Fats Octaves (Im sorry another one!)

[rjm-uk]

Should i be practising fast chromatic octave passages with my 4th finger going to the black keys, or is it ok to use 1 and 5 all the way up and down the keyboard.

[xvimbi]

If you can reliably, accurately and reproducibly produce the sound that you want, at the speed that you want, any fingering is OK, as long as you don't injure yourself.

In general, though, most would probably agree to use 1-4 for black note octaves, because finger 4 provides more area (it is more difficult to play a black key with finger 5), and it already places finger 5 for the next octave. However, if you can't stretch that far without causing tension than you might want to take it easy with the 1-4 fingering until you can play it without tension.

[chopiabin]

I still vaccilate between using 1-4 on the black keys - for legato chromatic octaves (first page of the third ballade) 1-4 works well I think, but sometimes I feel I lose a little speed. For extremely fast octaves I tend to resort to 1-5, but I still feel that 1-4 is more "Horowitzian" if that makes any sense whatsoever

[thalbergmad]

For sheer speed, i would stick to 1-5. In addition i feel using 1-4 can result in loss of power.