Piano Technique: Seating and Posture.

In this post you will learn how to sit correctly at the piano, so that you will have full control and avoid some of the problems associated with bad posture.

First of all the position of the seat is of great importance. The height should be so that your elbows are just above the keys.

The distance from the piano is also very important. Most beginners will bring the chair close up to the table as if they were sitting down for dinner. This is incorrect. You should be far enough away so that your elbows are just in front of your body and you should sit on the front half of the chair or stool only. This will give you more freedom of movement.

The distance from the piano is also very important. Most beginners will bring the chair close up to the table as if they were sitting down for dinner. This is incorrect. You should be far enough away so that your elbows are just in front of your body. 

Also you should sit on the front half of the chair or stool only. This will give you more freedom of movement.

Next you need to think about your back, this should be straight but not tense. Imagine you are a puppet hanging from a string attached to your head. Any tension will translate into your fingers and make you play worse apart from giving you a sore back if you sit for hours in a slouched position. 

 

Moving up from the back, make sure again that your shoulders are also relaxed and not tense. I see so many students who when approaching a difficult passage, seem to completely lose their neck as their shoulders rise.

Finally when you place your hands on the keys your wrist should be level so that there is a straight line from your elbow to the first knuckle of your hand. From there the fingers form a relaxed arch shape as if you had a small piece of fruit between your hands and the keys with each knuckle rounded.

Oh and a final note - make sure your nails are not too long. Apart from being dangerous, you could rip your nail off between the cracks in the keys at high speed, it will enable you to use the tips of your fingers (one of the most sensitive parts of your body) to feel in contact with the instrument. There are no nerve endings in your finger nails. It will also avoid an annoying clicking sound as you play.

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Choosing the right piano.

For beginner students this is a big decision. An instrument of quality is a major purchase, but then again, what are your goals. Are you playing for fun or do want to make it a career? In my experience as a teacher I have been asked to recommend an instrument many times and as I travel to the homes of the students I teach, I come across much variation in the instruments I see students learning on. In this article I will pass on the same advice that I give my students and at the end I will tell you what I personally use.

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Electronic Keyboard.
When I start a new student who has had little or no lessons in the past, this instrument is often the one that already exists in the home. Some prospective students even inquire about lessons  and have nothing at all yet to practise on. The benefit of a keyboard is mainly, that it is a financially cheap alternative, until you know for sure that you want to take your studies further. It is a sad fact that there are many students who don't carry on for much longer than a few months when they realize that learning an instrument requires dedication, hard work and time practising, so to spend hundreds of pounds or dollars on a quality instrument at the very early stage is probably not advisable. Added to the financial aspect, a keyboard is very portable. However, even at an early stage, make sure a keyboard is placed in such a way that you are using correct posture when playing. Try also to get one that is touch sensitive, so that you can control the dynamics.

   

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Digital Piano.
As a student even approaches grade 1, the above instrument would not be enough. The range of notes is not even enough to play all the pieces required at a grade 1 exam. Added to this, the keys of a keyboard are much lighter than one would find in an exam piano. The change in the weight of the keys on the day, would be so different that it would severely affect ones playing if one were not used to it. This is where digital pianos go one stage further, using "weighted keys"  to mimic the feel of a real piano. They can be a good alternative to a real acoustic piano right up until grade 8. For some people, space might be a problem, where to put a full size piano. Another advantage is, that they require less care. You never need to get them tuned, worry about temperature or humidity and generally they are less expensive than a new acoustic piano. You can also adjust volume or use headphones if you don't want to annoy the neighbours.

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Acoustic Piano.
Nothing can really match the responsiveness and tone of an acoustic piano and it would be a must for anyone wishing to make a career out of playing. It would even be a better alternative for any student. One would find that the keys respond to one's touch just that bit more than a digital piano, and they should be less noisy. If expense is the issue, a second hand one would be a good alternative, but get it checked out thoroughly first. Here is a few things you might want to look for:

• A neat alignment of the internal parts, e.g. hammers
• Signs of woodworm
• Rust on the iron frame
• Any cracks in either the iron frame or the sound board
• Any broken or missing strings
• Do the pedals work
• Are there any funny rattles or vibrations as you play an entire chromatic scale of the whole range of the keyboard

If in doubt get a professional piano tuner to take a look with you before purchase, better to pay his fee than waste hundreds on a bad second hand instrument.

So what do I use? Well, despite the superior quality of the acoustic piano, for reasons of space more than anything, I own a digital piano. I purchased a quality instrument, from musicroom.com , (although  the links to the illustrations in this post are from Amazon ), with which it is hard, (but not impossible) to tell the difference in tone quality  between it and an acoustic. You can check out the quality for yourself  here

The actual model is of the same as that pictured above - a Yamaha Arius YDP 142 although in a different colour.

Let me know in the comments below if you found this information useful, or if there is any other advise about pianos you wish to know.

How much should I practise?

There are many theories about how much one should practice and how often. For example, on an ABRSM forum I recently read, someone advised 15 minutes a day for Grade 1, up to an hour and a half per day for Grade 8.

However, I think this question itself completely misses the point. Of course, 15 minutes a day would not be enough for a higher grade, but does that mean that someone who does 8 hours a day will be better than someone who does only two?

Not necessarily..........

Much more important than how much practice you do, is the quality of your practice. Just analyse for a moment now, your last practice session. What percentage of the time did you spend playing stuff that you already know quite well? Many students, for example will always start playing a piece from the beginning even though that is the section they have been learning the longest and know the best.



Here's an idea you could try. Imagine you have a long piece you have been working on and you could divide it into four sections A, B, C and D. No doubt you started with the A section and have been working your way through chronologically until now, where you are just learning the D section. Start your practice each day with the D section. Then do the C and D sections together. Then try from the B section to the end and finally play through from the beginning once only. This method will ensure that the least familiar section gets the most time.

Whatever method you use, make sure you spend the most time on the thing that needs the most work. Oh and don't forget sight reading!! This is often a student's lowest mark in the exam. Why? Because they spent the least time developing that skill.

I hear from a lot of my students, especially ones who are in the middle of final exams in school, during this summer term, that they have very little time. I have some sympathy, but I am a firm believer, that if you really want to do something, you will find the time to do it. Back in the day when they were called "O" levels instead of G.C.S.E.'s, I took grade 8 on two instruments, within a week of each other in the same term as I took nine "O" Levels. Yes it was in the days before internet, ipads, Xbox, mobile phones and social media, but still, it took self discipline and that motivation came from the desire to succeed. I would start by going through the complete scale list every day and regularly use a metronome on technically difficult passages to build up the speed. Each session had a goal, it wasn't just a play-through.


That said, it is advisable to break one's practice time up into smaller sections. Your mind will be fresher if you take a break and you could even cause yourself "injury" by practising too long in one go. If you are doing other exams at the same time, music could also be a break from such academic pursuits and vice versa.

So instead of me prescribing exactly how long you should practise, which you might have been expecting when you saw the title, I would prefer that you went away with more thought about how you practice.

Please let me know in the comments below your experience. How much do you do and how do you structure your practice? And finally, if you found this post useful, please share on your social media, without of course, getting too distracted by your iphone and forgetting the piano sitting quietly in the corner.

How to play anything - FAST

A recent viewer on my YouTube Channel commented on one of my Grade 8 videos,  "As a grade 3,  this is the most depressing thing to watch. I doubt I'll ever get that good!"

Have you ever felt like that when looking at a new piece that seems impossible? I’m sure we all have at sometime. But, today I want to let you into a secret... that you can play pretty much anything you want to, and faster than you ever thought you could. So what is the secret?

Well basically, to play fast, you need to practice slowly. Sounds like a contradiction, doesn't it? But it's not. Let's back track here. When you were a baby, just learning to feed yourself with a spoon, probably a large percentage of your food, ended up on your face, rather than in your mouth. As time went by, you gradually got more accurate at knowing where your mouth was, so that now, (or at least I hope so), you can feed yourself without major mishaps. You have developed muscle memory. Your muscles that put the food in your mouth, remember what to do by themselves, without you having to think about it. This muscle memory, was developed by repeating the same action, over and over again. The same is true when it comes to learning a piece of music. You need to get to a point where you can play it, without thinking about it. Where your fingers know where they are going on their own. To do this there are a few basic principles you need to apply.

1. You need to start at a speed which is easy and comfortable. There must be absolutely no hesitation. If you can't maintain the beat - IT'S TOO FAST. Many students who when learning a piece, keep stopping or stumbling every couple of bars or even every couple of notes. This is pointless practice. 
2. You must use exactly the same fingering, every time you practice a passage. If you are training you muscles to know where they are going without you thinking about it, they must repeat over and over, exactly the same action, with the same fingers. OK, a little bit strangely, but let's go back to the analogy of a baby learning to feed itself. The process would be slightly more complicated, if every time it went to feed itself, its mouth was in a different place.
3. Practice in sections. Don't try and tackle the whole piece in one go. However, a word of caution here. When practicing in sections, always overlap a bar or two from the preceding and following sections. If you don't, when you come to put the sections together to make a whole, there may well be gaps and/or stumbles between them.
4. Use a metronome. Apart from the piano itself of course, a metronome is probably the most used piece of equipment that I have. When you have found a speed that you can comfortably master, then, and only then, gradually increase the speed. The incremental steps of a traditional metronome are a good guide: 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 66, 69, 72, 76, 80, 84, 88, 92, 96, 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 126, 132, 138, 144 etc.I tend not to go much slower than 60 bpm, because below this, it gets harder to feel when the next beat is coming. I prefer to subdivide the beat. That is to say, instead of play crotchet=40 I  would use quaver=80. The same is true for very fast beats. Minim=72 is easier to follow than crotchet=144.
5. Reach that magic moment. "What is it?" I hear you ask. The magic moment, is when you are starting to increase the speed and you get to a point where you suddenly realize that you weren't even thinking about what you did. Your fingers knew where they were going by themselves. You get to the end of a certain passage and say to yourself, "How did I just do that?" This is a great feeling, and from there the sky is the limit. Keep increasing the speed up to the desired tempo.
6. Once you have technically mastered a piece, practice WITHOUT a metronome. A metronome is great for learning fast passages, but it can tend to make pieces sound mechanical rather than musical. At this point you can add more creative nuances, a bit of rubato here and there depending on the piece.

I challenge you to try this method on a piece you are practicing, that is technically difficult. Find that magic moment and then come back to this post and leave a comment below if it worked for you.