All piano players wish to know how to perform fast. We’ve all listened to few blazing quick jazz riff else a precisely performed classical arpeggio to wonder “how to accomplish that?”
The positive news is it’s not so difficult to perform amazingly quick with the proper technique. However, like all things, it needs discipline and endurance to acquire the skills required by you to confidently perform at rapid speeds.
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Return to the major scale of C, for instance.
You can construct a finger speed exercise of nearly everything. Try shifting through each scale as slowly as probable, and constantly raise your pace as you shift upwards and downwards the scale. Forever ensure your performance is good and smooth even prior to raising pace! You don’t wish to construct the improper muscle memory on the basis of lousy technique or touch.
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Utilize Arpeggio To Increase Speed
Another plain exercise to employ to create speed involves the arpeggio. Available are numerous arpeggio patterns for you to utilize. However, for the present simply adhere to the tested and genuine arpeggio pattern of C Major, comprising the major triad of C with an octave of C above.
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$14.99 (as of December 14, 2024 15:29 GMT -08:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)Similar to the scale of major, your technique must be balanced on slower speeds prior to employing the exercise for hiking the speed of your finger. Performing a fluent arpeggio depends plenty upon the wrist. Especially, if you wish to get rid of the 1 octave and convert your arpeggio onto a fast run over the keyboard. Accordingly, in the process of building speed, actually think over that rocking wrists motion.
The Blues Scale Of F For Developing Finger Speed
Another popular scale for developing finger speed comprises the blues scale of F. With right hand, scale of F blues is extremely enjoyable as it employs really simple fingering pattern involving 1,2,3 1,2,3 concurrently. The fingering pattern remains consistent irrespective of the number of octaves played by you.
As you can conveniently play many octaves within the scale of F blues, obtain advantage by working the scale top and bottom of the keyboard. While performing at rapid speeds, you should note your subtle finger operations as well as your bigger arm movement. Such a scale works excellently for coordinating the two.
Talking of subtle finger movements, a nice way is to locate an exercise which combines speed with precision. Actually, what purpose is blazing quick piano speed without accuracy. For a thing like this, it is important to shift upwards a scale with steps of 3-note.
An exercise such as this is awesome as you’re not simply operating every finger individually, you’re even replacing your hands repeatedly. This goes much towards building an internal knowledge about the keyboard. While playing this exercise, you’ll start to subconsciously lay out the largeness of the spaces between keys.
These are some of the ways to enhance speed. In reality, you can pick up nearly everything upon the piano to rehearse in a manner to know to play quickly. However, always remember that golden ( though a bit confounding) maxim: The key in performing quickly is initially off mastering how to perform slowly! Enjoy practicing!
Advantages Of Finger Exercises
A nice question to ask is why you should perform finger exercises? Similar to athletes, musicians require proper control over their muscles, while injuries can be avoided with strong muscles. Performing the piano utilizes more than simply the fingers, rather it uses the entire arms. To master the use of arms, hands and fingers plus wrists properly. finger exercises offer greater effectiveness than real pieces, as exercises are frequently built to address one technique with their easy structure being less distracting. Furthermore, finger exercises, like strength instruction for athletes, may better finger strength, dexterity, flexibility and coordination, which can then enhance speed, musicality, plus overall performance while performing musical works.
Briefly, finger exercises, such as arpeggios and scales, are key building blocks concerning musicianship.
When Must You Rehearse Such Exercises
You may include few finger exercises within the warm-up cycle. Later, you can shift to other types of finger exercises. The following are the Piano Speed Exercise.
Velocity Exercise
This exercise harps on the way to play quick passages effectively, which is primarily exaggerating the spherical and rotational movements required to perform the passage slowly, and restrict the motions for increasing speed.
In order to play rapidly, we must be acquainted with the proper hand movements. Pianists are continuously drawing circles. While playing upwards and downwards the scale, your right hand lies in round motions. With the raising of notes, the wrist comes down, while with the lowering of notes, the wrist makes an over movement. Your left hand makes a rotational movement; Sway the wrist plus hand to and fro. When you increase speed, reduce the swaying movement and propel ahead rapidly.
Enhance Your Finger Speed Upon The Piano
These are some finger speed exercise which advances your speed and mastery upon the piano. Begin your finger exercise with that ancient standby of C Major. By any hand you select to begin with, perform the first 5 scale notes, utilizing all 5 fingers. Perform your course from C till G, followed by back down once more. Don’t play at your top speed yet. Begin well and slow to ensure that the entire notes have similar volume. You desire steady actions. Don’t flip your fingers, shift them steady with a straight downward movement.
Now let’s shift to a whole scale, like the major scale of F. Begin slowly, performing only one octave initially. Perform upward and downward the octave, well and slowly. After you ensure towards performing the notes steadily and smoothly, you can start to gather speed. It’s advised to employ a metronome during these rehearsal sessions. Begin at a reduced pace and slowly increase the speed of the metronome. Rehearsing this way assures that you build a correct perception regarding musical timing. It also is an enjoyable idea to rehearse playing of blues scale. While performing a blues number it sounds truly stupendous to perform a rapid blues scale for a relevant song part.
Arpeggios
The final finger exercise to mention is arpeggios. The arpeggio comprises playing the separate chord notes rather than striking them all at the same time. Perform the notes for your selected chord and make your way upwards the keyboard, performing higher to higher octaves for the chord.
Whichever means you select for finger rehearsal, bear in mind that beginning slow and developing speed comprises the right way to assure that you are not picking up poor habits. While you rehearse the exercises the muscle memory will be acquired by your fingers needed to perform the scales quicker and quicker without resorting to bother with the notes.
Five Piano Finger Speed Exercises
Be Cautious About Your Thumbs
It is observed that occasionally our thumbs become lazy. Especially, while performing scales, the thumbs must cross below the hand to ready the following note as fast as possible.
For instance, while performing the D Major rising scale by your right hand, you might wish to perform the D note by your thumb, with E by your index finger.
Instantly after you perform the E note, navigate your thumb below your hand to ready near the G note. It doesn’t essentially require to be resting on the G key, though it must be shifting upwards the keys in order to be ready when you require to play that again.
Similarly, if you are performing the similar scale by a downward pattern through your left hand, you might do the same work, but only would be performing the scale on opposite. Rehearse the movement of performing your thumbs, followed by index fingers, next readying your thumbs once more a number of times daily. This finger exercise of piano works wonderfully well and though appearing superfluous, it makes a huge difference.
Perform The Finger Staccato
It comprises a fine finger finger speed exercise of the piano that really takes a bit time to understand. Essentially, you’ll perform your passage notes else scale notes within a staccato which emanates mainly through your finger.
It will be desired by you to avoid employing your arm else some not needed muscles when performing this.
While conducting this exercise, attempt to mentally test yourself to employ as little muscles as probable. Notice how much pressure it requires to press downward the key.
You’ll be amazed to know that it really takes slight force. Be wary of the movement of your hand and attempt to play just by your fingertip.
Block Scales Chords Passages
This constitutes a wonderful finger speed exercise for advancing scale speed along with chord identification. Suppose you possess a piece of music which looked akin to the composition of a Sonata by Mozart beneath. Instead of performing the left-hand like individual notes, perform every measure ( and every chord alteration ) like a blocked chord.
Not just you will enable to recognize the notes you’ll require to perform with greater convenience, but you’ll get to know the piece harmony better.
Similar technique may also be employed to scales, though it needs bit more rehearsal to achieve so. While performing this with scales, you’ll wish to perform each finger at the same time, apart from your thumbs, that will function as pivot notes to be readied early as if we were conducting in the initial lesson.
Perform With Interspersed Rhythms
The exercise is extremely easy, but offers excellent results. If you view the left hand within the Mozart item from the earlier example, you’ll notice that it’s performing a bass pattern of Alberti (alternating below-top-middle-top) which also carries smooth eighth notes.
Instead of really performing the notes like even, in place alter the rhythmic values of the left hand to alterations of dotted eighth and sixteenth notes as the examples below.
Rehearse Your Scales Plus Arpeggios Daily
It appears rudimentary, though it actually creates a difference. The students who rehearse their scales daily can not just play quicker than the students who don’t, but can even perform with greater musicality as they aren’t struggling to decipher notes.
Practicing Scales
Each aspiring piano performer should rehearse their scales everyday for minimum an hour.
If you haven’t attempted rehearsing scales in this manner earlier, you can begin now with the most easy tonalities of C Major and a minor. Notice that when noting out scales, Major remains always capitalized, while minor is permanently lowercase. To begin, you should rehearse your chosen scale ‘Legato’ with your right else left hand, though not both simultaneously. Legato signifies ‘tied together’. It signifies that you must perform all the notes evenly and linked without resting between every note. Begin extremely slowly, followed by gradually increasing your speed, till you can perform quicker and quicker. After you can perform each hand conveniently at a regular speed, you can shift on and attempt to perform with your two hands simultaneously. When you are performing with your two hands, you should raise your speed in steps.
Benefits Of Practicing Scales
Rehearsing this technique slowly enhances the power of your finger muscles allowing you to play faster.
While doing this, it’s vital to note the way you’re grasping your wrist, since it must be always eased and stable. In reality, you should be performing with your fingers, and your wrist must not be tense. Tense wrists can lead to carpal tunnel syndrome, a popular injury resulting from imperfect wrist position.
While noting correct wrist position, you should attempt to play the scales utilizing legato, non-legato, plus staccato. Non-legato, also named ‘Portato’, constitutes the converse of legato. This implies that you must pause between every note, with connected notes being absent. Staccato is performed in similar manner like non-legato though it must carry a more sharp plus brief sound. The placement of your wrists during the use of staccato and non-legato is slightly different. While playing staccato or non-legato, the position of your wrist must shift from bottom to up, which should be permanently relaxed.
Play Arpeggios To Improve Wrist Form
Mastering your technique at performing arpeggios is among the most vital things for you to emerge a skilled pianist. Arpeggio is just a group of notes that is performed in order of sequences. For instance in tonality of C Major the arpeggios comprise C E G, C E G.
Rehearsing the arpeggios improves the power and speed of your fingers, while bettering the ability of your wrists to become more relaxed.
For rehearsing the arpeggios, you must begin from the tonality of C Major. Similar to rehearsing the scales, you must initially rehearse with every hand individually, and don’t forget to maintain your wrist free. When performing , rather than banging upon the keys of the piano, use your hands’ weight for pressing them. You must begin to perform 2 octaves up, followed by 2 octaves return down, and slow you put in more octaves. Heed that initially you must perform extremely slowly, till you have perfected this technique. While you perfect the technique, attempt to play every note forte, which stands for loud and powerful.
As you improve your skill, and you begin to play nicely with every hand at slow or regular tempos, you must begin attempting to play quicker. After you’re able to perform the arpeggios conveniently with every hand, you can next attempt to perform them with your two hands. Similar to rehearsing scales with two hands, you must begin to rehearse arpeggios slowly. While mastering your technique try to slowly augment your speed.
You can next attempt to perform the arpeggios, non-legato, legato and staccato.