Hello, all,
First, this is a really enjoyable forum. I am 47, took organ lessons as a boy, got away from keyboards for a while, and about 10 years ago took piano lessons for the first time in my life. My teacher left town after a couple years and I never got a new teacher. I got away from the piano again and but am now getting reacquainted with it!

Here's my current conundrum. I decided to try to learn some ragtime (as my wife, a very new violin student, is doing herself). I am working on Joplin's "The Easy Winners." I find it nearly impossible to play the big jumps in the left hand without looking at the keys. Somewhere I read that one should really work on being able to hit those notes without looking. Well, I've been trying for a month and am certainly better than when I started, but still not great.

On the other hand, if I look down from time to time, I can play the left hand pretty accurately, and at a much quicker tempo.

So--- should I force myself NOT to look down, and expect that some day I'll be able to know where my hand is without looking? In other words, tough it out for now, with "big" payoffs later? Or do the expedient thing and peek?

Thanks for any advice.

Concert pianists look at their hands all the time when they play, just watch any concert. For leaps, go ahead and do it. Practicing blind does not make you better. The "don't look at your hands" thing really only applies, IMO, to sight-reading, where your eyes have to be somewhere else. I can't do fast leaps accurately without looking and I've been practicing very hard for about 18 months now. As far as long-term benefits, I really wouldn't know, but I would suspect that blind people who can play excruciatingly difficult works have practiced enough to make up for their loss of sight.

Try playing La Campanella without looking at your hands.

I look at the keyboard all the time, what`s the point memorising everything otherwise? If you spend all your time learning how to make mistakes then you`ll definitely never play it without looking.

I look at the keys practically constantly, and 95% of the time I'm looking at my left hand. I'm not sure why, but for whatever reason, my left hand needs the extra visual help whereas my right hand doesn't.

i'm left-handed and always have to keep a wary eye out for my right hand!

Thanks for the reassurance, everyone! I can now watch my hands (esp. the left, in my case) without guilt.

I'm also left handed LP but I find I need to watch my left hand more. Perhaps it's the guitar backgound....now that I think about it, that's it. I always watched my fret hand and the right just took care of itself.

I do tend to look around quite a bit. Left, then right, then the bookcase, maybe the music, the ceiling, etc. Here's something I've noticed. If I change what hand I am looking at from my normal routine., I tend to lose it, it just does not "look right". Weird, huh?

Here's a picture of the great Rachmaninov himself at the piano. See how his eyes are glued to his hands. Looking at your hands is not a sin!

I agree about looking at your hands--it's the reason I HAVE to memorize things. Otherwise I would be looking at the music when I need to be looking at my hands.

Steve W, I think ragtime is the absolute hardest type of music to play with the music. So often the LH is one low note and then a chord up near middle C, then back to the low note. Even with my eyes glued to that LH, I'm still going to miss the low note a lot until I am really familiar with the pattern. It sure is fun to play, though!

I think the "don't look" advice is really for sight reading. That is also an important skill, but when I work on that, I do it at a level way under what my performance level is. Maybe 3rd-4th grade pieces for sightreading practice. I always think I'll move up from there, but I'm still at about that level of sightreading after 11 years of piano. Just no self-discipline in that area, I guess!

Welcome to the forum. I know you'll continue to enjoy all the wonderful people and advice here.

Nancy

People often say: "Look at concert pianists,
they look at their hands all the time,
so it must be okay! End of story." But I
regard this statement as completely invalid
for several reasons. First of all, concert
pianists--the ones you see on video--represent
less than one hundredth of one percent of
all piano players. These people are
rare talents, mnemonic freaks who can
play a large repertoire of lengthy pieces
note perfect from memory in front of
thousands of people. What these individuals
do at the keyboard is unique to each
of them--some play with flat fingers,
some play sitting with their chest at
the level of the keyboard, and so forth--
what they happen do is irrelevant to
the rest of us. Trying to copy them would
be like trying to develop your tennis game
by copying every move that Roger Federer
makes on the court.

Second, since they're playing from memory,
their eyes don't have to be glued to a
score, and, with nowhere else to look, they
naturally tend to look at their hands.

Third, what you're seeing on video or
on stage is the result of decades of work
at the keyboard that has been distilled
into a 45 min. performance. You don't
see the countless hrs. of practicing
with the eyes glued to the score--not
on the hands--while learning a piece from
scratch. To reason that, because
they are looking at their hands on
stage, it's therefore all right to do it
when learning a piece, is the shoddiest kind
of thinking.

If there is one thing that is most important
in piano playing, it is to not look at
your hands when playing with the score.
Of course there might be times when you'll find
yourself looking at your hands when playing
with the sht. music, but if you want to
become proficient at the keyboard, you'll
need to get into the habit of not looking
at the hands.

I agree,

Kathleen

That's nothing.

You want to hear unique?

Listen to an ABF recital.

Of course there are benefits to being able to play without looking, even when you aren't sightreading. It's faster and easier to just know where to put your hands rather than looking first.

Plus, I would argue that *every* pianist plays without looking at keys, even when not reading from the score. We all have 2 hands, and we all play with 2 hands, and quite often we can't look at 2 hands at the same time. So if you are watching your right hand, you're not watching your left hand, and vice-versa.

But it's certainly not a sin to look. It helps to be able to do it without, but for something like big leaps in ragtime, looking certainly helps.

I agree that looking at your hands while playing is not a sin. However, I think you should work on using your peripheral vision as much as possible - in other words, look at your hands but not directly at your hands. The ability to use peripheral vision helps greatly when playing from the score. In addition, there are times in more advanced music where both hands need to execute jumps at the same time far apart on the keyboard; you can't look directly at both hands at the same time...

It's not La Campenella, but I do see some big leaps in there:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSIwUpsJYw4

Try practicing very hard for 18 years, and maybe you will be able to play those leaps without looking!

Something that helps is feeling for the keys... the pattern of 2 blacks and then 3 blacks separated by white keys is not simply visual. The black keys are raised and separated in alternating groups of 2 and 3 so that you can feel for them and know exactly what you are playing without actually looking.

Fitting that several people use the term "sin" if you look at your hands. Though I work at *not* looking at my hands, in the beginning I certainly do, but my goal is to not look. So, the word "Sin" from Wikipedia:

The Greek word hamartia (ἁμαρτία) is usually
translated as sin in the New Testament; it means
"to miss the mark" or "to miss the target" which
was also used in Old English archery.

So, if you miss the key, you've missed the mark and thus sinned. But, I don't think God will smote you for it.

Happy playing. And some of us are working specifically on "The Entertainer" in this thread...

http://www.pianoworld.com/ubb/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/topic/32/3916.html#000010

Practice, practice, practice, ...

It seems to me that there is more going on than we realize[/b] when we read the music while playing, rather than our watching our hands. My piano teachers encouraged me to not watch my hands, and I now realize that the muscle memory takes over which allows me to pay closer attention to the music I am playing. I still look at my hands at times, and I think that the visual and the physical aspects of playing connect in our brain to bring it all together. I believe that the more one plays, the less reliance there is on looking at what the hands are supposed to do.

I never consider piano playing cheating. The only way you can cheat at the piano is by pretending to be playing while it's really a player piano doing it and recording yourself and passing it off as you playing.

I say do whatever works, you're working with a keyboard, your hands and your mind and no set of rules works for everyone.

I don't look at my hands unless it's a long jump and if there's a difficult passage I found out that my fingers memorized it but for some reason I'll keep hitting the wrong key so now I look down to make sure I land on the correct key and I've memorized the measure adajacent to it so I can keep going smoothly when I get back to looking at the music.

I do not see how it would be possible to ever proficiently play stride piano if you had to constantly look at your left hand to do it.

And just because concert pianists often look at their hands, does not mean they could not play what they are playing with their eyes somewhere else. It might give them a bit more confidence to look, but I'd be very surprised and dismayed if, with the amount of practice and skill these people have, they were not able to play their songs blindfolded handcuffed, and drugged.

you just have to look at your hand and keyboard when you do jumps, especially those huge ones. when you're learning such jumps or anything difficult to position on keyboard, free feel to look or else you'd never learn or be able to judge the distance. once you memorized the passage or get the feel of the distance of leaping or anything of that sort, you sometimes don't even have to look anymore, especially when it's at the performance level.

for those who feel guilty about looking at keyboard/hand, may i suggest that you take 3-month time, blank-fold yourself whenever you play something and see how it works?

Steve W, I actually played Easy Winners for my last recital.

You weren't the only one that had troubles with the jumps. I think after I memorized that peice, my eyes were completely glued on my left hand.

I think it's okay to look at your hand as long as you're not trying to be one of those amazing people who can sight read a peice and play it with any errors the first time through.

At the same time, being able to do those jumps without looking at your hands is a very convenient skill to have. I always like to practice jumps by closing my eyes and trying to back in forth between them.

I've been trying to play through everything I learn a few times with my eyes closed in order to train my hands to judge leaps by feel rather than by sight, which I use whenever necessary.

Why? becaue I can't look at both hands at once and some tricky passages require me to look at one hand to play them at tempo, whereas others require that I look at the OTHER hand.

Interestingly, I have found that it is not always the hand that's playing the hardest bit, that I have to watch, but rather the hand that's playing the part that's keeping the rhythm (usually my LH). For some reason, if I focus on right hand turnarounds, I lose the LH, no matter how well I know it. As a result, I tend to put the more complex stuff into muscle memory and focus on the RH to make sure it's behaving, NOT to see where it has to go. Weird.

I've also recently learned that looking at the music, after I've memorised a piece frequenly makes jumps easier to achieve than looking at the hand. All it takes is confidence in my ability to make the jumps without looking. Again, weird...

This all refers to blues with ostinato LH, save for walkups etc. I'm about to start lessons in May and am going to ease up on the blues for a couple of months to work on Bach's 2-part inventions. I'm curious to see if the same obseravtions will hold...

I look at what I am doing, largely from habit I think. The mind is an amazing thing though. Recently I was playing a Chopin study at night when a complete power failure plunged me into darkness. I thought I would be forced to stop but, to my astonishment, I finished the piece without mishap. It appears that the mind, over years of playing, creates a sense of haptic geography which is surprisingly accurate. The degree to which we develop the confidence to use it is a personal option. I certainly do not think looking at the keyboard is "cheating" or reprehensible in any way. To me that is almost as ridiculous as saying we should practise walking about the house with our eyes shut or forcing ourselves to do hefty mental arithmetic instead of using calculators.

Aside from that, as several posters have implicitly pointed out, the precise way we look at the keyboard is extremely complicated, and seems to depend on a habituated series of specific pivotal glances.

There is very little need to look at your hands while playing 2-part Inventions, as there are almost no jumps in them, at least the ones I've played.

Watching my fellow ragtimers performing at festivals across the country, it is rare that a performer doesn't look at his/her hands. It is interesting - most of the time they are watching the left hand, and even if the right hand is jumping all over the place, they hardly have to look up there at all. I suspect that some of it is that the left hand HAS to be steady and accurate, and you can hide a world of sins with a fast right hand. Also, since most piano music is more right hand dominant, we are likely more apt to trust where the right hand is going. This applies for both left handers and right handers - I am a lefty, but my right hand has always been able to play faster and more precise than the left. One other thought would be that the right hand is rarely as note/chord intensive, and large jumps are easier for single notes, even played fast, than are the jumps where you have to hit a 3 or 4 note chord.

Thanks, again, to all who responded thus far! I am learning a lot from your thoughtful replies, and appreciate your taking the time to comment on this.

I wonder if there is a correlation between which hand is dominant and which hand one needs to watch? Those of you who watch your left hand, are you right-handed? Perhaps we develop a better muscle memory in the hand that's dominant. Or maybe it's just that in most pieces the right hand is busier than the left, so the muscle memory develops better.

Anyway, I'm inclined to think it doesn't matter if you're staring at your hands, or the music, or the ceiling, or your navel. If you're enjoying yourself and you're reasonably happy with the progress you're making why worry about it?

If you are capable of playing without looking, by all means look.

But if you cannot play without looking at your hands, your enjoyment will be mixed with a lot of frustration as you try to progress.