Piano Video Lesson: Why You Can't Sit Too Close to Your Piano

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin and today the question is why you can't sit too close to your piano. I see people often times and they're sitting like this at their piano and you think, well this is nice, can be nice and close to the music. What's wrong with that? Well there's a very big problem with that and it's trying to play in the extreme registers. Look what happens if you're sitting this close, look at the angle of the hands. You can't possibly get them comfortable.

The bend is tremendous plus your elbows go into your body here. It's a nightmare trying to play this way. So you sit back a bit and you'll know if you're the right distance. I have a video I did years ago about this. If you put your hands like this, they should be straight out in front with your wrists bent and that's about right. That means your elbows are in front of you, not next to you when you're playing the piano and that enables you to play all registers of the piano easily. Now another thing that I see many students doing is they have something high so they move over on the bench so they can play here and they move over back over here and it's low. Well what happens if they're playing something that goes all over the piano like this? You can't possibly be jumping around the bench to get to different areas of the keyboard. Here's the good news, from a central position you can reach all the keys. You know they're not that far apart. So find a central location far enough from the keyboard that your elbows won't get in your way. You can comfortably play high register, low register on the piano and you're going to be in great shape. If you haven't been sitting at this distance, try it for yourself and see how it makes you feel particularly in playing in extreme registers on your piano. Thanks again for joining me and all your subscribers. Ringing that bell helps the algorithms. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/why-you-cant-sit-too-close-to-your-piano/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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