Piano Technique: Getting Your Piano Fingers in Shape For Piano Playing
Piano Technique: Getting Your Piano Fingers in Shape For Piano Playing
Hi this is Duane and today I would like to talk a little bit about piano technique, developing piano technique. After all you need to know how to get from here [piano playing] to do what you want to do [piano playing]. How do you get from there to there?
I started out and I remember my first lesson very well. I went to Mrs. Graham’s house in Auburn, California. I was seven years old I believe, six or seven and she sat me down and said, “We’re going to play Up We Go with three fingers,” up we go and down we go. I remember very well that I tried to play them like this [piano playing] and she said, “Duane you can’t play with flat fingers” and that’s true of course. You ought to do an experiment, lock your knees in place and try to run. It just doesn’t work, does it? You can’t play with flat fingers; you have to have your fingers curved.
The first step is to get your fingers in a curved position like that. I call it parachute position, if you jumped out of an airplane and you floated down you’d land on the keys about like that. See how my fingers are curved like so and that allows you to play like that [piano playing]. You can’t play like that it just doesn’t work [piano playing], so make sure your fingers are curved.
Another thing you’ve got to do is point your bellybutton right at middle C. Some people set way off to the side and they’re doing themselves a disservice because it fouls up the orientation of your hands. Point your bellybutton right at middle C and make sure you’re sitting high enough so you have a slight downward slant to the keyboard. I’ve seen some kids practices and their parents don’t realize they should have a downward slant so they practice like that or they’re too small.
There was a famous story about Earl Gardner the great jazz pianist and whenever he’d travel and didn’t have a piano bench that was tall enough he would use a Chicago telephone book to sit on because he was a short guy. It’s important to get your body up high so you can kind of slant, not extremely so but so you can slant down at the keyboard.
Once you’re in the position, how do you develop finger technique? There are a number of things you can do. One thing I was taught and one thing I have always taught my students was to get a Hannon book, a book of Hannon techniques. They look like that, it’s an old book, and it’s been around forever and ever. This is the first of three books, there are 20 exercises in this book and you can see they look like that.
Let me give you an example. I’ll just turn to the first one here. The first one goes like this [piano playing]. The next one goes like this [piano playing] and each one has a different pattern so when you play through those 20 exercises you’ve learned 20 different patterns. Songs happen in patterns, don’t they? There are pieces that have patterns in them like these so you’re training your fingers in advance for those patterns.
Now if you go on to book two you’ll get into scales [piano playing] and you’ll learn to play all the scales like that [piano playing], the major and minor scales. Then [piano playing] you’ll learn arpeggios like that and so on. That’s how you get from here to there by practicing through a Hannon book like that, preferably with a teacher. If you don’t have a teacher it makes it tougher but you can still, I know people that have done it without teachers. It’s still doable.
After you get your body in position with your hands curved and your bellybutton pointed at the middle C, you’re high enough, and your practicing some exercises. There’s another book called Czerny and there are others too, anything will work but I like Hannon particularly. Then what you actually need to do is play lots of different songs, every song creates a need for a slightly different technique. For example in some songs [piano playing] there may be octaves like that, that’s called an octave third. Playing an octave and then a third under the top octave [piano playing] like that [piano playing].
Then there are some songs that call for a run like that [piano playing] that’s a four-note run [piano playing] so you’d practice that. All I’m saying is play a variety of songs; classical, popular, and so on that develop different techniques. The very best thing you can do is get a good piano teacher and I urge you to do that but if you’re an adult that doesn’t have that luxury you can still develop some pretty good techniques on your own.
That’s my tip for today, thanks for being with me and we’ll see you tomorrow with another piano tip. Bye-bye for now.