Posts Tagged ‘Speed’
The Art And Physics Of Mastering The "Trill"
November 11th, 2009
The Trill
If you are an intermediate to advanced piano player, it’s very likely that you’ve come across the trill in your compositions. Generally, a trill is shown in modern musical notation with the letters “tr” above the trilled note, and a wavy line that proceeds. In musical pieces composed during the baroque and early classical eras, the wavy line on its own is used.
Musical Notation Denoting A Trill
The usual way of performing a trill is to rapidly alternate between the note indicated on the staff with the “tr” and/or wavy line and the note that is directly above it in that given scale (unless the trill indicates an accidental).
This Is The Way You Would Execute The Trill As Shown In The Previous Notation Above
Many of Chopin’s classical compositions include trills. They sound like a fast, flicking motion of the two fingers playing two successive notes very, very fast.
There are two main problems that the piano player MUST solve in order to play the trill effectively: (1) speed and control, and (2) continuity.
With a simple trill, there are only two notes you need to focus on: the note indicated, and the note that lies directly above the one indicated. If the first two notes are not started properly, learning the trill will become a very difficult task.
We can solve the problems of the trill by applying an exercise called “parallel sets.” A parallel set is a group of notes that can be played as a chord, and all parallel sets can be played infinitely fast. Within the parallel set, the delay between the successive fingers is called the “phase angle.”
As an example, if we were going to used fingers 2 and 3 to execute the trill (2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, etc.), you can use the 3 as the conjunction and get those first two notes right. Next, practice 3,2. Then, move onto 2, 3, 2, and then 3, 2, 3, 2. It’s really just this simple.
Try not to focus on speed, as this is insufficient. Experimenting with hand and finger motions is also a must. Try soft fingers, rolling motions, flat fingers, and so on. Relaxation is also one of the most important aspects for executing the trill; more than almost any other technical skill out there because of the need to acquire rapid momentum and balance. Allowing stress to build up will cause the fingers to lock into its larger members, such as the palms, hands, and wrists, which in turn increases the effective mass of the fingers.
Your physics lesson for the day: An increased mass means slower motions. Relatively speaking, a hummingbird can flap its wings thousands upon thousands of times faster than other relative species of birds, and small insects can flap their wings even faster than that of the hummingbird.
Therefore, it’s very important to free yourself from stress when practicing trills, in order to let the fingers do the work without the weight of the rest of your body. Trills are one technical skill that require constant practice and maintenance.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
The chord attack is the best practice method for keeping your trills in shape. See my post on The Chord Attack Method to learn more. Make sure that you don’t treat your trills as a series of staccato notes. Your fingertips should be placed at the bottom of the keydrop as long as possible, and make sure you stay aware of the minimal lift needed for the repetition. If you practice on a grand piano, take a mental note that this lift distance can vary from around twice as high as those who practice on an upright piano. Remember, fast trills mean smaller lifts, so on an upright, you may need to slow down your trills.
A Few Tips For Getting Up To Speed With Fast Pieces
November 6th, 2009
You Don't Need To Break The Keys To Get Up To Speed...
Yesterday, I touched on the topic of practicing by breaking down difficult passages into small segments. When you break it down this way, you can maximize practice time and bring your playing up to speed in practically no time.
But how should you know exactly what speed to start at and progress toward? Like everything else, it will depend on your own personal skill and the piece itself, but here are some general guidelines and things to keep in mind in regards to velocity and choice of practice speed.
In general, we want to be able to play up to speed as quickly as possible. However, playing so fast that you begin to feel stressed and make mistakes will not help improve your technique. Additionally, forcing your fingers to play the same way at a fast speed will not help increase your speed.
Your technique will improve the most quickly and effectively when you play at a speed at which you can play accurately. This is especially true when you practice hands separately. When you practice the left hand and the right hand separately, you have more control, and therefore you can get away with playing much faster than you could if you were playing with hands together. Since the main goal of practicing hands separately is to gain speed, the need to quickly get up to speed and to practice at a speed which is optimized for improvements in technique become contradicting.
So, how do we fix this? The solution is to constantly change the speed at which you practice without staying at any one speed for too long.
But what happens when you reach block? A difficult passage? When you come across a difficult part that requires skills that you don’t already have, the best alternative is to bring it up in stages. You can use speeds that are too fast as exploratory excursions to figure out what needs to change in order to for you to accurately play at such a speed. Then, you can try slowing down and practicing those new motions. Keep in mind that if you lack the technique required, you need to go back to shortening the passages to extremely small segments, as explained in yesterday’s blog post.
To vary your speed, you first need to get to a manageable “maximum speed” at which you can play the piece accurately. After you’ve reached this, try to go faster and take a mental note of how your playing needs to be changed or adapted (at this point, don’t worry if you are not playing completely accurately). Next, use these newly discovered motions and play at the previous “maximum speed.” You should discover that it’s easier to play now. You can continue to practice at this speed for a while, and then try to slow down to ensure that you are playing completely relaxed.
You can then repeat this entire procedure. It will help you drive up your speed in manageable jumps so you can work on each skill separately. Generally, you should be able to play a new piece, at least in small segments, hands separately, at the desired speed during the first sitting. This may seem unattainable at first, but you’ll be surprised that you can reach this goal relatively quickly.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
Using a metronome can also help with building up speed, but make sure not to overuse it. Metronomes should never be practiced with for more than a few minutes at a time, because your brain will become confused and you will begin to have trouble keeping up with the beat of the metronome. For more information on metronomes, read one of my previous blog posts here: Five Tips For Acquiring Accurate Tempo
Posted in Rhythm and Tempo, Technique (Discussions), The Practice Routine | 
Tags: Hands Separate, Hands Together, Metronome, Speed, Technique | 
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The Chord Attack Method
October 11th, 2009
Chord B-E-G
A “chord attack” occurs when you play a sequence of notes as chord. For example, say you had to play the quadrulplet, C-G-E-G in the left hand. If you practice this slowly and then speed it up gradually, you will eventually hit a “speed wall,” which is a speed that you can’t pass because stress builds up. To break the speed wall, you would have to play the quadruplet as a single chord, C-E-G. A “chord” is a combination of three or more notes that blend harmoniously when played together. You will then go from slow speed to infinite speed! And that’s why it’s called a chord attack.
Let’s take a closer look. Examine the passage below:
In the right hand, the passage begins with the triplet, E-G#-C#. The fastest way to play this sequence is to play it as chord, along with the corresponding fingering. When you play a chord, there is zero delay between the playing of notes, so you are playing the notes infinitely fast. Chord attacks are a great method to enhance speed and velocity. You can use then wherever you find a series of notes that can be played as a chord.
Now that you can play a chord very fast with the chord attack method, what happens if you want to slow down? Firstly, you can play the chord while moving the hand up and down at the frequency at which the chord or quadruplet should be played. Try between one and two times per second. Experiment with your movements by varying your bouncing hands, and remember to adjust your wrist, arm, and finger movements as well. If you begin to feel tired after a while, you might be doing something wrong, or you haven’t quite figured out the technical movements.
Basically, practicing the up and down movement over and over again until you do not feel tired is necessary. And if you feel tired by practicing the motions with chords, you’ll definitely have a hard time with quadruplets.
But how should you move? This depends on your own body and level of comfort. You need to find the most efficient motions that personally compliment you. Try keeping your fingers very close to or touching the keys as you increase your speed, and get your whole body involved in the movements. This should definitely include your shoulders, your upper and lower arms, and of course, your wrists. Don’t play from your fingertips, use your shoulders and arms.
How will you know when you’ve done it? When you find that you can play the chord or quadruplet softly, relaxed, and without tiring, then you have definitely made great progress.
Remember that you need to play the notes as perfect chords, meaning that all notes should land one after the other, no stops, delays, or flub; note after note, infinite playing. Without this, you won’t acquire the accuracy needed to play them fast.
Practice the bouncing hand motions slowly. This is the best way to work on acquiring accuracy. Accuracy will improve faster when you practice them slowly.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
Practicing chords can solve a lot of problems in piano practice and improvement. I’ve found some great resources for chord practice, even if you barely know a thing about chords.
The Talking Chord Chart
The first is The Talking Piano Chord Chart, which gives you some great virtual piano lessons, allowing you to see and hear each chord and how they are formed. You’ll know everything about major, minor, augmented, and diminished chords in no time. If you use this chart right, it’s quite likely that you can learn up to 48 different chords in a matter of 15 to 20 minutes.
Power Piano Chords
The second is Power Piano Chords, which gives you 39 separate lessons on piano chords. When you study and practice enough about chords, you can actually improvise in your music and even write your own arrangements, because you’ll understand how certain notes fit together to create desirable sounds and harmonies. I advise you to check them out soon!
Posted in Musical Signs & Notation, Piano Chords, Technique (Discussions), The Practice Routine |
Tags: Chords, Quadruplets, Speed, Triplets |
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Five Tips For Acquiring Accurate Tempo
October 2nd, 2009
Time Signature
Tempo is the speed at which you play a piece. Keeping up with tempo can actually be one of the most frustrating skills to learn and execute, especially with fast piano pieces. I’ve put together five essential tips for improving your tempo capabilities.
1. Begin all pieces by counting carefully, especially for beginner piano players.
If you’re just a beginner, learning to count out load is the only way to find out your own idea of counting with time. You should also be able to understand the time signature at the beginning of the piece, which looks like a mathematical fraction. The top number indicates the number of beats per measure and the denominator indicates the note per beat.
2. Use a metronome to ensure accurate speed and beat counting.
A metronome is a ticking pendulum (electronic or manual) that indicates the exact tempo of a musical piece. No matter how much of an advanced pianist you are, you never cease to be amazed at how honest the metronome can be. I am always surprised at the errors I find in my own playing when I incorporate the metronome. If you use the metronome in your practicing process, you will undoubtedly improve. All serious piano players own and use a metronome.
3. Do not spend long amounts of time practicing with a metronome.
While metronomes are an essential part of musical practice, they can also be harmful to your technique if you use them for too long. It leads to something called, “mechanical playing.” In fact, if you play with the metronome for more than 10 minutes, your mind will start play mental tricks on you, which causes you to lose your accuracy. Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself… If you have a metronome that makes a clicking sound, your brain will start to create anti-clicks that will indeed cancel out the metronome’s clicking so you will either begin to stop hearing the metronome’s clicks, or you will just lose the timing and accuracy of the clicks.
4. Never use the metronome as a substitute for your own internal timing.
The metronome is used for setting tempo and checking accuracy, and nothing else. When you find yourself exploring new ways of speeding up your playing of a piece, it is a process of discovering new motions that you feel comfortable with. If you actually set your metronome to such an intermediate speed, you will likely struggle and end up building up a speed wall that you can’t find your way around. New motion discoveries always prevail because the human hands are mechanical devices that have resonance at which specific combinations of movements will naturally work effectively.
5. Electronic metronomes are always better than mechanical metronomes.
Electronic metronomes are more accurate than mechanical ones. They can also make different sounds, use flashing lights, incorporate a headphone input, include volume variance, have memory functions, and are generally just less bulky and expensive. Mechanical metronomes look nice, but as they get older, they become less effective and sometimes they even need rewinding right when you’re in the middle of practicing.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
Get a metronome, if you don’t have one. My piano teacher used to have a mechanical one, and I found it annoying that she always had to rewind it. I use the Korg MA-30 Digital Metronome, and I find it very handy, extremely durable, and has a lot of great features. You can find ones on the Internet, such as the Ultimate Metronome. Whichever one you choose, put it straight to good use because it will definitely help you improve your piano playing.
Posted in Rhythm and Tempo, The Practice Routine |
Tags: Counting, Korg MA-30, Metronome, Speed, Tempo, Time, Time Signature, Timing |
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Slow Piano Practice
August 30th, 2009
When you’re practicing a piano piece, there is no such thing as going too slowly. In fact, you should always end each and every practice session by playing slowly… at least once.
Even if you have not reached the stage where you are plaything with hands together, you should still practice the separate left and right hand slowly. Before switching, ALWAYS end your left or right hand practice with a slow run-through practice.
You may not know it, but this is such an important rule in piano practice because it has such an incredibly large effect on your technical improvement. However, musicians still have trouble figuring out why it actually works. All we know is that it DOES work.
As a hypothesis, many believe that slow piano practice is so beneficial because the piano player has the ability to completely relax. Additionally, it’s easier to pick up more bad piano habits when you play at a faster pace. With slow piano practice, you can virtually erase these bad habits.
Even though you may be at the beginning stage of learning your piece, playing slowly is a great way to test whether you have actually learned the piece.
But how SLOW should you practice? What may be slow to you may actually be medium speed to me.
Ultimately, this is your judgment call. It depends on the individual, their skills, and their learning capabilities. You will begin to realize that when you play slower than a certain speed, it will begin to lose its effect over you.
It’s very important to keep in mind that when you are practicing piano slowly that you maintain the same hand and finger motions that you will use when you play faster. If you play below your optimal slow speed, this will seem impossible.
Ideally, you want to choose a slow speed you can play as accurately as you want, around ½ to ¾ speed. As an added bonus, playing at your optimal slow speed will also help you memorize your piano pieces. As you technique improves, your slow speed can be increased.
Want to hear a fun fact? Some very famous pianists have actually been known to practice ridiculously slowly. That’s right, the genius composers that we all know and worship today over our pianos actually took their time with practice. Some were documented to practice at one note per second, which seems completely insane.
As a final note, it’s important to think ahead of the music when you are practicing slowly. If you practice too fast, it’s easy to mentally fall behind the music, which can easily be adapted as a bad piano habit. Why is it bad? Because you lose control. You need to think ahead and try to maintain that distance as you get back up to speed. When you think ahead, you can actually foresee what is awaiting for you, which can prevent flubs or blank-outs so you will know what to do when you get to that measure.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
As you sit down to your piano for a practice session, try practicing everything at a fast pace, and see what happens the next day you sit down to practice. After that, try practicing a certain measure or passage fast only, and another measure or passage (of the same difficulty) slowly. Compare your improvements the next day when you try to play them. Since this effect is cumulative, after several days of using the fast practicing as well as the slow practicing, you will begin to notice a huge difference in your improvements. Since this is a time consuming experiment, practicing slowly is all you really need. Patience, my friend, patience is all that you need!
Posted in The Practice Routine |
Tags: Bad Piano Habits, Fast Practice, Pace, Patience, Piano Practice, Practicing Piano, Slow, Speed |
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