Analysis of Procedures Used for Training Piano Students

Students should follow the following steps: To begin with, rehearse scales till the fingers become flexible. Do this for 30 minutes or more if time permits to improve skills especially by using exercises which include the Hanon series. Pick a new piece of music and read it slowly for a few pages while playing both hands together from the beginning. Repeat the slow play until you become adept. Increase the speed until the final speed is reached. A metronome is recommended for this gradual speed up. After a two hour practice, the fingers are becoming accustomed to it such that the students can play as fast as they want and revel in it before quitting. They are tired of practicing so they can take a break, play as much as they want and enjoy the music Once the music can be played satisfactorily, learn it by heart and practice “until the music is in the hands” On the day of the lesson, try out the piece at maximum speed as many times as possible so as to ensure that it is in good condition. This is the last try. The more practice, the better. Every step of this routine is wrong! The above will assure that the students will not improve beyond the intermediate level even if they trained constantly. For instance, this technique does not inform the students on what to do when they are stuck. It only informs them about repeating it for maybe a lifetime with no clear picture of when or how this skill will be acquired. This leaves the student with the task of learning how to play this instrument. Hence, the music will come out flat during the lesson and unexpected mistakes are bound to happen. This becomes clearer when you read about more efficient methods explained below.

One of major reasons why students quit piano is lack of progress. Majority of these students are smart which often lead to the question; why practice all day and still end up learning nothing? This is probably because there is no reward, as incentives go a long way in ensuring dedication. It is important to note that the procedures described above are intuitive. Should an individual of average intelligence be left alone on an island with a piano, the person would probably devise the methods described above and learn how to play. This explains that the method is purely intuitive and all the time spent in class is for naught. This is the primary reason why teachers employ the intuitive approach as they never get accustomed to the right methods which led to the intuitive approach. Counter-intuitive methods are harder to adopt because of the signals the brain send to inform individuals of how only the intuitive methods are right and others aren't. In essence, it is important to note that only the right methods should be adopted, independent of others. Students are considered lucky when they begin with the right methods and they must be cautious of the wrong techniques after leaving the teacher if they are unaware of what the technique entails. These lucky students are incapable of teaching others because they are ignorant of the fact that intuitive methods pose danger. The unlucky students who are accustomed to the instinctive techniques change to better ones over time and it helps them know the right from the wrong methods. This is one advantage they have over the teachers who have only the knowledge of the intuitive methods. Finger positions To learn how to properly position your fingers on the piano, you need to practice by relaxing your fingers then place your hand on a flat surface with your fingertips resting on it while your wrist levels with your knuckles. Your hand and fingers should be positioned in a dome shape and your fingers should be curved.

Make sure your thumb is pointed slightly down then bend towards your fingers so that the last nail of your thumb is parallel to your other fingers when it is viewed from above. The manner with which the thumb is bent is often useful when playing chords that have wide spans. It basically positions the tip of the thumb such that it is parallel to the case which makes it less likely for you to hit adjacent keys. It also positions the thumb so that the right muscles are used to raise and lower it(the thumbs) The fingers are positioned such that they are slightly curled curving down and hitting the surface at an angle of almost 45°. This curled manner permits the fingers to actively play between the black keys. Form an approximate semi circle with the tip of your thumb and other fingertips. Doing this side by side, the nails on both of your thumbs will end up facing each other. While playing, use only the part of the thumb that is directly beneath the thumbnails rather than the joint between the middle and the nail phalanges. To ensure optimal uniformity, play with the tip of the thumb since it's already too short while the phalange is in close proximity with the finger tips for other fingers. The front pad of the fingertip should hit the keys since the flesh is thicker than the fingertip itself. Ease into this act and straighten your fingers once you feel the need to stretch them or curl them. This however depends on the piece you're playing. It is compulsory for every beginner to master the ideal curled position as strict compliance to a particular curled configuration is incorrect as this has its perks Bench height and distance from piano it is left to the learner determine the correct height that suits bests and the distance from the piano.

To start with, position yourself on the bench in such a way that your elbows are by your sides with your forearms directed straight towards the piano. With your hands placed on the keys and ready to play, your elbows should somewhat fall below the height of your hands reaching about the same height with the keys. The distance between you (the bench) and the piano should be such that your elbows slightly miss your body as they are brought in towards themselves. During this process, your hands on the keys. To ensure your feet is properly placed on the floor or pedals, sit close to the front edge of the bench and not the middle. Pay attention to the bench height and the location as they are extremely important while playing loud chords. Play two black key chords at the same time as loudly as you can to test this posture. The key chords are C#2, G#2, C#3 ( 5,2,1) for the left hand and C#5, G#5, C#6 (1,2,5) for the right hand. To produce a loud percussive sound, tilt forward slightly and press down a hard on the keys with the entire weight of your arms and shoulders. Also, ensure that the shoulders are fully engaged.

To ensure that loud and appealing sounds are produced, the shoulders and the body must be fully engaged with maximum force and not just the hands and forearms. If you find this comforting, then the bench and sitting posture is right. It is necessary to have a bench with alterable height so as to ensure that the students play with their finger pads rather than the fingertips because the standard bench height for fixed benches are usually one or two inches higher Starting a piece: listening and analysis (Für Elise) Listening to a performance or recording is the most efficient way to kickoff the learning process. Some people believe that listening first is a form of cheating. However, this claim is not defensible in any form. One of the disadvantages to listening is that students won't want to be creative but will rather imitate the recording. Playing styles are unique to each other individual so imitating is extremely difficult. This may hereby cause the students to blame themselves because they are unable to imitate the pianist. Listening to recordings help you to try out new pieces and they are as essential as the finger technique. Analyzing the configuration of the composition is the next thing to do. This will help in determining the practice routine and the time estimate required to master this piece. Time estimation is highly significant in the achievement of this practice routine.

Take for instance, Beethoven's Für Elise. Analysis begins with numbering the bars on the music score. If the bars are not marked, mark every tenth bar with a pencil just above the center of the bar. It's advisable to count any part of the bar at the beginning as bar 1. Counting it as a full bar makes it difficult to identify the first partial bar. In Für Elise, 50% of the piece is learnt by playing the first 4 full bars and repeating it 15 times. Also, 6 bars are replayed 4 times which gives 10 bars. This means that 70% of the piece is learnt in a span of 30 minutes or less. During the repetition of these bars, two difficult interruptions are observed. A student who has gained one to two years of knowledge should be able to learn 50 different bars of this piece under 2-5 days and perform the entire music offhand and with speed in 1 to 2 weeks. Understanding certain tricks helps in realizing the secrets of achieving skills that helps in decreasing tough passages to easy ones. Rehearse the hard parts first Practice the extremely difficult sections. According to Für Elise, there are two difficult sections with 16 and 23 bars. These will take longer periods to learn so dedicate enough practice time to them. Learn most pieces from the end since majority ends with the toughest pieces. Choice of Practice Speed, Velocity Be informed about this as quickly as possible. Remember, hands separately is still what we are practicing.

There is simply no point in playing the instrument so fast, as you begin to feel stressed and eventually begin to practice mistakes and acquire bad habits. You should therefore know that forcing your fingers to play faster in the same way is definitely not the same way to increase your speed. However, what is needed is new ways that automatically increases speed, as exemplified in parallel play. In fact, it is easier to play faster when using parallel play. Come up with hand positions or motions that help to increase speed automatically. This is one of the most important contributions in this book and will be treated later. It consists of specific techniques, for example, glissando motion, relaxation,flag finger positions, thumb over method, etc. And also the use of what is called the “Post Practice Movement”. If perhaps you do not make obvious progress in some minutes, you are probably doing something wrong, therefore, think of something new. Students who use the intuitive method are known to repeat the same thing for hours with just little improvement, and this thinking should be avoided in order to learn in less time. When trying to increase speed, there are two situations you would encounter, one of which involves the technical skills you already have. You should be able to bring this up to speed in minutes.

Techniques also improve quickly when you are precisely playing at a particular speed you are used to. It is especially true when you're playing hands together. hands together practice will still be discussed in this book. Due to the fact that you have learnt more about hands separately, it is easier to play hands separately with more speed than hands together without increase in stress. Hence, it would be a mistake to think playing as fast as possible would make you improve faster. Funny enough, practicing hands separately eventually becomes confusing since you need to gain speed and also practice more accurately. The solution to this is to change the speed of practice often. For very hard passages that require skills you do not have yet, you would just s have to bring up the speed little by little. To make things easier in such situations, use faster speeds to determine what need to be changed in order to play at such speeds, afterwards, reduce your speed and practice the new motions you come up with. To change the speed, first play as fast you can play accurately, then play faster and observe what needs to be changed about your playing. You do not need to worry about playing so accurately at this point because you will not be repeating it so many times. Then, make use of the new motions you come up with and play at your previous maximum accurate speed. By now, it would be significantly easier.

Keep up with this speed for a while, then try playing at slower speeds to ensure that you are completely relaxed and absolutely precise. By doing this, you increase the speed at which you play and you work on each needed skill separately. In most cases, you should be able to play majority of the new piece, even if it is in small segments, using hands separately. At first, getting up.to speed may seem difficult, but with more practice, every student can do this in no time. Relaxing As you begin to get up to speed, the most important thing to do is relax. By relaxing, what you are doing is using only those muscles that are needed to play. Therefore, you can be working as hard as possible, and at the same time, feel relaxed. The relaxed state is easy to attain when practicing hand separately. There are two schools of thought on relaxation. One school stresses that as time goes on, it is better not to practice at all than to practice with even the slightest amount of tension. This school teaches you by showing how to relax and play a single note, advancing carefully, and gives you only the easy material that can be played when relaxed.

On the contrary, the second school says that even though relaxation is a necessary part of acquiring skills, it should not be the highlight of the entire learning process. This approach should be better, if and only if you are aware of the other side of it. For all actions the individual perform, the brain tends to be quite wasteful that for even the simplest tasks, the untrained brain uses most of the muscles in the body. And if the task is difficult, the brain has been proved to lock the entire body in a mass of tensed muscles. But, in order to relax, you must make a conscious effort to shut down all unnecessary muscles. However, it has been proved that it is a little bit difficult, as it involves going against the natural working principle of the brain. As much as practicing moving your fingers to play the keys, you also need to practice relaxation. Remember that relaxation does not mean letting go of all muscles, just the unnecessary ones, while the needed ones are still working in full throttle. This is a high level skill which requires as much practice as is possible. For starters learning how to relax, begin with easier pieces then at the same time, practice adding relaxation. One significant way of feeling relaxed is to practice one parallel set and accelerate it untill you begin to feel stress set in, then try to relax. To allow for this, you are meant to come up with some arm movements, and when you find them, you will automatically feel the stress leaving your hands as you play. Some students unconsciously stop some basic functions of the body such as breathing and swallowing at regular intervals all in the name of concentration.

Therefore, it is important to learn how to relax and maintain the basic functions of the body. This way, you would even begin to feel like a professional in some way. When feeling relaxed, one should be able to concentrate on the playing and should also be able to conduct all normal body functions. It is a well known fact that if after a session of practice, your throat feels dry, it means that you stopped swallowing at some point.. It is an erroneous belief by many students who were not taught the basics of relaxation that long sessions of practice can magically make the hands know how to play. But in reality, what happens some times is that the hands just happen to follow the right motion for relaxation. This explains why some skills do not seem difficult to acquire, while others prove to be difficult and also why some students learn certain skills so fast, while for others, such skills are difficult to acquire. Therefore, relaxation could be said to be a state of unequal equilibrium, i.e, as you learn to relax, it becomes easier to play, which in turn actually makes it easier to relax. This explains the difficulty of relaxation for some, while it is completely natural for others. However, this shows that everyone can learn to relax, if taught properly. Relaxation is a form of energy conservation, and there are at least two ways to conserve energy:

1. Avoid the usage of unnecessary muscles.
2. As soon as you're done with the working or needed muscles, turn them off. Using the one-finger gravity drop as an example, the first way of conserving energy is easy, since it's simply allowing gravity to control the drop, while the rest of your entire body is comfortable on the chair you're sitting on. This makes playing so easy. However, a tense person, or a beginner would end up using muscles for lowering their hands too.

For the second way, you will have to learn the technique of relaxing all muscles when you reach the end or bottom of the key drop. For a gravity drop, gravity does the work of pulling the arms down, but at the end of a key drop, creating tension for a short while is needed in order to stop the hand. After, you have to quickly relax all muscles. Ensure you avoid leaving the hand or resting it on the piano to prevent pressing it down. However, this proves to be difficult because of the weight of your elbow resting in the air.