So his teacher tells him to memorize the pieces. Good I think, so I have him go memorize each piece and give me a concert once a day. He's like 40% of the way there now, better but no where near close.
So his teacher now says go learn with your eyes closed. _This_ made the difference. He plays with the correct rhythm, corrects any mistaken notes because well mistakes compound, even his dynamics sound right now. It's actually beginning to sound like actual music!
For him I think closing the eyes got him out of his mentality of just rushing the pieces, it put him out of his comfort zone and that has made all the difference.
Playing with eyes closed is something that I've never tried, but my guess is that it's forcing him to listen and that's why it works. (I need to try it myself!) What worked for me when I was a bit older is my teacher making me get a little handheld recorder (cheap ones were surprisingly good back then, and I'm sure the tech has improved). Try having him record the song and listen to the recording, and ask what he thinks. In particular, does it sound musical? Why or why not? My guess is that it'll reveal details he wasn't able to focus on while playing, and it will motivate him to fix them.
Closing my eyes really helped with removing all stimuli that distracted me from actually doing that and it made all the difference.
Feel the damn music :/
he puts heavy emphasis on practicing with your eyes closed from the beginning. this becomes possible through visualizing scales and chords from the beginning.
other aspects are: getting your ego out of the way, trusting in you inherent musicality and allowing you creative source to steer your fingers to express your emotions and avoiding conscious interference. there is also a lot of simple improvisation inside a chord from the beginning.
i cant speak for the long term success of his technique, but i like the approach and it makes sense to me with respect to other skills i have aquired before.
his youtube channel is a bit hard to navigate but this playlist is a good starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQxJJ7AgS7k&list=PL4cPpP-Ua6...
he also has a blog: http://piano-jazz.blogspot.com/p/water-pianism.html
He was an excellent teacher - one of the things he majored on was ‘blind’ familiarity with the keyboard. He would get you to close your eyes, then ask you to pick out, for example, all the Cs on the keyboard going up the octaves. Made a huge difference to my confidence in positioning my hands at speed…
I record and watch or listen after many days. I have recordings of some of my performances from years ago which felt really terrible on the day of the performance but felt ok many years later.
Each piece could be seen as many stories and as performer you can choose your story, then try to tell it. Classical pieces obviously have a canonical version which is what most audience would expect. Still, when learning such piece the story still needs to be there, not just as a sequence of prescribed pianos, fortes, and ritenuntos, but as a moving flow to capture interest and convey some relatable image.
I guess the classical training also can equip performers with such imagery. I have grateful memories of teachers that tried to project a story into our kid-minds before delving into technical aspects of learning a new piece. Very inspiring times.
Start slow and in small chunks with a focus on “correct”, everything else takes care of itself.
Keep in mind, this is a man who continued playing as a soloist in concert once after breaking his A string by playing high on his D string. You have to know the rules before you can break them well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSHwX2O7j2w
World of difference IMO.
FWIW, if I was learning Un Sospiro, I would just try get through the whole song. I played it at 1/2 speed and that seemed to be a reasonable attempt.
Sometimes I feel if you have to follow the techniques in the OP, the song may be too challenging for you.
I use my 4th finger for Backspace, not 5th (pinkie). While pinkie may seem logical at first, it is much shorter on my hand than 4th. To use 4th, I only have to move my wrist to the right. To use 5th, I have to move my whole arm toward the screen, which is a much bigger deal. Same kind of thing happens in piano fingering all the time.
The other key thing about fingering is you don't want to stretch fingers if you can avoid it. Stretched fingers cause fatigue and fingers are less flexible when stretched. Try stretching your fingers apart and moving them quickly. So when finding a fingering, you want to group notes into comfortable hand positions, play what you can in that position, then move your hand to the next position. This is commonly called grouping and surfacing if you want to do some research.
You also want to avoid playing with your wrist twisted to the far right or left. If your fingering requires a twisted wrist, the notes should probably be grouped a different way, which will also change the hand position and fingering you use.
How to figure out what is "correct" fingering and what is not? I asked some pianists that question and I've got 3 versions of answers from each of them followed by advice to try out and see what works for you. So what is "correct" fingering then?
A lot of the fingering remarks at this stage were about legato. In the easy Beethoven Sonatina in G, you have sort of a reversal of my earlier story - the downward movement is in the top notes here. There's a sequence of two chords, D-A and D-G in bar three. You could easily do both of those 51-51, but then the possibility of joining the two upper notes would be lost. The "correct" fingering would be 51-52, lifting the pinky and doing a nice legato on the top notes, one that follows into bar 4 with 53. It makes a world of difference when you hear how it sounds with a proper chord legato applied.
If you don't have a teacher, the next best thing would be to make sure you have a good edition with the proper fingerings added. Something like Alfred Masterwork, or the newer Schirmer Performance - both are relatively inexpensive and nicely edited. But then you will get just the fingering without the reasoning behind it.
At least in some cases, yes. For me, that's the real point of having a teacher - learning the thought process, not the pieces.
One thing worth mentioning is that sometimes the correct fingering for a piece is contextualized. There are pieces that you might treat as a goal in their own right, but they might also be just a stepping stone to other pieces. For example, you might see a sequence of three notes in the left hand, and there will be a "correct" fingering that's most comfortable for just those three notes. But the teacher that suggested this piece knows that those three notes can be seen as a simplified version of a six note pattern that occurs throughout a more difficult piece you will tackle later. So the "correct" fingering they suggest to you is the fingering that's most comfortable for the more difficult version you haven't played yet. You're not looking at the piece as-is, you're thinking of it in the context of what you'll eventually play and optimizing the fingering for performance of the target piece.
You will often hear that "correct" fingering is the one most comfortable. This is only partially true when you're in the early stages. Often, you go for something that's suboptimal in a particular piece because it will be more comfortable in another piece down the road.
Can you point out to such "agreed" fingering somewhere? Because as a self learner I perhaps had no chance to know which one is it?
For the chromatic scale, I was taught to alternate 3 and 1, using 2 when there are two white keys in a row.
It's a bad idea to finger on the first play or the first day because there's a risk of premature optimisation. It doesn't take much analysis apart from one or two specific problems. The fingerings I end up with usually vary somewhat from the editor's.
But the OP is correct, once you've got a fingering, you have to stick to it, even if it's suboptimal in places. It's your fingering, and if you change something after 200 repetitions there's a danger of slipping back into the old pattern and stumbling.
People have different sized hands, and different hand strengths, so some fingerings may be more damaging to a pianist's hands, and some might be more comfortable but break down at higher speeds, and some might simply be impractical at any speed.
> Use the correct fingering, dynamics, articulation, etc. from the very beginning; you are never going to get around to “fixing” it later.
When I was an impatient kid my piano teachers would keep insisting I play sections slow on a first pass, which annoyed me (it was like reading a book out loud slowly), but it was only until many years later when I played pieces like Un Sospiro[0] which are intractable if you do not start practicing at something like 16 times slower than performance tempo. If you start out correctly, the rest will follow, and IME, sight reading greatly improves as well.
> [...] you may reach a point where you can’t play any faster, no matter how hard you try. What is likely happening is that the hand motions you are using—which come naturally at the slower tempo you started with—simply will not work at such high speeds.
This is completely true, for instance, in ragtime, the left hand makes big, quick jumps and there is often no time to look at where it will land (which one likely does when playing slowly), so repeating a bar over and over again to incrementally refine your distance estimate is crucial.
This applies to things like typing on a keyboard as well, if you focus on correct finger placement (and correct use of the 4th and 5th fingers), your WPM might take a hit for a few days or a week, but in the long term it really helps.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po_a1SmZKLs