I think after 3 years of half-self teaching myself in piano, I've realised one of the reasons I've been holding back progression wise.

I have a really bad habit of looking at the keyboard when I'm playing. Any large intervals when my hand has to jump across an octave or more, I'll have to look down briefly to see where I'm landing my fingers. At the moment, I'm stuck making not much progress at around a grade 4 level. The problem becomes quite apparent in pieces where the left hand does a lot of moving (rags, waltzes etc.).

I think I do this a lot because I like improvising, and I memorise music a lot, so often I do a lot of playing without music, where I look constantly at my fingers.

Does anybody have an effective way of stopping this irritating problem, because I'm convinced I'm not going to get very far if I carry on doing it.

Jayjay.

It is not always bad. If you have memorized a piece there is nothing wrong with looking at your hands as you play it. Switching eyes back and forth between keyboard and score is dangerous, difficult, and tiring. It is very easy to lose your place in the score.

But if you HAVE to look at your hands that is indeed a handicap. CHOOSING to look (for added security) is something else

There is no special secret. Find some pieces with the sort of left hand jumps that you are having trouble with. Practice LH slowly. Many repetitions. It is OK to look at the hand to start with. With enough repetitions and familiarity with the movements you'll find that you can judge the leaps without looking. Perhaps you have underestimated the amount of repetition it takes to get some skill at these kinds of thing, or perhaps you have never isolated the problem for focussed practice?

Another useful tip. The LH is often a leap up from a base note with the little finger to a chord. It is useful to practice with reverse thinking. Imagine the higher position of the hand as the "home" and skip down with the little finger.

The basic movement is mainly a forearm movement. Swivelling the wrist and/or striking the note(s) with a tremelo action gives poor control and poor accuracy.

Using a metronome helps. Set at 70 or slower, one note or chord per beat

Finally it can be helpful to keep your hand spread to minimize the distances.

Your teacher should be showing and telling you this stuff.

Thanks for the advice. I'll try and take that into consideration. Anybody else want to offer their 2 cents? Different people have different techniques I suppose.



Just a small note, like I said at the beginning, I'm self taught mostly. I think I've probably skipped over a lot of technique because in the last few years, I found technical studies to be a dull excercise rather than a necessity.

I'm a bit confused.... I don't see that glancing down at your hands very briefly to ensure you land on the correct notes for large intervals is a 'problem' at all - I do it all the time, and encourage my students to develop the skill of flashing their eyes between the keyboard and the music for tricky corners. Could there be another reason why you feel you are progressing slowly?



Finally it can be helpful to keep your hand spread to minimize the distances.

Your teacher should be showing and telling you this stuff.


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Yes it would be good to spread your fingers a little, but as a teacher, I would also encourage a bit of bend in the fingers to ensure you still play on fingertip. But that's just one opinion, isn't it?

I think the problem is that my note placement is very unreliable, even when the melody doesn't go very far. As soon as I look at my hands, putting notes down accurately is easy. Maybe in my head I'm just making this problem a bit overblown.



I suppose the main problem that I find with playing the piano is processing all the instructions at once. I play the cornet as well, and I find it really easy to read a single line of music with just three valves/embouchure to worry about. In some piano pieces I find the amount of incoming information quite difficult to handle. I can usually get the notes right, but it's fingerings I struggle on. If I practise a piece enough, the fingers, notes, and everything else is committed to memory and I can play it well.

I think most of us do this and it is not a fault; in fact in difficult passages you really don't have a choice! It's nice to be able to memorise a tricky passage (or even the whole piece ) but if this is difficult for you then at least decide where you need to glance at your ands and make a mark on the music where you need to look again, so you don't lose your place.

Mel

According to W. Timothy Galwey, the tennis coach and co-author of most of the "Inner Game .. " books, the way to gain the kinaesthetic sense that allows you to place your shots just in the corner of the court is to hit lots of shots without aiming and watch where they go. The corollary for piano leaps is to go for them without looking but listen to the result so that you know what the error is, if any. Two specific sets of exercises with which I suggest you start are the arpeggios in octaves, one hand at a time, and single octave leaps, also in octaves, in which you think of placing the thumb on the note that the little finger has just left, or vice versa. Where you have time to find a starting place, you may be able to verify the correctness of a leap by feeling the configuration of the keys, and noticing the absence of a black key between B and C or E and F.

For quick passages with intervals within the span of the hand, the basic skill is derived from scale and arpeggio practice; for particular difficulties I find I spend a lot of time trying alternative fingerings to find the one that is most reliable, and then put in a fair amount of single hand practice with that fingering.

Enough of these exercises (and others) will eventually give you the kinaesthetic map of the keyboard: the ability to play any note without looking, once seated correctly. However, I suspect I have started too late ever to match Bernard d'Ascoli.

For my first 55 years of piano playing, I looked incorrigibly at my hands. Then I went to university again, got my best piano teacher and practised seriously for the first time. As a result, my accuracy in unseen left hand leaps has increased enormously. Nowadays I play the piano almost exclusively in small ensemble music, where having the score is essential, at least in rehearsal. Often I know how the music should go better than the others, and I need to be able to identify their errors, so looking at my hands is a distraction that I avoid as far as possible.

You say you often play without music so play with your eyes shut.

My first piano teacher used to hold a book over my hands to stop me looking at them. Somebody else used to have a teacher who fixed a sheet onto the piano to cover their hands and stop them looking (but I don't know quite how this was done)

My second piano teacher used to make a game out of it; sit down at the piano with your eyes shut and play middle C. When you can do this reliably, jump from middle C to another (given) note. When you can jump reliably to single notes, jump from middle C to a chord.

It sounds like you may not have realised how it long it can take to fully learn a piece for the piano. You'll find that as you progress in difficulty the pieces you play will usually take longer to learn and will be harder to sight read. What you've just said there is exactly what you need to do for all the pieces that you are learning. You need to practice enough so that your fingers automatically know what to do. When you have trouble with fingerings, break it down and only practice that small section on it's own. Keep on doing that until you are comfortable with it. Do you know about the thumb-under technique? That's something that you need to know at this level and will make your playing much easier.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with looking at the piano while playing. Taking quick glances at the keys so you can accurately make jumps is an important skill in my opinion. Do you mean that you look at your hands for a few seconds and then just suddenly forget what comes next? That's just probably because you aren't concentrating completely on the music or that you're not used to looking at something other than the music which can distract you.

Take it slowly and only learn two or three pieces at a time. You'll find that you can make more progress that way and you'll get less fustrated because you can actually see the progress that you've made.

Playing with eyes shut was a method I used to improve my scales and arpeggios (using muscle memory). I also tried them with exam pieces that I more or less can memorize.

Though there are claims that I should have fixed my eyes on each note in the scales being played so that I don't depend on muscle memory, I must say that my accuracy in pieces was greatly improved with this "blind" method.

The only piece that I did not practise with this "blind" method was the one that I got the lowest score for. I think it is because during the exam, the mind is so tense (and is everywhere else but never on the keyboard) that muscle memory kicks in to save the day.

And it was totally convenient to practise in such a manner when I felt like sleeping, early in the morning.

Muscle memory is vital. It confers a level of fluency that is possible by no other means. Kendall Taylor says: "The notes should folow one another as easily and naturally as the notes of a scale". And you are right ... it can save the day, if you can relax enough to let your hands carry on automatically when your mind has gone on strike.

But it is fallible like everything else. It is a chain of actions - and each successive action is triggered by the feedback of the one before, plus other aspects of your mental state. Tension and stress affect your mind and the way you experience that feedback and can cause muscle memory to fail too!

So for maximum security you need to memorize a piece from many directions, the sound, structure, themes and their development, harmonies, modulations, keyboard geography and, if it suits you, even visual memory of the printed page (though that particular skill has never done much for me). Thi is as well as training the semi-automatic response of the muscles, AND you need to practice skills and techniques recovering from blackouts by, amongst other things, having many places in the piece from which you are able to restart, if the worst should happen.

Thanks for the advice. I have read about memorising from many directions, but I haven't understood all the directions possible, and am not very sure whether I am making use of these directions to commit the piece to memory.

I know that I use sound as a guide to where the next notes are (mainly directional). Themes have lately been introduced to me, which I think I use to remember the overall structure of the piece, though I am often confused by themes and follow up with wrong bars. I think I have experienced modulation in Mozart's pieces before, where in the middle of a movement, phrases start in similar fashion, but in a different key. Wonder whether that is what modulation means in this context.

Visual memory hardly works for me because I am such a poor sight-reader.
How do keyboard geography and harmonies work?

Thankyou very much for all of the feedback guys. Judging by the response, I'm thinking that I may be making a bigger deal of this than it actually is. I'll certainly take your tips into consideration.