proprioception may be key to improving piano playing?

navindra · 2024-09-27T04:39:02+00:00

I've gathered at this point that proprioception is a key skill to develop to improve my piano playing. It's a legit sense that's distinguishable from the tr...

thepianoplayer416

keystring
In other words, people who are stuck playing beginner or very basic pieces would not have the chance to develop musically. People are just playing pieces that doesn't require them to change positions by executing big jumps and use more keys.

There are pieces with awkward fingerings and finger transitions you need to think ahead all the time. People who play any kind of improvisation also need to think ahead the notes they'd play.

keystring

thepianoplayer416 In other words, people who are stuck playing beginner or very basic pieces would not have the chance to develop musically. People are just playing pieces that doesn't require them to change positions by executing big jumps and use more keys.

That may be a consideration, but it's not where I was going in terms of proprioception, which involves sense of the body in space; the body moving in space; and vis-a-vis things in that 3D space.

Say I play music for several years that is mostly in the keys of C, G, F major and relative minor keys. I'm on white keys, so one narrow strip along the keyboard. If mostly 5 finger position, the hand tends to have one shape. No pedal, so I'm not using that part of my body and adjusting. Mostly a two-octave range near middle C - maybe a bit more. You're not moving about along the geography of the piano - not going in and out for mostly black key notes. You can constantly sit up straight without ever leaning and adjusting your balance.

I started self-taught as a child with my main source a Czerny book, and a set of sonatinas - Clementi, Kuhlau, Mozart, in easy keys. This actually "shaped" my hands and even now I'm fine tuning (sometimes not that finely) how I'm moving to various places on the piano, because a fair bit is still awkward. Recently I resorted to this video to work out some kinks - I mean goodness gracious, of course the forearm can fan out from the elbow and why wouldn't you (unless you started off in a squared off box so to say)

Some simple pieces are very musical and can have a lot of musicality put into them. Your second point, absolutely.

navindra

candela These videos are very cool, thank you.

Both of these videos stress the importance of feel or touch to playing the piano.

Josh's exercise is even consistent with the recommended method for learning touch typing -- you never look at the keyboard, you always look at the screen/sheet and use other senses to figure out where you are on the keyboard.

This is not my latest keyboard, but I don't even have the keycaps labeled these days:

With typing, you want to know where the home keys are. With piano, you orient yourself with the 2-3 black key pattern.

I'm going to try to learn simple new pieces using Josh's method... it's actually quite fun to do.

TC3 One is just keeping my head up and using peripheral vision more

That's a great point, even if you can't train proprioception to get you 100% there, it's still useful to leverage this sense to get 95% there and then use a second sense like feel or peripheral vision to land on target.

Ithaca

keystring I'd also say that the teacher or book that keeps you in the middle of the piano for a long time, mostly C, G & F "position", five-finger spans, no pedal ..... they will be working against developing that sense of body and space and "terrain" on the piano. It sort of cripples what could develop.

Do you think the John Thompson "Teaching LIttle Fingers to Play" and the JT First Grade books move too slowly? I was thinking last night that a big issue is that people move too quickly, so they never develop a solid feel for the where they are on the keyboard, anywhere. After looking through the first two JT books, my thought was that it was teaching people to know the octave below middle C and the octave and a half above middle C blind, while slowly including the occasional "big" jump past that. And the fact that most of the songs have words/syllables to sing directly above the melody line encourages students to keep their eyes up, rather than looking down at the keyboard.

At least, I think that's how it worked for me - I think the reason why developing a good sense of where everything is on the keyboard felt so organic to me was because those two books were so good at encouraging the appropriate behavior at the right pace. (I always read and sang the words, so my eyes were almost always up. This seems to hold true for my daughter, as well: if it's a wordless piece, or one that she doesn't have sheet music for, then her head is down and she's staring right at the keys. But if there are words to sing - she likes to sing - her head is up, and she's reading the score.) But, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know how to think about the impact of the speed at which one progresses through these books. I started when I was 7, and did Teaching Little Fingers in my first week. But the First Grade Book took me considerably more time. Maybe if someone was moving through much more slowly, then it would be too slow from a proprioception standpoint?

keystring

Ithaca Do you think the John Thompson "Teaching Little Fingers to Play" and the JT First Grade books move too slowly?

I am not familiar with those books, other than some people telling me bits of their experience with them.

lilypad

Day two of eyes glued to the sheet and feeling my way to the right key if I have to. I'm already noticing marked improvement in judging interval finger placement without having to feel the keys.

On the occasions when I have to feel the groups of black keys to find my place, I was having trouble distinguishing whether it was a group of 2 or 3 and would have to feel down between them. Supposedly feeling with your whole hand instead of just fingertips is recommended. I'm not sure if Josh Wright's video mentioned this and I just forgot.

I remember a series of keyboard orientation drills that are part of Howard Richman's "Super Sight-Reading Secrets" (out of print now, but still available on alibris website). I didn't have much luck with the sight reading part of the book, but I figure the keyboard orientation part might help me feeling the keys better.

navindra

lilypad Your experience mirrors mine!

I also have difficulty distinguishing 2 or 3 groups using touch... especially when I land in between groups.

I'll try your recommendation and use the whole hand.

lilypad

navindra I have the same problem also and haven't gotten any better after a couple of days of the first keyboard orientation drill. I'm going to give it a month.

The drill is sit so that you're centered in front of middle D; start at the bass end of the piano with hands an octave apart. With eyes closed, feel for the 2 and 3 note groups with your hand flat and forward toward the back of the keys. Then pull you fingers toward you so that they're curved and play (fingers 2 & 3 play the two-note groups and 2-3-4 play the 3 note groups. Go all the way up to the treble end of the piano and then all the way back down.

Even though I haven't improved in distinguishing the 2 and 3-note groups by touch, I've somehow gotten a lot better at judging intervals without touching the keys. Maybe from dreading the consequence to having to find the right key through feel alone if I fail.

navindra

lilypad I'm making progress!

First of all, to state the obvious, proprioception and feel are independent skills.

I've found the best strategy is to hone proprioception so that I can get as close to where I need to go as possible in one shot. Only use feel (or eventually, peripheral vision) for final confirmation or corrections.

Regarding feel itself, finger tips work best for me. I found it easier to start practicing by landing directly on the black keys as accurately as possible.

If I'm confused as to whether I've landed on a group of 2 or group of 3, it's usually because I'm in between, so a slight shift of my fingers usually clears up the confusion. Finally, I confirm by sound and not vision. 2 black keys are Do Re and 3 black are Do Re Mi. If I get pentatonic sounds then clearly I've missed the mark... just shift slightly to correct.

It's so much easier now... the breakthrough for me was to shift my fingers slightly when confused. Now, even though I've only practiced landing on 2 or 3 black keys, I'm finding it easier to feel wherever I need to land.

This is fun!

candela

I've also just practiced this deliberately for a few days now. I believe I first watched these videos as a piano beginner a few years back but didn't really find it worthwhile to dedicate a lot of time to this kind of practice at that stage. Here are some of my observations this far.

My approach is to rely more on proprioception for the rough position and on touch for confirmation and precision. Though I'm still making mistakes, I'm positive and thinking that it seems doable to learn how far to stretch out the arm to get to a specific group of black keys without looking. I imagine it's somewhat similar to how eg string players or trombonists learn specific positions on their instruments. Even relative beginners can do an ok job finding them though it usually takes many years of practice to play with good intonation. Luckily as pianists we don't need the same mm precision but do need to compensate the arm position for which finger is aiming for which key within that general black group position. I believe trombonists use seven positions. The number of black groups on the piano for each hand would be about the same plus some overlap in the middle. (Let's face it, this covers the vast majority of music, even if the arms may occasionally cross or stretch far into the opposite side.) Adding spacial awareness to compensate for the upper body movements would be the next step.

The difference in distance of movement jumping eg three or four groups of black keys also becomes quite noticeable after paying attention to that particular aspect for a while. So instead of thinking in absolute terms that the right hand is moving from the D5 group position to the D7 position one could instead focus on the relative movement and the feeling for how far a two octave jump is.

iternabe

Personally, I have no confidence in my ability to develop proprioception. Just cannot imaging making large jumps without looking. However, I did just make some beginner findings that exhilarated me as small victories.

One thing I found is for jumps, I don't need to have my eyes fixed on the destination all the way until the jump is completed. Just a quick glance at the destination is enough. As my wrist and hand leaps towards the new position, I can look away before they land, and they still will land accurately. What a revelation!

This solves another conundrum that have puzzled me - how to make both hands jump together but to different distance? The level 2 piece I am working on now have such a jump: left hand shifts down a 4th, right hand shifts down a 6th. It's probably easy to more advanced players, but a real challenge to a beginner like me. How can my eyes look at both hands at the same time? Well, it turns out I don't need to. What works is I glance at the destination of the small jump first (left hand), and as I begin to move both hands, I shift my eye to look at the destination of the larger jump (right hand). And voila! Both hands lands correctly.

BartK

iternabe Personally, I have no confidence in my ability to develop proprioception. Just cannot imaging making large jumps without looking.

Don't give up! You can learn to do it with practice. I had trouble with jumps too but now I can easily do them even when both hands move apart, like LH down and RH up at the same time. When that happens you don't have the possibility of looking at both. You can either train yourself to not look or look in the middle where you kind of see both hands peripherially, or you pick the hardest jump and do the other one without looking.

My best tricks for learning jumps are:

Eyes closed
Hands separate, jump as quickly as possible and stop on the note without playing it, making sure you're exactly in the middle of the key.
In slow motion, making sure you're doing an arch with the minimal possible distance and the minimal amount of movement (use rotation to reach).

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