Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum adjusting to different pianos

Hi,

Are there tips on how to become better at adjusting to different pianos?

The problem is this: At home I have a Kawai ES7. I like it a lot it has a nice sound to me and a nice touch. Though at school I have to play a Boston Acoustic grand piano. A very nice instrument without doubt. But the feel of the keys quite different. The action is substantially heavier compared to my ES7.

The problem is that it's very hard for me to adjst well and during class I don't have mmuch time to adjust to the piano. I guess this is one of the reasons I perform substantially less good in class compared to at home. Especially making the differences between piano and forte is harder. (knowing where to put my fingers is always difficult but that's no surprise for a novice like me)

What can I do to overcome this to some extent? One hint I took from my teacher was to crank down the volume on my piano at home so I'm already forced to play harder. This helped some but not that much either. I actually even consider seraching another digtal slab/stage piano with a heavier action but I guess that should be a last resort.

Now I'm only taking piano lessons for a mere 3 months starting from scratch. Maybe I'm expecting too much from myself.

Thanks for your insight people.

Wouter.

wouter,
You don't say if you've tried the HEAVY or HEAVY+ setting for touch on the ES7. That might help a little. There are also various other settings you might tweak to improve the experience.

This is just me theorizing, however I don't think it's a coincidence that beginners - those pianists with inefficient and/or undeveloped techniques - have the most trouble adjusting between the subtly different playing mechanisms of various pianos. Let's first recognize that what's ultimately necessary of a piano technique is the ability to depress a key at various degrees of swiftness (some may argue at various degrees of strength, but they're wrong - all strength ultimately does is produce a swifter key strike). Now obviously an accompanying goal is to be able to do this with as much precision and as little effort as is possible in order to produce the desired result. Let's look now at each of the two ends of the spectrum of a modern piano technique.

Let's look first at what is widely accepted as an efficient and healthful technique and second at what is generally considered not to be efficient or particularly safe.

Through a combination of utilization and inhibition of parts of the whole body - not just fingers, but torso, shoulders, elbows, wrists, etc. - as well as gravity, it's easy and effortless to produce a very wide range of key strikes via a wide range of newtons of force produced (force being mass x acceleration; if it's not obvious, the variable mass is fixed because it's simply the hammer that is striking the piano string). What's more is that it's easy to blindly reproduce a similar key strike each and every time because for each result desired, there's a wide range of forces producible that will each yield a result similar to the one that's desired.

Let's assume the most common inefficient piano technique is one that relies solely on the fingers to produce the desired sounds. It need not be explained that the fingers alone can produce very little force (remember that formula?). Because the range of force able to be produced is so very small and insignificant, each newton of force producible has far greater variance from one another. As such, it's far more difficult to blindly reproduce a specifically desired key strike with each and every attempt.

I highly recommend you read the following for a brief history of the keyboard and its various schools of technique: http://practisingthepiano.com/history-piano-technique-part-1/


Forum member zrtf90 contributed an invigorating post just recently on the topic at this thread here (the whole thread is worth reading): https://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubb...ver_from_4th_to_1st_fin.html#Post2192307

Wouter,

I've been taking lessons exactly one year longer than you. I started on a Roland digital stage piano which, as digital pianos go, wasn't half bad in terms of both touch and sound. The piano at school is a Yamaha grand piano. I used to think of it as a piano with a heavy action.

I now have a Boston grand piano at home. It makes the Yamaha feel like the grand with the lightest action in the world.

Moral of the story: every piano you will ever play will have a different feel than the one you have at home. I'm convinced that even if you got the exact same piano you play at school, it would still feel different. Yours presumably wouldn't be nearly as worn out from being played five hours or more six days a week — not to mention all the abuse school pianos take from clueless beginners and angry kids being forced to take lessons.

I can tell you from personal experience: the more you play, the less it will matter which instrument you are playing. Some of them, I assume, will always be terrible, but no matter. They say a good musician can coax music out of basically any instrument. The more I play (therefore, presumably, the better I get at it), the more I believe this is true. So just give yourself some time to get better, and soon you won't worry so much about differences in feel anymore.

Also, cut yourself some slack. We all play better at home. Most teachers know this. Also, you are getting thirty minutes a week, at most, to show your teacher what you can do, and as a beginner, you might be getting even less than that. Throw in some obligatory chit-chat before you start in earnest, a couple minutes to get situated, and you're left with maybe twenty minutes of actual, focused lesson time, if you're lucky. That's barely enough to loosen up your fingers, let alone get comfortable.

Stick your piano to its heaviest setting, as suggested above. Then just go wit the flow. It gets better. I promise .

Remember when you first learned to drive, and moving to another automobile was a big deal? I think moving to a different piano when you are first learning is a lot like that. The actions will be different on different instruments. Solution? Play lots of different pianos! Make your rounds of the hotel lobbies and piano stores that might have pianos you can play.

I tell my instructor "I did it better at home" all the time, so take heart! She says she hears that a lot. A lot of that is a natural part of learning. You are all of a sudden playing for someone, so there is more pressure.

I could be the instrument too. I play on a digital Yamaha P155 at home. My instructor has a Steinway, but there is one key that drives me nuts because it sticks a little. Of course, she's used to it!

Silver Keys...very good analogy with the car. I used to feel the same way about my teacher's piano. I've been taking lessons from her almost a year now and even though her piano still feels different from mine, I feel like I've gotten somewhat more used to it. Lessons have become a lot less intimidating now that I've adjusted to her piano. I no longer come in with the thought in my head "I'm going to screw it up!"

Thanks everybody. I'll try to give it some rest and see where I am in ayear from now. I guess that should geive me enough time to see wheter or not I can adjust better to different instruments. And truth be told.. I'm not much worse in class than I am bad at home. LOL. It's jsut that I tend to have much more silent notes because I don't strike the keys hard enough at school. Maybe I can ask wheter or not ist's possible to come and play that piano when the teacher is not there. Giving me some more time to train strenght and get used to heavier action piano's. Saranoya's right about getting actually not much more than 20m of actual piano time eacjht class. probaly that isn't nearly enough to get connected with the instrument. At home I often play several 10-30m sessions a day. (my teacher told me it's better to do several sort but well focused sessions than one very long one, seems to work pretty well for me as my progress is going well, working on double notes and moving fingers away from a base starting position.)

Kind regards,

Wouter.

+1. It's helping me with a Casio PX-350. The "heavy touch" setting requires more work to get to "ff".

. Charles

I'm going to suggest something that may or may not be the issue. From my own experience, since one can adjust the volume of a digital piano, many people play and practice at a lower volume that one gets from an acoustic. So when your move from your practice DP to your class acoustic, you are automatically, without really being aware of it, trying to play softer because the sound is louder than you are used to. In this case, the issue isn't that the piano touch is so different, it is that you are unconsciously changing your touch because the sound is so different, that is louder.

Just a thought,

-SoundThumb

I can relate to SoundThumb! I will occasionally slam down these massive bass notes on my instructor's acoustic piano because I am used to playing on my digital with the volume down!

Driving a different car still requires an adjustment for me, but it is quicker now than it was decades ago.

I think it can only be beneficial playing on other pianos, as we can't always just stick to our own in the future. We need to be versatile.
That said, I'm very used to my own upright and it's wierd to play on my Aunt's grand- it is a lot harder to get the sound from, I really have to press hard. Her upright is the opposite, and sounds 'plingy' compared to mine.