Rapid-Fire Piano Runs In Slow Motion

Good morning. This is Duane. We’ve been doing a series of videos on how to play in various keys, but I’m going to take a little break from that this morning because we’ve had a lot of questions about what fingers to use and how to do those rapid-fire piano runs in slow motion. Let’s take a look at that. I’m going to do it in extreme slow motion here. Let’s take this run right here. It’s a G7 suspension. In another way, Audrey called it G7 suspension, and later, I’ll tell you about what else it could be, okay?

Notice, my left hand’s playing G and D, and my right hand’s playing F, A, C, E. You could do that as a, that’s a low G so that’s the root, and that would be the fifth, seventh, ninth, eleventh, thirteenth, but it’s also going to be viewed as a G7 suspension because the fourth is taking the place of the third, so I can play it like that too. I’ll do both, but let’s take this run and do it very slowly. Play each note from the bottom up with your pedal de-pressed, then you bring your thumb underneath your right hand and play the same four notes. Bring your thumb under, play the same four notes. Go as high as you want. That’s as high as I’ll go, and then you simply turn around and come back.
When you run out of fingers with those same four notes and bring your little finger or you kind of have to maybe lift your hand a little bit, and play the same four notes. Okay, let’s do it again. Now, my left hand is just sitting there, but actually, if I play that faster, I’ll probably bring my left hand up and play the chord to give a little support. Let me do that three times. Get the idea there? Okay, I’ll slow down now.

Okay, a little bit faster this time. I’m going to bring my left hand up to the chord. When my right hand gets back, it’s about to run into my left hand, then I pull my left hand back down to a lower root. By the way, don’t play the chord down here. It sounds too muddy. Just play the root and the fifth, or you can play, if you prefer [inaudible 00:02:59]. See there, that even gives it a little better support, particularly if you come up then and play the chord. Again now, that’s just one run, but you do the same thing to all the runs you want to do.

It sounds a little more complex because of the black notes involved. Let’s do this, so let’s make it just a G7 with a 13th in it. All I’m doing is bringing that C down to B, and it’s the same chord, or if you don’t like the 13th, just play a G9, G7 9th. F-A-B-D, that’s even easier. Remember, keep your pedal de-pressed so it hooks all those notes together. Let’s try one more. Let’s go up half a step and go to B-flat 7th. All you do is move those two middle notes from white notes to black keys. Here’s a minor 9th. You can do it to any, that’s G7 suspension. Now sometimes too, you can use a tremble low left hand. For example, I could do this.

That even gets it more support. All I’m doing in the left hand is playing a tremble over the same chord. Tremble is where you just alternate your fingers rapidly like that, then your right hand, playing the same notes but applies in higher octaves, okay? Well, there’s some ideas on what fingers to use and how to practice very slowly, and I want to emphasize, you do need to practice very slowly. If you’re an absolute beginner, you may despair at the thought of ever doing that, but believe me, there was times that I couldn’t do that at all, that I watched the people play that and it seemed out of reach for me, but eventually, even with these old short fingers, I was able to do it to some degree.

Now, understand that people’s dexterity is different and their finger shapes are different. I don’t expect to ever play as well as somebody with really good coordination. I don’t have particularly good coordination, but I accept that and I just do the best I can, and you can too. Okay, that’s it for today, so if you like this sort of thing and find it helpful at all, we have a lot more material like this at playpiano.com, so come on over and sign up for our free piano tips. Thanks. Bye.

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