Piano Video Lesson: How to play repeated notes on the piano - Video 2

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin here with two reasons why you must change fingers on repeated notes.

When you have the same note on the piano, often times you'll see fingering where they tell you to use different fingers on the same note and you think, why would you need to do that? Why don't you just play that same note with the same finger? Well, the answer is yes. There are two times when this is not true. Otherwise, absolutely use the same finger on repeated notes. But today I'm going to show you two times when you absolutely must change fingers on repeated notes. Well, there's one very obvious time and that's when things go really fast. For example, in this Scarlatti Sonata, it's virtually impossible to play repeated notes this quickly with the same finger.

Obviously, you couldn't possibly play that with one finger instead of using the same finger repeated.

Different fingers can absolutely go faster. So that's an obvious place where you must change fingers on repeated notes. But there's another time as well. If you want to achieve a true legato on repeated notes, you must change fingers. Why? Because listen to the sound with one finger repeating the same note.

Now, by lifting up the previous played finger while the next finger is coming down, you can actually get the repetition sooner, making a more of a legato between the repetitions.

Once again, here it is with one finger and now changing fingers.

So listen to the beginning of the second movement of Mozart's C major sonata, K 330.

There's two C major sonatas that I play all the time. I wanted to get the right cursor for all you scholarly musicians out there.

I'm going to play the same part of this beginning of the second movement of the sonata with the same finger repeated notes where they occur. And listen to the difference.

Now, you might think that you can make it work with the pedal and the pedal indeed will help. But what I'm going to do now, I'm going to play the same section with no pedal, no pedal, but with repeated notes, changing the fingers and listen to how much legato could be achieved in this manner.

So it's remarkable how much legato can be achieved even without the pedal. And then by adding the pedal with the repeated notes, with changing fingers, you get the ultimate smooth legato.

Oh, let me let you see the pedaling as I do it. I don't use the pedal all that much.

Quickly you must change fingers in order to facilitate rapid repeated notes. Otherwise, if you have instances with repeated notes that don't require an extreme legato or they're not so fast, by all means use the same finger on repeated notes. But these are two instances where you must change fingers on repeated notes. I hope this has helped for you, for all of you. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. You're watching LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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