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Piano Is Not A Gymnasium by Terry Trotter Keyboard technique isn't about athletics; it's about art. It's just a means to get the music out. Ultimately you want to have a variety of touches and a range of dynamics at your fingertips. You want to have the coordination to move around the keyboard with confidence. In essence, technique is about control. Most people have no trouble getting the strength necessary to play demanding pieces it's the control of articulation and dynamics that are the problem. In fact, you don't have to practice playing fortissimo at all. That's how a lot of players get hurt. That old concept of having your sound reach the last row of Carnegie Hall can be a dangerous one. Some people feel that when they're practicing technical exercises, they need to push the volume and get a lot of sound, but it's not true. Band situations present another hazard. When they get started playing blues or rock, for example, many players basically just whack the piano. Even when you have control of the volume of electronic instruments, when the band is playing at 120 dB onstage, you're likely to try to compensate by playing harder than you ought to, if for no other reason than just to keep up with the intensity. Still, to obtain technical facility, you do have to make your body do things it may not be used to, push it a little bit in order to develop. It doesn't want to do pianistic things, especially if you didn't learn to do them as a kid. If you're an adult, you have to push the tempos at which you practice just a little bit, gently. Your system is not going to want to do it. So be careful; if you push yourself too much, tension may creep into your playing and you'll risk injury. Be aware of tension as you practice and perform. If you start feeling really tired, you need to stop. It's not like doing push-ups or arm curls. People try to get that last rep out when they're doing bench presses at the gym. You don't want to do that on the piano. If you do, eventually you won't be able to play at all. You'll be instructed by your doctor not to go near a piano for months. By adopting a very simple practice routine that combines simple technical exercises with a musical approach and an awareness of your body, you can avoid such disastrous results. Here are a few suggestions for you self-starters, culled from years of teaching and observing fellow pianists, that should get you on your way to developing a solid foundation of technique. Horizontal Movement First and foremost is my concept of horizontal movement and I don't mean physical movement. Simply put, no matter what you're playing, it should be a phrase that's moving somewhere. Whether it's a short idea applied to an arpeggio or a long one applied to a scale, whether it's a musical line or whether you're just comping, you should make the music go somewhere dynamically. You have to be going somewhere for the music to have the kind of grace that it needs, no matter whether you're playing an exercise or a prelude. Keeping this idea in mind while you practice technical exercises will help keep you from pounding, too. Scales It's not whether you should practice scales, it's how you should do it. It's very important to start at a tempo that's comfortable for you. Find one where you can comfortably play two-handed scales in octaves at four notes per tick on your metronome. Then you want to find the tempo that is your sixteenth-note limit, where it pushes you just a bit. That's where you want to start practicing. The idea is to feel that you're pushing yourself just a little bit. Then you want to inch the metronome up gradually, so that you're never totally comfortable, but neither are you straining. Plan to practice scales at this tempo two ways: in sixteenths and in eighth-notes. At the beginning, concentrate on playing four-octave scales legato, where the sound of one note connects or melts into the next, without overlapping. When you're doing any kind of linear technique (such as scales), your fingers should be close to the keys. I don't believe in the hammer touch, where you raise your fingers high. That can be very destructive, even though that was the way that lots of us practiced years ago. Keep the thumb very light and loose. If the thumb is tight, the rest of the hand is going to be tight, too. As you go up and down the keyboard, you want to have a gliding feeling with no jerky motions involved. In order to do that, the thumb has to move smoothly under the hand, and the hand over the thumb. The wrist remains quiet, not stiff, and in line with the forearm. The forearms should angle inward slightly toward each other. The elbows should not stick out. As you go up and down the keyboard with the hands together, keep the hands in line with your forearms as much as possible. Keep your wrists at about the same level as your elbows. Think of the wrist as being quiet, but light. As you're moving up and down the keyboard, keep your hands centered in front of your body as much as possible. So as you're moving to the right up the keyboard, you would move your body to the right and forward a little bit. And as you go down, move your body to the left and forward. The point is that your arms should be well-supported by the larger muscles of the shoulders. Your shoulders should be loose, if not relaxed. Relaxing is very good, but it isn't an accurate term because when you're playing, you're using muscles. You want to use them in an efficient way and yet remain loose. It's important to apply different rhythms to your scale patterns in addition to straight sixteenths and eighths. Try dotted rhythms, triplets, and various combinations of eighths and sixteenths. This will put the emphasis on different fingers, and you'll land in different places in the scale. You'll develop flexibility and control this way. As you grow as a keyboardist, you're going to run into people who stay in one place, have their elbows out, pull their fingers up, and generally do it all wrong and they'll still sound great. But for us ordinary mortals, this works better. Five-Finger Exercises With exercises that use all five fingers but keep the hands in one position for a relatively long period of time, you run the risk of causing irritation or inflammation. To avoid this, I'll have my students do such exercises in only three keys at a time. After a rest stop, do the next three keys, and so on (see Example 1). More advanced students can play these five-finger exercises in thirds. Play this exercise in eighth-notes at a tempo slow enough that you can watch everything and control your finger movements. (see
figure #1) The Dohnanyi finger independence exercises where you hold down notes and then move the other fingers can be useful for finger independence (see Example 2). I've brought a couple of well-known pianists to their knees with a couple of those exercises. I said to them, "Hey, you ever try this?" They'd say, "Oh, that's not that hard." They sit down and try to play them, but their fingers keep coming up when they don't want them to. The advantage of these exercises is that they don't make any demands in terms of stretching. You can do them in all keys. If you play them by holding down the notes lightly without using too much weight, and if you don't play them loudly but try different tempos and dynamic levels, they can be very helpful in developing more control. (see
figure #2) Warming Up One of the problems that pianists have before they perform is that they usually can't get to a piano. When I was with Larry Carlton, he asked me what I did to warm up. He could sit backstage and mess around with the guitar, and I couldn't go out and just run some scales as the audience drifted in. I told him that it's a mental thing. After you get to a certain level, once your hands are physically warm, you just play what you hear, and no warming up is necessary for that. Your technique will rise to your idea. A good way to warm up before practicing is to play scales at a slow tempo up and down the keyboard with a nice legato touch, in three keys at most. Tone The kind of sound you make on the piano is determined by the speed with which you depress the key. It's a simple thing, but it's really important. Getting a variety of sounds out of the piano is part of technique, too. It's not just about moving your fingers up and down really fast. Sometimes I'll take a ballad, or a lyrical classical piece, such as the Chopin Prelude in E minor. Then I experiment by playing with different finger speeds into the keys. My teacher used to talk about thinking of the key as a spring that has to be compressed, as though you're feeling the resistance of the spring when you start to depress the key. You imagine it, and you go slower into the key that way. That can be nice for getting a lyrical sound. Then when you're going for a light, clear sound, use a quicker motion into the key. Arpeggios As with scales, when playing arpeggios you want to find a way to get up and down the keyboard without too many jerky motions of the hand. You want to have your hands glide across the keyboard. At a slow tempo, you want to connect the notes as your thumb goes under your hand: Angle your arm out a little and stretch your thumb a little as it goes under the hand and stretches to the next note up. When you're playing at a fast tempo, the finger actually would get off its note before your thumb hit its next note. You should never snap your thumb under as you play arpeggios. As you play the third finger on the G when moving upward in a C major arpeggio, the right thumb should be on its way, pretty close to being under the third finger. Left-Hand Work I often work on my left hand alone. I might take the Bach Two-Part Invention No. 8, and play just the left-hand part alone. It actually works as a piece all unto itself. Or I'll take a tune, maybe a ballad, and play it with my left hand alone. Then I may take a blues in an unusual key, and improvise with my left hand alone, linearly. Then I may go back and forth, having the left hand take a chorus, then the right hand. It creates a consciousness that carries over into two-handed playing. Injury Prevention on the Job In the heat of a gig, some players can get tense as they get into the excitement of the show. When I perform, I make sure that I move my shoulders around occasionally, even in the middle of a tune. Take lots of breaks, even if they're ten seconds long. Shake your hands out often, to make sure that no tension is building up. After I land on a chord, I let my wrist give, or rebound a little, rather than keeping it stiff. It's the difference between jumping rope with your knees locked straight and jumping rope with them bent, with a bit of give when you hit the pavement. There's a little cushion that way. Conclusion With just some simple Bach pieces, some scales, and some arpeggios, you can build a very nice technical foundation, if you're relaxed about it and if you listen to your playing. If you play with dynamics and phrasing foremost in your mind, you'll progress nicely. Make everything as musical as you can. If you have a wide enough dynamic range, you won't need to play too loud; go for a softer pianissimo for contrast instead. Play your scales at different dynamics; it'll help you to concentrate, to have that one quality as a goal. It'll keep you involved. Then take a piece that normally you'd play with a big dynamic range, and play it quietly, or vice-versa. The point is to get the feeling of controlling the dynamics according to what you want to hear musically. It's about getting this whole mechanism your body and the piano so that it's at the service of the music. You've got to have patience for this, especially if you're starting the piano later in life, not as a kid. It's a very slow process, and you can't hurry it. You have to just get involved. You have to get up and practice, and have something to aim toward. Work on some scales, some arpeggios, and some Bach each day. If you don't get to everything each day, no problem. But you can't think in terms of short-term accomplishments. This simply takes years. But during those years, you'll be getting better it's just not usually as fast as people want. The minute you start trying too hard or pushing too hard, your system will say, "The heck with you." It's going to go at its own pace. Terry Trotter is a studio musician and teacher in Los Angeles. His trio with Tom Warrington on bass and Joe LaBarbera on drums has recorded six CDs of the music of Stephen Sondheim for VarFse-Sarabande. He has also been Natalie Cole's acoustic pianist for many years.
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