Between the thumb, 2nd and the 5th

Hi Andrew! Glad you share your own experience. I agree as I wrote above that one should be careful before making a habit of experiments and a warning from own experience is always a good thing. Recently I played publicly (first time in 20y I think) nothing fancy but interesting as I've been working with overholding etc for at least 10 months. Working the piano seems to be under the law of enantiodromia, any force produces it's opposite. Concentrating on the more apelling stuff in the DVD and neglegting others like a loose wrist and the use of armweight for a long time made my recital a big sweat. What I gained momentarily in sound and orchestration I lost somewhat in fluidity balance and endurance. I watched the DVD once more and than I realized that there is absolutely nothing against the armweightschool, nothing that would imply any stiifness whatsoever. Me focusing on one thing was the problem. So here is a warning from me don't isolate the overholding etc in slow tempi from other aspects it might backfire. The message of the DVD, I guess, is not that the armweight stuff is bad it's just bad in combination with a collapsed arch. The key needs like 50g and whats the weight of the arm in motion? Best regards Eric

Hi Andrew! Glad you share your own experience. I agree as I wrote above that one should be careful before making a habit of experiments and a warning from own experience is always a good thing. Recently I played publicly (first time in 20y I think) nothing fancy but interesting as I've been working with overholding etc for at least 10 months. Working the piano seems to be under the law of enantiodromia, any force produces it's opposite. Concentrating on the more apelling stuff in the DVD and neglegting others like a loose wrist and the use of armweight for a long time made my recital a big sweat. What I gained momentarily in sound and orchestration I lost somewhat in fluidity balance and endurance. I watched the DVD once more and than I realized that there is absolutely nothing against the armweightschool, nothing that would imply any stiifness whatsoever. Me focusing on one thing was the problem. So here is a warning from me don't isolate the overholding etc in slow tempi from other aspects it might backfire. The message of the DVD, I guess, is not that the armweight stuff is bad it's just bad in combination with a collapsed arch. The key needs like 50g and whats the weight of the arm in motion? Best regards Eric Yeah. fair point! There was a time when I discovered that I was falling into a similar trap of clenching within my forearm, in association with starting to grip within the hand itself. I think I'm on the right lines at the moment, but finding sufficient grip at the key is definitely still a weak point for me. I can often see how problems at speed usually correspond with insufficient balance in the slow, overlapping practise (especially on my right hand 4th finger- which had never really taken any active role in gripping the keys before). I also noticed yesterday that I'm still doing a lot of swivelling in my right hand. This rather surprised me, as I have been extremely aware of the importance of avoiding such movements and do think about it a lot. However, it was only yesterday (after having spent the last two weeks trying to avoid raising my right wrist) that it actually occured to me that small amounts of reaching within the hand were what keeps throwing my wrist out of alignment. I'm hoping that this will provide a fairly major breakthrough. Andrew

"Small amounts of reaching within the hand" causing swivelling is a very good point. I try to keep my "knuckle-line" parallell with the keybord and even imagine that I have a very small hand and can't reach. To be very precise in aligning the fingers has helped me. It's amazing how precise you need to be. One of my major flaws now is that I forget to release quickly ecpecially when gripping. Releasing can of course be done with the key still down if one want that. Scr--ing up a performance is a good teacher.... Eric