reduction, since speeds faster than you're ready for certainly invites tension!) and some of the other things to work on and seeing if I can't build it in there. In fact, I'm trying very hard right now to start being conscious of it as I'm typing, lol! Unsurprisingly, I do the same thing when I type, so it's good practice to work on keeping things low and even and just deploy fingers with a minimum of movement and see if I can't be accurate as well as being tension-free.

I have the strength, certainly, and the general familiarity with the keyboard, so I suppose I can make it happen if I really want it to. I won't be too anxious if I keep to scales and arpeggios while I work on it! Hopefully I'll pop out the other side with some better habits that will hold me in good stead while I work back to where I want to be. I certainly have the internal sense of what I want things to sound like, so hopefully this will be like upgrading my arms and fingers so I can get to where I know I want to be. Honestly, taking video of myself this morning was a real eye-opener. And with you tube? I can just watch all the masters play now, as much as I like, rather than just listening to them. And while so many of them have distinctive styles, they all have a certain economy of movement and relaxation that I just don't have. I might have once had it, but I certainly don't have it now. With the legends, and really anybody who has reached a certain level, there's a fluidity and general LACK of fixed shapes that is probably what gives the overall versatility to do what they do. Or, that is to say, there are certainly discernible techniques and one would not mistake how the arm moves in rapid-fire octaves for the motion in some slow rolling legato, but I guess there's just this general fluidity, lack of force above what is strictly necessary to control the hand and arm, and an overall economy of motion. These things seem clearly necessary to any kind of effective playing at a level higher than, well, whatever it is that I'm trying to get past.

If it takes me a year, or two years, to get me there, so be it. I've got a new piano and nothing but time!

Great advice from BruceD on slow & purposeful relaxation. I hope you'll have the patience to slow way down, slower than you think you could possibly need, and really concentrate on how your hand feels with each note.

I once spent a whole week doing nothing but this sort of thing (that is, nothing else on the piano!). This probably sounds excruciating--and my situation is different because I was retraining after an injury. But the remarkable thing is that it proved to be a week of major discovery instead of the boredom I'd expected. I had not realized how good my hands could feel till I was able to let go of unconscious tension.

My experience with tension is that it comes from lack of strength. All the more reason to slow down scales and other exercises and watch for tension developing in your hands and fingers. Besides, the way to develop strength is through slow repetition. And even the most simple exercise is worth doing. I'm on the first few Hanon exercises going very slowly and watching my small finger keeping it close to the keyboard and not springing out when I play with the finger next to it. All my bad habits are rooted in lack of strength because these kinds of exercises were not encouraged early on in my lessons.

But,it's never too late for fingers to be truly independent of each other and to eliminate tension.

There's definitely some of that. Even when I'm not being actively observed, and I start to anticipate a passage that has been giving me trouble, I get anxious and out come the claws.

That would be easy enough to fix if that were the only problem, but certainly there's some fun baggage in there. I mean, I did not quit piano with indifference, and I would definitely rank having abandoned it rather than do what it took to achieve what I wanted to achieve to be one of my more profound regrets. And I never really considered it a viable option to go back to it. My thought to myself was: you had my opportunity and blew it so...get over it and just listen to the pretty music from other people who were more dedicated than you were.

So part of me just starts to get uneasy when I think about where I COULD have been had I not been such a @#^^@#$ and immature student at times. What if I had combined what was probably a somewhat competent general aptitude for it with actual rigorous work? That's not to say I was some great natural talent, because I was not, but it was something that I learned relatively easily and did well in, at least initially. Up to the point where having a knack for something only increases the speed with which you get better, not the seriousness and rigor with which you work at it. So, I got to the point where basically everybody had started with a general aptitude for it, and stopped progressing at about there because without a good work ethic, you're done. Let's call this about the mid-intermediate level. And let's call me about 16 years old. You know, for visualization purposes.

Anyway, like I said, I was no prodigy, and I'm not sitting here pining for the worldwide acclaim my solo career surely would have brought me, but piano could have stayed with me. I could have studied harder, I certainly could have gotten to a point of general high amateur competence, which would have given me something I could have spent the last 25 years enjoying simply for myself or with other non-professional musicians. I could have kept something I actually do love very much and which gives me goosebumps when I hear it played right.

So there's some of that in there, too. Take some general anxiety, a lot of eroded skill, some faulty technique never learned properly, and mix it all up with juuuust a soupçon of regret. Ahhh, perfect. Just the tone Chopin wanted for his nocturnes.

TwoSnowflakes, I have read your post, here:

Any suggestions for how to release some really engrained tension in my hands? It's choking off everything! I think I always played with too much tension, and then I stopped playing altogether.

I decided to start up again after 25 years about three weeks ago, and obviously nothing good has happened to my piano skills in the interim. (And I was not very good when I stopped). What is clear, however, is that for whatever reason, I just claw up and just do super weird things with my wrists and it just does not look natural. So, of course, nothing really gets down and out the fingers in a good way, resulting in some really bad uneveness. I don't sound notes that my finger is actually on, or I jab at it and then some random note gets accented without me intending to.

Anyway, any of you veterans have some exercises to do that helps? Part of it is anxiety (I can't even play for my teacher without getting nervous), but a lot of it is just 25 years of not asking my fingers, wrists and arms to do this. And because I'm pretty sure even at my best, I had some bad tension in there, it's not just a matter of getting my sea legs back. I will have to do some overt work to fix this. I really recall having a lot of trouble with velocity on runs and arpeggios that should have flowed easier, and I used to get searing pain between my shoulder blades. I wonder if my hand positioning was always this bad.

Here's video of me this morning, murdering a chopin nocturne. And some scales. I am a little better with hand tension in the scales, but they are uneven and off the beat, as you'll hear. At least they're marginally together on the same note, though. That was NOT the case three weeks ago. I could not play two octaves of c major with both hands together! Very depressing. So I'm sure things will improve, but if anybody has any suggestions for how to start working on the tension and hand positioning so I learn/relearn things better from the get-go, I would be enormously appreciative.

Scales: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/89452048/IMG_2076_small.m4v

Nocturne: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/89452048/Movie%20on%205-17-13%20at%2010.07%20AM.m4v


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There is no mention of how you returned to the piano after 25 years. I ask that in the context that I have had health issues which can keep from away from the piano at a month at a time and causes me to work my way back to where I was a couple of months ago and it takes me 1 or 2 or 3 months to be where I was.

You have to be very, very, very patient when you return to the piano. I don't suffer tension but I realize that it could cause tension. You know that it takes about 6 months of playing the piano at which point you should be able to be back to where you were 25 years ago. Your brain takes about 6 months to return to where it was before. You won't be any better than you were 25 years ago, but you should be back to about where you were before. But you have to be patient and try to relax and give your brain a chance to do its thing.

There should be no tension if you are going back to the old piano books and playing them all over again slowly as opposed to trying to play something very difficult that you haven't played for 25 years! ! !

Here's another one - trilling on a keyboard this time. You'll see as I increase the tension in my wrist the emg buzzes - there's no outward sign of tension.
https://www.box.com/s/v0vo8v2rrbryysgq08mg

Still in pjs.