Wrist Problems/Better Connection To Keyboard

Hi, I am a student studying privately with a teacher and have been experiencing problems with my connection to the keyboard. I feel like I am not fully connected to the keyboard naturally and have noticed that I compensate by pressing with the fingers and wrist. I think that my unnecessary pressing is hindering my ability to produce smooth passage work and I cannot produce the type of sonority that I want to. When I try to produce more sound like my teacher always urges me to do, I end up unconsciously pressing more because it is a habit that my former teacher and current teacher has failed to mention to me. (I just recently discovered I was doing it!)My arm is almost always loose but I think that my stiff wrist is stopping the arm weight from going right into the keyboard. Even though I am very accurate in my playing, in my opinion it sounds superficial and shallow. The sonority and nuances that I imagine never come to life, and even though I have made it through many competitions and other piano events successfully, I am not satisfied with the sheer sound I produce at the piano. How do you recommend I deal with these problems? PS. I have both your book and DVD and was wondering when your 2nd book will be released. Thanks!

A very nice question and nicely described problem. If your wrist is stiff, preventing your arm weight getting to the key, it is most likely compensating for an overly relaxed hand structure. You try to relax, your hand structure collapses and then you have to find "strength" somewhere else. The solution is to activate the movements of your hand that GENERATE hand structure instead of undermining it. The grasping action should be more present in your playing if you want richer tone. Take a moment to press your right middle finger with your left fingertip, exactly on the underside of your right proximal phalange. Now flex this right middle finger, working against the resistance your other hand is presenting. Chances are that you flexed the distal and medial phalanges but did not actually pull against your other hand with your proximal phalange. There's your weakness. Teach specifically your PROXIMAL phalanges to pull against resistance, then apply that feeling to your playing - it should help. Best wishes, AFF

How could this exercise be adapted to the piano?

He just told you. "somewhere else" means, somewhere in your playing apparatus. Chapter 1 -The arches of the hand Take a look at grasping at the piano and the grasping function.

Very easy to adapt it to the piano. Stand your third finger on key, and really try to use specifically the same muscles you discovered in the previous exercise to "pull" on the key. If you do this as I envision (so difficult to do this over the internet!), the key will go down and your top knuckle will rise up to create a peaked arch structure out of your hand. The pulling motion does not curl your fingers but draws the heel of your hand closer to your fingertip rooted in the key. Teach each of your fingers in turn to do this (let's leave the thumb out of it for a while yet), and then begin to play any simple scale pattern using that motion. Go very slowly at first. Give your reflexes the chance to learn the new organization, which is RADICALLY different from what you may have been doing before. This is the starting point for adapting this use of the finger to piano playing. From there you might begin to explore where it might be useful to invoke this while actually playing a piece. Try some passage where you particularly noticed the difficulty you describe at the beginning of this thread, taking care to have a really different feeling and function at work in your finger, hand and arm as you proceed. Good luck! AFF

After viewing the DVD again I noticed the exercise above is very similar to the "Hook" exercise described in the DVD. Do they achieve similar results?

"The Hook" does indeed activate the lumbricals and interosseous, but it goes further and and invokes the superficial and deep flexors that move the medial and distal phalanges as well. Thus "The Hook" synthesizes activity of parts of the musculature involved in flexing the finger. The exercise I gave you singles out the lumbricals and interosseous, that move the proximal phalange, because this is generally the weak link in the chain of muscular activity. If you try to do 'The Hook' and you don't have the lumbricals and interosseous working well, you risk hurting yourself. Be careful! I just taught a lesson to a teenager amateur, playing pop arrangements, and with no metacarpal-phalangeal arch whatsoever. I spent the entire lesson investigating the movement I describe to you, of activating flexion at the top knuckle in order to finally really STAND UP on the key. It took her a long time to get it, because her old reflexes, her old way of playing, kept rearing its ugly head and spoiling things when she tried actually playing something. The power of habit is not to be underestimated! It can work for AND against you! 'Stand up' 100 times a day, at work, on the bus - put your finger on your leg and and PULL with the proximal phalange. Learn this so well that you start to feel it even when you play piano and your old habits are trying their best to hold sway. This alone can completely transform a piano technique - but it's not easy to really do it! By the way, my second book, is basically finished but whenever I try to get to the end of it in editing, I always find something that needs changing, or a new chapter that needs inserting, so I have no idea when it will actually go to press. Thanks for asking! Best, AFF

Since the questioner describes pressing more and more I wonder if he is describing an error of technique that Matthay called "keybedding". At one time I was very frustrated with the scalar passagework in Schubert's Impromptu in E-flat major, Op. 90, No. 2. Certain notes weren't coming out. I drove harder and harder into the keyboard. Still, I was failing to sound all of the notes. I sat back and thought about it. It only takes a few grams to depress a key. It's just not possible that a supreme muscular effort would fail to depress a key. I realized that the only place you can press hard is at the BOTTOM of the key's descent. Well, that's when it's already too late to produce a sound. So what I was doing was playing a note but then continuing to dig into the bottom of the key. Now it was time to play the next note, but the next finger wasn't getting any benefit from that (excessive) arm support. That note would fail to sound. By the time I got around to releasing the first finger and transferring the weight to the next finger it was already time to be sounding the next one after that! In other words, I was working not only too hard, but primarily TOO LATE. Later, I encountered a description of this technical error in Matthay. He called it "keybedding" because the effort is wasted by pressing into the keybed. It's a mis-timing of effort. The solution I found at the time was simply to try less. Now I find from Alan's DVD that there is a certain utility in "overholding". However, I'm very alert not to allow myself to return to my old bad habit of keybedding. I also surmise that the original problem I was having a long time ago was probably more related to losing my arch for certain notes in the scalar passages. That was probably where the problem started for me and then my keybedding was a bad attempt at compensation that only worsened clarity and facility. I play that Impromptu now better than I ever did by maintaining the arch and overholding (while not keybedding). I bring all of this up because: 1. I think the original poster is describing the error of keybedding. 2. I've been practicing overholding and I think it is worthwhile to include with it an admonition not to dig in so much that it turns into keybedding.

EXACTLY!!! I couldn't say it better! Thanks! AFF

Very well said. As long as you go down far enough to let the escape mechanism work, that's the beauty of the grand piano--you don't have to play all the way to the keybed, or let the key come all the way back to the top, before it's ready to be played again. --you may not know, but these points can be adjusted, to suit your style of playing and what you are playing. I do need to point out one thing that I think is a misconception. You say it takes only a few grams to make the key go. That's not quite true. On most grand pianos, it's somewhere around 52 grams to get the jack to escape. If you play slowly, it's a trivial amount of force (not weight) to get the key to move down. However, when played quickly, this force to move the action of the key can be 100x that of what you use to do a nice, adagio, legato. You can prove this to yourself: Take a sheet of paper, hold it out, gently and slowly strike it with a finger. It moves,right? It moves down with the finger movement and you feel it hardly at all. Now, speed things up. Try striking it as quickly as you can and repeat that a few time. Do you notice how much more effort it takes to get the paper to move, when going fast. In the piano (as well as a law of physics) inertia--the stationary mass of the action, takes a certain amount of force to move it. When the mass is to be moved slowly, the force to change it's direction is not as much as it is to set it into motion when you need to have it change its direction quickly (from static to one of motion "dynamic"). Two pianos can take the same amount of grams to move the key down, but because of the inertia required, if one piano action is regulated to concert level and the other just "ordinary," the one not regulated so well will feel like you are trying to push a tank; whereas the good one, will fly almost effortlessly. And this will really be felt, as well as get in the way of what you are trying to do. This is called the "touchweight" of the piano. this is not the weight it takes to depress the key, but the amount of force you have to apply to break to overcome the inertia of the action mechanism. So, when you say it seems to take a lot of effort, but think it's only a few grams, yes it's only a few grams to move the key, but as you speed up, the force needed to move those grams goes up incredibly. Having the skeletal parts all in line and working, no doubt gives you maximum control; but this can be hampered by the piano itself. That's the problem I'm having with mine, right now. A good piano, will have an action ratio (front of key movement to hammer movement of leverage around 5.5. Five is light, above 6.2 is heavy. Mine is 6.4 & up. That extra gram of force (not weight), when called upon to play notes very quickly adds up to taking a lot of strength when you play at speed. I'm doing the Schubert OP. 90 #4. The mm setting puts the arpeggiated 16ths at 576 notes per minute--that extra gram in the leverage, no matter how good your body is aligned is not only going to cause you to feel it, but quite possibly cause you to not physically be able to get up to the speed that the music calls for. Most pianos, unless specially prepared, including S&S are not touchweighted--they are only, balanced. It is an expensive and difficult process to do and the manufactures expect the artists to have this done. When you compare a piano that has the touchweight correct--it flies with very little effort, yet the weight to press the keys down remain the same as the piano which has the touchweight, wrong. Strange huH? But weight to press the key and force to change the key's inertia are two, very different things. As I mentioned, I'm working now on my piano, to touchweight it right, & also to where it's most advantageous for me. The cost will be around $3,000. But since I'm already a piano tech as well as pianist, I can get the cost down to about $1,200 or so. Before a piano can be given a concert regulation, if the touchweight is not set correctly, the regulation cannot be set either. So, thinking that a few grams of weight to depress the key is not a big deal is not really correct. --the few grams (10 US nickels) to depress a key is not the same as the many grams of force to change the inertia to play a note and move on to another or repeat that one, quickly. Hope this helps-- Bob