Piano Video Lesson: An Essential Wrist Technique

Welcome to livingpianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin. Today, I'm going to give you an important wrist technique. I've talked so much about the wrist in many of my videos, as well as to my students. The wrist is almost as important, or perhaps, just as important as the fingers in piano playing, because there's so much that they allow for in phrasing, the way in which notes are connected or detached.

Now, generally speaking, I've talked about how the wrist has to be independent from the arm, because if you want to get short sounds, if you play with the arm there's a limitation to the speed compared to the wrist. There's also a crisper sound. So for example, in a Bach Minuet, you would play like this to get the staccatos.

Very well articulated, and the way to practice that is with various exercises where you just use the wrist, and you don't use the arms. And one simple exercise, I have a video in this, which will be in the description, is utilizing thirds, just using your second and fourth finger. You put the metronome on 60, and just play using just your wrist, not going up and down with the arm.

The arms are, however, are so important in keeping your fingers exactly over the right keys. And this is how it works. It seems so simple, and really it is. But playing in a simple manner might be hard if you've never done it before. But, this enables you to get great speed, because once you can identify the wrist separate from the arms, then you can have the speed and power to play...

And it's rather effortless, because you're only using a small amount of mass instead of trying to do it with your whole body or your arms. Now, what I'm talking about today is something entirely different, I've never brought up in any video before. And it's a different type of wrist technique. If you don't want that well articulated staccato like I demonstrate in the Bach of...

Suppose you want something a little bit more subtle, where the staccatos are not punctuated in such a manner. For example, in the First Bach Invention.

Now, if I were to play that last note of the subject, using the technique I showed you in the Minuet of... It would sound like this. You can hear that every single one of the staccatos are accented. And maybe you don't want that, maybe you want to have it where it tapers at the end, yet it's still short. And that's where an alternative wrist technique where you come up, instead of going down to the wrist...

You actually come up with the arm, and allow the wrist to just be lifeless. And listen how it comes off with a gentle staccato, not an accented staccato, and listen how beautiful this is. So that's the tip for today. If you want a gentle staccato, you can come up with the arm and allow the wrist to just be floppy. And just... So you get the opposite of an accent, it comes off on staccato.

Now, without using the wrist at all, you'd get this sound... And once again, using the wrist in the manner I showed you initially, of coming up with the wrist... And you can hear every one of those staccatos are accented. And listen once again, with the coming up of the arm and letting the wrist just gently bend without any force, getting a gentle staccato that isn't accented.

So that's a new technique for you to try out in your music. I'm interested in how this works for all of you. Try it out where you have staccatos that are gentle, that are on the off-beats, staccatos that are not punctuated, that are not to be accented. This is a way you can achieve that phrasing without accenting the staccatos, as in the first technique showed you.

I hope this is helpful for you. Let me know in the comments here at livingpianos.com and YouTube. And once again, thank you all you subscribers. The Patreon subscribers really help out the channel. And subscribing here on YouTube and at livingpianos.com, you'll know about future videos that you might be interested in. Thanks for joining me again, I'm Robert Estrin.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/an-essential-wrist-technique/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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