Posts Tagged ‘Muscles’
How To Relax When Playing Piano
October 7th, 2009
Relax!
As you build up your speed in your piano playing, it becomes more and more important to learn how to relax at the same time. Generally, this means that you should only be using the muscles that are needed to play. You can achieve relaxation much easier by practicing your pieces hands separately. Here are a couple pieces of advice that I follow during my practice routines:
It is better not to practice at all than it is to practice with even the slightest bit of tension. It’s much more efficient to relax and play a single note, and then advance carefully; only playing those easy materials that can be played relaxed.
Do not forget to relax all areas of the body, including breathing and periodic swallowing. You thought hands and arms and fingers were the only parts of the body needing relaxation? Well, think again. Some students will stop breathing when they find themselves playing very demanding pieces because the muscles are anchored at the chest. If you’re throat is dry after playing, it means that you also stopped swallowing. My piano teacher told me a horror story of her younger years when she had been playing for an audience at a recital, when all of a sudden she started choking on her own breath right in the middle of her playing.
To fully relax, you must find the proper energy and momentum balance as well as arm, hand, and finger positions and motions that allow you to play with the right amount of energy. This may seem complicated, and it can be. Relaxing can require a lot of experimentation. If you have been concentrating on relaxing on a regular basis during your practice routines, then you should be able to quickly execute this. For those who haven’t been practicing their relaxation, you can try practicing an easy piece until you build up stress, and then try to relax. For this, you’ll need to find different motions and positions of the arms, wrists, and body. When you find them, you’ll feel the stress gradually drain away from you.
The most important element of relaxation is energy conservation. There are at least two different ways to conserve energy. Firstly, do not use unnecessary muscles, and secondly, turn off those muscles as soon as their jobs are done. Again, this is easier said than done. You can experiment with this using the gravity drop, During a gravity drop, you allow gravity to pull the arm down, but at the end of the key drop, you need to add tension to the finger for a moment to stop the hand. Then you need to quickly relax all of your muscles, but do not lift the hand. Just rest it comfortably on the piano with just enough force to support the weight of your arm. This is a lot harder than you would assume, because the elbow is practically floating in mid air. You can test whether or not you are pressing down by taking the arm off the keys and resting your forearm on your legs, completely relaxed. Then you can carry over that same feeling to the end of your gravity drop.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
Without relaxation, neither music nor technique could be possible. Technique comes from the brain. Non-musical playing actually violates so many aspects of nature that it interferes with the human brain’s natural processes for controlling the mechanisms of playing. Basically, if you spend your practice sessions doing mindless repetitions, you will find yourself going through a long, roundabout way of learning piano.
Posted in Technique (Discussions), The Practice Routine, Tips For Beginners | 
Tags: Brain, Energy, Fingers, Hands, Muscles, Practice, Relax, Relaxation, Technique, Tension | 
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Introduction to Piano Fingers
October 4th, 2009
Piano Hands
Where do I place my fingers on the keys? How do I know if I’m doing it right? What’s the best position? Curled or flat fingers?
These are just a few of the common questions that many piano players wonder when they find themselves struggling to make sense of a piece and position their hands and fingers to play the notes. In most beginner books, the fingering is shown in each piece to help guide students for later levels and also to help improve finger/muscle dexterity and motions.
Since everyone has their own idea about finger positions, there are no real “rules” about where and how to use them to play the piano keys. Different people have large hands, small hands, short fingers, long fingers… and so even these physical characteristics create differences in finger positioning.
One overall rule you can follow: The fingers should be in the most relaxed and powerful positions possible. Here’s a small exercise you can follow to test this:
1. Make a tight first.
2. Open your fingers and stretch them as far out as you can.
3. Relax your fingers (still stretched outward but without your forced stretching).
4. Place your hand on a flat surface with all of your fingertips resting on the surface, with your wrist being at the same height as your knuckles.
5. Notice anything? Your hand should be forming a dome-like shape. Because your fingers are relaxed and not stretched, they tend to curve a little bit.
6. Your thumb should be pointing slightly downward and bending just slightly toward your fingers so your thumb is parallel to your other fingers.
7. Many people don’t notice, but they tend to position their thumb slightly outward, away from the other fingers. It’s very important to keep the thumb parallel to the other fingers when playing chords and wide spans because you are less likely to hit adjacent keys. It also positions the thumb so the right muscles are used to raise and lower your thumb.
8. Your fingers should be slightly curled downward and meeting the piano keys at angle (approximately 45 degrees). This is very important, because it allows your fingers to play the black keys.
9. Look at all of your fingertips in this position. They should trace an approximate semi circle, from your pinky to your thumb.
10. This is an ideal starting position for playing the piano. Obviously, as you gain more experience and advance to higher levels, you can modify it to suit your own playing style.
11. When you place both hands in this position, side by side, your thumbnails should be facing each other. You can use the part of the thumb directly below the thumbnail to press the keys (as opposed to the joint).
12. Your other fingers contain a bone that comes very close to the outer skin of your fingertips. Inside the fingertip (away from the fingernail), your flesh will be slightly thicker. This fleshy part of your fingers should come in contact with the piano keys, not the fingertip itself.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
This exercise is just a really simple one to familiarize yourself with the mechanisms of your own hands. They are just suggested starting positions, but as you begin to play, these rules will most definitely change and even fly right out the window after some time. Depending on a lot of things (speed, dynamics, key combinations, and so on) you may need to stretch your fingers straighter or curl them even more. Again, this all depends on your personal style and what you are playing.
