Staccato Scales for Faster Fingers

[princessdecadence]

It's one of them fact or fiction question.  I've been told by a friend that if you want to play fast then a good exercise would be to play the scales staccato since she argues that it would increase finger flexibility and speed.  Personally, I don't see how.

[stealsoul]

If you just want to play fast:
Grab a metronome, put it slowly (20bpm or so first). Somewhere where you can do it really comfortable without worrying about the speed.
Play a part (= some bars) for 15 minutes. Put the metronome faster after 15 minutes. (just some bpm).
Do this every day. After a month or so you can do it real fast.
Speed is just some muscles in the fingers. There's no magic or so, it's just like weightlifting.

here is a video of guitarist that used this way to get fast> https://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1938099378022643751&q=guitar
It must be possible on piano too

[rc]

I find that after a certain point, the hands are pretty good at getting to the notes and speed becomes a mental game.

I suppose it's important to get to the stage where the hands know what to do. To that end, I believe it's helpful to practice in all sorts of ways, I sometimes find staccato useful in getting the succession of notes under the finger. Not sure about flexibility and speed, but practicing staccato means you don't have to connect notes at all, which removes that difficulty...

I'm speculating now, since I haven't really had to get anything so fast yet... But the faster you go, the shorter each note value is, so at the fastest speeds each note is probably staccato or near-staccato in length, connecting them becomes a non-issue and it will also feel like staccato. Speculatively.

Notching the metronome is useful, but I don't like to do it all the time. After too long, the metronome can play a trick on your ears, where your brain tunes it out like road noise and you actually hear the space in between the beats.

https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,12295.msg132843.html#msg132843

[jamie_liszt]

Possibly, to speed up scales my teacher always tells me something like: you must become friends with your metronome, lol, and keep in mind, to play fast you must practise playing fast, playing slow won't help! Playing Slow only helps with eveness etc.

EVEN- To practise eveness you play the scale hands seperate and hands together with different rhythms, long, short long, short (quaver, semiquaver, quaver semiquaver etc. -accent the long note) or short shrot short long (tri-pl-et semiquavers then quaver again accenting the long note) etc. then swap the rhyms around,eg-: long short instead of short long, then you will be accenting a different note with a different finger, then play the scale normally accenting ever four notes. This is the way my teacher shows me to play more even and it helps me.

SPEED- My teacher says when you have it perfectly even with no unwanted accents you can play it slow with the metronome, as someone said before and speed it up every so often a couple of beats, if your speeding scales up do hands separate eg if you want to get hands together scales up to 4 note sper beat at 132 or even 150 you have to be able to be able to play scales faster hands sep. 220 sep. 150 tog.

Also try playing stacatto (could help), and if you are playing a scale ascending, bottom to top try playing it the other way going down. Remember mind games .

this rhythm stuff and speed stuff is for anything not just scales.!

[jlh]

It depends on what your goal is for the practice.  Practicing staccato is a great way to promote a better coordinated scale passage, and you will benefit from this with smoother scales and more even attacks.  If, however, you're doing this to develop your finger muscles then you are wasting your time.  Read Gyorgy Sandor's book about piano playing.  He says that you should NEVER try to build your muscles to play piano.  If you're finding your arms, hands, fingers, etc, hot and tired after practicing or performing, then you're doing something wrong and you have too much tension.  The remedy for getting tired during difficult runs is not developing your muscles, but better coordinating your muscles.

[abell88]

If, however, you're doing this to develop your finger muscles then you are wasting your time.

Especially since there are no muscles in your fingers!

[jlh]

Especially since there are no muscles in your fingers!

Well, regardless of how technical you want to get, the fact is there are muscles that actually move your fingers... larger ones in the forearm, small ones in the hand and smaller ones in the base of the fingers.  The point is that you need to learn how to engage the larger ones and coordinate all of them.  There is no need to build any muscles -- unless for some reason you have atrophied to an unhealthy condition, and in that case you shouldn't use the piano to get you back into shape.

[bearzinthehood]

With the exception of the pinky, which you can develop quite a bit.

[princessdecadence]

Ta all for them helpful replies.  I hope it doesn't take anyone by surprise but I don't use the metronome, I have it but it's covered in stardusts.

@Jamie_Liszt - it's always harder to play top to bottom.  Becoming friends with my metronome is a pretty tricky task *pout* but I shall give it a try.  Thanks for the tips.

@jlh - Never give me any pain to play scales besides the pain caused by boredom. Ta chuck!

Fingers DO have muscles!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_hand

[jlh]

@jlh - Never give me any pain to play scales besides the pain caused by boredom. Ta chuck!

Fingers DO have muscles!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_hand

Pain is last problem you will have.  The problem is that most people don't realize there's a problem until there's pain.  Pain means you've been doing something wrong for a long enough period of time that your body can't take it anymore.  Another problem is that when you start feeling pain you have probably developed a habit of playing in a certain way -- that way being obviously incorrect and will be difficult to break By the time you have pain, it will be even more difficult. 

So don't gauge your liberty to develop finger muscles at the piano by whether or not you are currently experiencing pain.  You should find the tension -- if there is tension (frequently by poor technique in the application of simple actions such as staccato scales), you need to find a way to loosen the tension or eventually there WILL be pain.

[princessdecadence]

I'm usually pretty relaxed when I play except for times when I have to stretch my fingers, I can reach an octave fine but some pieces (esp. Rach's) I would have to really really stretch and push my fingers to press the notes.  I don't have the biggest hands so... That's when I  actually thought hmm...I'll increase my fingers flexibility (not build on any muscles).  Rather, I see it as a stretching technique like what I have to do for example when you want to fo a spiral (that's when you stretch one leg out and body in figure skating) you have to PULL your body and legs as far as possible and stretch, like the fingers, I stretch them - hence they will be more flexible and later on you will be able to play them notes you initially can't reach.  It's all about flexibility surely this wouldn't hurt.