My piano teacher says that I'm playing with too much tension.. She's recommended that I go to take alexander technique classes which I just signed up for..I've noticed I definately don't have the same technique in my left hand that I do in my right. She always tells me to lift my fingers nice and high to prepare them before I play the note to get good tone and I find that easy to do in my right hand but awkward in my left.
It doesn't help that her upright has a very heavy key action.. I can play something beautifully on my young chang upright piano or yamaha digital piano at home and I go sit at her kawai and rather than my playing being natural I have to exert a fair amount of force to play. I get tense when I'm playing there, but not at home - not sure if it's becuase she's inspecting my playing or because of the key action.My difficulties playing her piano have led me to practice schmitt 5-finger exercises to help strenthen my fingers so that I can play her piano. I know you guys don't recommend them but I've been focused on playing them with my arms as relaxed free of tension as possible.. preparing my fingers for every note by lifting them as per my teachers instructions. I've been making sure that my forearm is aligned with the finger I'm playing and that my wrist is loose.I've asked her about the key action before but she says that my problem with playing is due to bad technique and that with good technique that I should have no problems playing a piano with a heavy key action, that a heavy key action is better because you get more control over dynamics, etc.I just had a lesson on her piano yesterday and today is when I first noticed actual pain in my left wrist.Anybody have any suggestions / recommendations for how to fix this?? Can / should I get a tuner to adjust my Young Chang to make the key action heavier like her piano??
She always tells me to lift my fingers nice and high to prepare them before I play the note to get good tone
If this is what she always tells you I would say get a new teacher...
When I was a child I use to have an opposite problem. The piano I practiced on at home, the keys where terribly hard to press down but when I went to my piano teachers home, the Yamaha had the lightest piano key action I had every played! This meant that I played everything LOUDER than normally and she would constantly abuse my aggressive control of volume.The reason why I was playing so loudly was because on a heavy action piano you use the weight of your entire hand to play a lot more than you would something with a much lighter touch. The weight of the hand compensates for the stiffness in the keys. But when we practice on light weighted keys we tend to use more isolated finger actions simply because we can get away with it. I taught a little girl for 1 year on a small unweighted keyboard, when we finally went to the real thing I had to re-teach her using the weight of her entire hand to play notes, not using individual finger movements and try to poke at the notes which she could do when she practiced by herself on the unweighted keyboard. She had to test how to use the hand to give energy to individual fingers so that pressing the keys down isn't isolated finger strikes. There is such a subtle difference between striking notes on a keyboard with just the fingers, and striking ntoes on a keyboard with the fingers as well as the palm, entire arm, body. Even a scale run requires the weight of the entire palm while playing, if we try to excecute it with just the fingers our hands will get very tired, we must feel the entire palm controlling the run and giving weight to the fingers. People who neglect or do not know the difference set themselves up for pain.Playing with too much tension can highlight the fact that you are trying to use finger strength to play individual notes instead of the entire hand to play a group of notes. It also may highlight that you waste energy, holding notes down you have already played with too much strength thus making the next note you play feel overall tense. It could mean 1000 other things I would ask your teacher to elaborate.
When you say you only use your fingers, are you absolutely positive about this? Consider this: The weights of the fingers alone are not enough to depress the keys, basic physics dictates there must be some force preventing your hand from moving up when your fingers press the keys downward. If no arm weight is transferred to the keybed that means that your shoulders are supporting your arm completely throughout the entire stroke. So where is force coming from? If it's not gravity then it must be muscles in your arms and shoulders, which basically means you are tense.What you are describing is not tension, so perhaps what you mean is, active fingers and relaxed arms and shoulders, which is not the same thing as using no weight.
I only have two principles that I try to follow- Move as little as possible- Relax whatever muscles I can afford to relaxThe swinging fingers into the keyboard technique IMO violates the first principle, in that you're not moving as little as possible.
Topic: Wrist pain - technique problem 