Piano Video Lesson: Are You Playing the Piano Too Fast?

Hi. I'm Robert Estrin and you're watching livingpianos.com. Today, the question is, why do you play too fast? And I bet you do. Most people try to play faster than they're comfortable. And then, more than that, you ever take a piece and you can play just fine, and then you try to play it slower, and it's like, ah, you can't even figure out where you are? Well, there's a great deal of motor memory that happens, or muscle memory, it's sometimes referred to. Your fingers just kind of know where to go. And you want to go fast enough that you won't forget where to go next. Of course, the problem with this is unless the music is really secure, your tempo will fluctuate. You'll make accommodations to the parts you don't know quite as well, going a little slower, and then you'll speed up again so you don't forget where you are.

So this is akin to, I don't know how many of you touch type, but I took a typing class in high school and learned how to touch type, where I don't have to look at the keys. And it's great because ... little did I know that would be probably the most important course I had in high school, just about because with the computer age, it's so great to be able to just type without looking at your hands. But the funny thing is if I stop and think like where is W the keyboard, I don't even know. Where is that? I have to look at the keyboard.

Sometimes, for example, if I have to on a screen and it's smaller and you have to just touch the letters on the screen with your finger, I can't even find them. And yet, you put me on a keyboard and almost as fast as I can speak. I'm a really fast typist as you're my guess. I was the fastest in my class in high school. Every time we had a timing, everyone would rush to me to see what I got. I guess all those years of piano paid off in my typing class.

So getting back to playing the piano too fast. Yes, it is a problem that is rampant among many, many piano students. And what you must do is take the time to slow down your playing and figure out what is there. And this could be a painstaking process. And I've talked a little bit about how sometimes when you want to start in the middle, you may have to speed up, play fast, just to figure out what finger you're on to start in the middle. And sometimes, when you're playing slowly, just to get on track, you might want to play faster just a little bit, just to see where you are and what fingers are on which notes as a starting point of a section.

But going through with slow practice, I can tell you this, every fine pianist I have ever met practices slowly incessantly. There are two things, really three that every accomplished pianist does, practice slowly, practice with a metronome, and practice without the pedal. And I'll also add to that practice with the music. When you memorize a piece, that doesn't mean you don't use the score anymore. As a matter of fact, it's the opposite. I like to memorize a piece first and then do all my practicing with the score, reinforcing the memory, practicing slowly with the metronome with no pedal and really solidifying.

So the reason why you play too fast is because you're not really cognizant of the score. You don't really have an intellectual understanding of it. You're just going through the motions that your fingers kind of remember on their own without knowing what they're supposed to be doing. But that's extremely dangerous because it doesn't have a solid foundation and things can fall apart if you depend upon that type of playing. Now, thank goodness we do have motor memory because piano would be so much more difficult if you couldn't depend upon it at all. But you want to minimize your reliance upon the feeling of the keys and where your fingers just naturally go. And that slow, deliberate playing is the way to do it, referring back to the score. So try that in your playing. Take a piece that you know, and that you can play fast but you can't play slowly, securely.

First of all, you're going to discover so many things. You'll go, "Oh, I thought that chord had three notes. It only has two," or, "I thought this note was staccato," or, "Oh, there's a quarter rest there I didn't even know about." You will always find more details because your music has so many details in it. So try this out for yourself. Let me know how it works. Here are the comments on livingpianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me. I'm Robert Estrin, and this is Living Pianos, your online piano resource. Thanks for subscribing.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/are-you-playing-the-piano-too-fast/

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