How to Improve Your Left Hand ACCURACY and SPEED [7 Tips!]

do you ever get frustrated playing the piano and having your left hand let you down it can be demoralizing to practice the piano and feel like your left hand facility is lacking this is a surprisingly common problem among piano students it's easy to neglect the left hand because it often doesn't have the melody in the music and frequently seems like it's playing a supporting role this video is the answer to a viewer's question Angela asks how to improve left-and accuracy and speed she says when the tempo increases then it causes mental overload and then she gets really fumbly in the left hand can you relate today I'm going to give you seven tips for how to improve your left-hand accuracy and speed by the end of this video you'll have some actionable insights that you can apply to your own practicing and hopefully gain much more ease in your left hand we've got a lot to cover in this video so let's get started tip number one focus on having an excellent hand position when you play the piano if you want to have any facility at all it's important to have a good supported hand position this is what it looks like to have an unsupported hand notice that the back of the hand is flat and the fingers are curled this is what it looks like to have a supported hand notice the arch shape in the back of the hand the reason this is important is because if you have an unsupported hand position that puts enormous strain on the fingers and it is much much harder to get around the keyboard not only is it harder to get around the keyboard but it's also hard to move move the fingers quickly because you're isolating them from each other and you're relying on just each individual finger to move rather than coordinating from the hand and using leverage to play each individual note I'm going to show you an example of how having a supported hand position can help you play the left hand with more facility this is berg Mueller's the storm this is how the beginning [Music] goes and now I'm going to look at measure 50 where the left hand has a figure so it has a figure that is continuous and that we want to play very quickly and with a lot of facility this is what it looks like if I Collapse my hand and then try to play those notes you can see that my fingers are kind of immobilized I feel a lot of tension in my wrist as well this is what it looks like when I have a supported hand position notice that I'm still able to reach an octave but my hand is more supported underneath when I have a well supported hand and play that figure it's so much easier to play because I'm not having to work hard at every individual finger I'm leveraging the hand to help me tip number two use consistent fingering and write it in your music because playing the piano is a physical activity it's important when we practice that we use consistent motions in order to be able to execute what we're doing consistently in fact a lot of what we do when we practice and we repeat passages is we are working to create consistency not just consistency in notes but also consistency in the physical motions that we'd use in order to produce those notes if you use different fingering every time you play a passage the notes might be consistent but the physical motions you're doing in order to produce those notes definitely is not and it's important to play with consist fingering if you want to be able to play quickly one exercise I recommend to my students is to take a piece that you're playing and write a finger number over every single note in the piece now that might feel a little bit like Overkill because some of it might feel very obvious to you but the exercise of making a decision and writing a finger number over every single note will force you to really be aware of the fingering that you have chosen and why here's an example of a boach invention where I wrote a finger number over every single note in the piece it was a very interesting exercise for me to do because I had to really think through what fingering I was going to use throughout sometimes students will write finger numbers in their music but then I'll notice in a lesson that they're not actually doing that fingering and what that reflects is a lack of connection between what you are doing on the page and what you are doing physically at the piano it reflects a a disconnect between those two things and so an exercise that can really help with that is to play and say the finger numbers out loud in this berd Mueller example that I just showed you here's what that would look like I would go 51 2 1 5 1 2 1 5 1 2 1 5 and remember fingering is non-binding you can always change your mind but if you do make sure to erase it in the score and replace it with the corrected fingering so that you always are strengthening that awareness between what's written on the page and the finger number that you're actually playing consistent fingering will definitely help you improve accuracy and speed in your left hand tip number three look for hand position changes and practice blocking in this context I'm using that same term I used earlier hand position slightly differently a hand position change on the piano is where you are playing with your hand in one position on the keyboard for example I might be doing that but then I can play multiple notes while I'm in that hand position I can go for example that's all under one hand position but then when I move to another part of the keyboard then that's a different hand position and so what we want to look for in order to increase left hand accuracy and speed is the places where the left hand moves from one hand position to another an example that I want to look at here is the Revolutionary atude here is a very popular piece that uses a lot of leftand intent ensive passage work and we want to be able to play it quickly here's a typical spot in it what often happens is a student will learn this and they will work on it slowly to learn the notes and they'll practice 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 notes in a bar and on some level think of those as 16 individual events I have to get this note I have to get this note and that and so forth all the way through the bar however it's much more efficient and it will lead to faster playing if you think of these in terms of hand positions and kind of grabbing handfuls of notes in each hand position so in this particular example we have this hand position then we move to this hand position then we move to this hand position and then down to this hand position then we practice that and move very quickly from one hand position to the next to there to there working on going exactly to where we need to go then you practice breaking it and then and doing each of those groups under one hand position then you can start to combine them and then down and then that is a way to gain facility because I'm no longer thinking of 16 individual events I'm just thinking in terms of 1 two three four five hand positions three up and then going back down it is much more efficient and it will lead to your ability to play the left hand more accurately and with more speed tip number four is directly related to tip number three and that is release your weight do not and I repeat do not bear down into the keys that is I think one of the most common reasons that people have a difficult time playing the left hand accurately and with speed I'll take the same example we have this re revolutionary Aude we want to do this if you are thinking about bearing down all the way into each [Music] note and if you're playing really hard that's kind of like walking around but stomping as you're walking stomping your foot into the ground so I don't want to feel that I am pressing all the way to the bottom of every note what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to drop my weight into certain notes and then use the momentum of that to get myself through the rest of the notes in that group I'm going to drop into the C and then I'm releasing my weight out of the keys and I'm going all the way to the middle of the bar and I'm releasing all my weight and then there I'm going to go drop drop so drop here and then go back to the surface as you play you should really feel that you are not going all the way down to the bottom of the keys very often especially when you play quickly playing quickly and playing loud those two things are in direct opposition to each other and in fact when you have loud passage work that goes very very quickly if you really sit down and analyze it not every single note is loud only strategic notes are loud the notes in between them are quite light you want to think the same when you are working on left-hand passage work in order to gain ease facility speed and accuracy tip number five Embrace slow practice it can be easy to get a little bit impatient when you're playing the piano because we are learning a piece that goes really fast we spend a lot of time at the instrument learning the notes getting familiar with it and it's easy to just feel like okay I'm ready to play it fast and play it fast too soon and then what happens is you make mistakes and it's very hard to be able to play accurately and quickly from that point forward and so you need to make friends with your metronome and get very comfortable with playing slowly so in this example of the Revolutionary atude that little place that we were just working on so I have my metronome at 56 which honestly you have to learn the notes first to even get it to the point of being able to play it at 56 but 56 is way below our goal Tempo so I would practice [Music] it and get really comfortable one thing to keep in mind when you practice slowly is do not bear down into every note just because you're playing slowly does not mean you have to play heavily so this is what we do not want to practice do you hear how I'm punching every note I want to practice in that feeling of dropping and releasing out of the notes to there drop drop drop the other thing I want to practice is consistent fingering and Dynamics and shaping doing all that with the metronome then what you do is you go up one notch which is on a conventional metronome a a couple of beats per minute on a digital metronome you want to go up two to four numbers or two to four beats per minute you don't want to just do like 58 5960 in this case I'm doing 56 and then 58 then I would do it there until I'm comfortable then I would increase it one more Notch do that until I'm comfortable make sure you do enough repetitions at one tempo before you increase the tempo on your metronome practice it to a point where it starts to feel kind of like insecure and that means that you've gotten fast enough for that day then go one notch lower and repeat that Tempo and that's when you stop for the day then the next day come back and start a little bit slower than where you stopped the previous day and continue to increase the tempo one notch at a time that is an effective way to improve your accuracy and speed for p fast passage work in the left hand and actually in either hand tip number six to improve the left hand choose pieces and studies that focus on left-hand facility there are a lot of ways you can do this you could start off by practicing five finger patterns for example in the left hand you could play and then chords you could do chromatically and then going up chromatically one thing to notice if you do that is make sure you have a well supported hand position you could do left hand scales alone multiple octaves going up really focusing on lightness of finger good hand position making sure to not dig into all of your notes and feel feeling an even touch and hearing an even tone another thing you can do is look at something like Hannon or Cherney Berg Mueller musovski these composers that wrote exercises and udes in big Collections and look for the ones that focus on the left hand isolate those find those that work for you and work on practicing them and getting really proficient at them another thing that really helps with left-and facility is to work on things that are contrapuntal the reason pieces that have a lot of CounterPoint are really helpful at left-hand facility is because the hands have to work independently Counterpoint simply means that the two hands are basically equal and independent and both hands have melodic lines we see a lot of examples of this in the writing of Bach that's why we play a lot of Bach because it helps with facility and hand Independence you could play his two-part inventions you could play his Symphonia you can move on to his preludes and fugues in the well-tempered clav the little preludes are really good for Counterpoint and hand Independence anything from the Baroque Era that uses Counterpoint would be a really good example of a way to improve your left-hand facility speed and accuracy also it's really helpful to look for pieces that are written specifically for the left hand for example there are these pieces by Arnaldo sorio that you can find on IM SLP I found this simply by going to imslp and typing in leftand piano and this came up it's a it's a collection of 20 pieces that are all written just for the left hand here's an example of the first line of the first one [Music] this piece is written in treble and Bas cleff but the understanding is that the left hand will play all of the notes and he puts in suggested fingerings to help make that possible and so focusing on pieces that are written for the left hand and exercises where you're looking at the left hand alone will really help you isolate and improve the left hand and learn how to play more quickly and with more accuracy tip number seven choose pieces that are the right level for you it's so important to play music that is at your correct level you do not want to be struggling just to decipher and learn the notes you want to be able to reasonably be able to learn those notes in a relatively short amount of time so that you can then focus on refining improving increasing the tempo and working on your technical approach and musical interpretation of these pieces because I'm making a video and I don't know you personally I can't use examples that would apply to every single person watching this video so it's very important that you don't just go out and try to work on the Revolutionary atude or download these sartorio exercises if that's not your correct level find something that is going to be a correct level for you and really learn it well really get to the point where your left hand feels great doing that and you feel a sense of accomplishment and then move incrementally on to another piece that's going to give you a new challenge that you can then use to improve your level I'm reluctant to give very specific time frames because it really does depend on the person but you really do want to be in a position of learning multiple pieces over say a 3month period you if you're finding that it's taking you six months just to learn the notes to a piece that you're working on at the piano then it's quite likely that that piece is a level or two too difficult for you that doesn't mean you won't ever be able to play it but it means that if you go back to something that you can learn more quickly and without as much effort then you'll be able to work up to the piece that was so challenging to you playing the piano is a series of skills that you're layering one on top of the other and so it's important to find a piece that you can actually put your arms around and learn and then move on from and learn something new afterwards if you gradually increase your ability and the level of the challenges that you take on at the piano you will be able to improve your left hand accuracy and speed because it's very difficult to play the left hand accurately and quickly if the piece is fundamentally too hard for you earlier in this video I talked about how having a good hand position can help you improve your left hand facility speed and accuracy I wasn't able to go into great detail about hand position in this video cuz I want to cover a lot of other things but I did make an entire video specifically about finding and practicing a healthy hand position for that deep dive you're going to want to go ahead and click on that video right up there in the corner if you found this video helpful please do like it share it with someone and subscribe to my channel that helps me reach more people thanks for watching good luck with your leftand facility and happy practicing

Channel: The Piano Prof | Kate Boyd

Views: 4,710

Keywords: Kate Boyd, The Piano Prof, ThePianoProf, Piano Technique, College Piano Study, University Piano, College Piano, Butler U Piano, Piano Lesson, Advanced Piano, Butler University Piano, Dr. Kate Boyd, Piano Practice, Piano Tutorial, Piano Tips, Intermediate Piano, Piano Teaching, Learn Piano, Piano Left Hand, Piano speed, Piano facility, Piano Practice tips, Improve left hand piano, play left hand fast piano

Id: 3F0_XC5euyY

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2024