Piano Video Lesson: Why Corrections Are So Hard on the Piano

You are present at that moment to incorporate the correction you know you already can do.

This is LivingPianos.com and I'm Robert Estrin.

The subject today is why corrections are so hard on the piano.

You may have had this experience where you have something in your music you learned wrong or something doesn't quite come out right and so you correct it and you cement it and you do it over and over again and you get it perfect and you can play it ten times as well perfectly. It's no problem at all. Then you get to a performance or you play for your teacher and the same darn mistake comes back at you. You go, but you corrected that. How could this possibly come back to haunt you? Well, I'm going to give you a parallel here. Imagine there is a route you've taken for a long time, for months, maybe years you have a job and every day you got in your car and you went the same way each day and you're just so used to it that you don't even have to think about it and that's the problem. Because then let's say there's a new route or a new job and you have to take a different way, but you're so used to it. You get in your car, it's the morning, you're thinking about other things. You say, oh my gosh, I took the freeway, oh my gosh, the wrong way.

The same thing happens when you're playing on the piano. Just because you can play it ten times in a row as an abstraction by itself in your practice with nobody there doesn't mean that that hundreds of times you played it before or that route you drove a hundred times before isn't still back there in your brain. It is and it can come out at any time. So correcting mistakes involves more than just correcting the mistakes. You have to learn to be aware of the correction at the time it comes. And in musical performance in particular when there are many distractions and perhaps a little extra nervous energy, a little more adrenaline, you might revert back to something and you can't even believe it's happening. So what's the answer to this? Aside from of course practicing incessantly on the correction until it's ironed out, it's being aware when you get to the correction. Just like being aware when you're taking that route, this is where I take the second entrance to the freeway, not the first one. Program it in. Even before you leave you think about I'm going to take that second entrance and when you get in your car make a mental note so you're aware of it when you get there just like in your musical performance. When you get to that second movement of the sonata remember the second ending has an F sharp. Be aware of it. So when you get there you are present at that moment to incorporate the correction you know you already can do. So that's the tip for today. I hope this is helpful for you. Please comment here on livingpianos.com and YouTube. Let me know how you feel about this and if this is helpful for you or if you have other pointers for other people leave them in the comments. Again Robert Estrin at livingpianos.com your online piano resource. Thanks again for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/why-corrections-are-so-hard-on-the-piano/

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