playing chords as soft as possible (ppp)

[piani0player]

hello,
      im learning a piece from imags book2 no.2 (The moon......) by Debussy.Its a very quiet piece,the dynamic is all below "p" and full of chords both hands.But im having trouble playing those chord softly.Every time i try to play them softly ,i always miss a few notes,Example : i played a 3 or 4 notes chord,i can only hear 2 notes or even worse 1.how should i practice them ?please help me.
thank you

[Franz_Liszt_X]

The keys to playing soft chords are 1. Relaxation, 2. Arm Weight, 3. Playing to the Bottom of the Key.

You can tell you are relaxed when you feel gravity pulling down on your arm.

[RiskyP]

I agree, using controlled arm weight is very important. Also, it has helped me if I (very) slightly depress all of the keys of the chord before it is time to play it - this way the hammers move slightly forward - and then just let my arm drop when it is time for it to sound. This way the hammers don't have as much distance/time to accelerate. The resulting sound will be soft, but most likely all of the notes will still come out.

It takes some practice to learn, but it does work - I got the idea from watching a video of Horowitz play the very end of Schumann's Traumerei. There might be better metods... I don't know.  

Btw, with this method it is probably harder to voice chords, unless you practice that all over too.

[OlderGuy]

My teacher tells me a similar thing as RiskyP suggests:
While a key is still depressed let your next finger touch the next key. Just make contact with that key.
Practice this sloooowly.  -Peter

[piani0player]

hello everyone

thank you,i will try it today.

[piglet]

Here's a link for some simple, but useful exercises:
https://homepage.mac.com/stevepur/music/debussy_piano/dumesnil/dumesnil.html

[piani0player]

piglet

the website is very helpful.

thank you

[allchopin]

like a baseball player preparing for batting, play the passage extremely loud first, that way the keys will seem to depress like butter and you will have a better feel for them.

[tph]

In addition to the already excellent advice proposed, an important detail you might think about is firmness (but not stiffness) of the first joint.  That way you can feel and control the key depression, which will result from the controlled arm weight.  Often, I used to lose notes because of "flabby" fingers.

tph