Bob's monster technical routine

[Bob]

 

[stevie]

thing is, i advocate playing pieces, and only minimal technical exercises on the most basic elements of technique - raw dexterity of the playing apparatus, go figure grandma.

[pianistimo]

yes.  i always figure that if you ask your students to do something - you should be able to do it, too.   (with the exception of that piece you've always wanted to hear and never had time to play). 

my most recent teacher has changed my 'philosophy' of exercise, though.  he probably uses minimal exercises and more 'brain' exercises (what i mean is playing a lot of off beat things and getting your brain to 'click in' faster in terms of what the fingers do).  it's usually repetitive but the accents are different every measure.  maybe what you are saying, too, to do  a variety of different exercises and not become stuck on one thing or other.  repertoire does this.  you have so many different challenges and difficulties - and you can take 5-6 to  -10-20 measures and repeat with different techniques to achieve the result.  i've learned from my teacher to not do things the same way over and over but to EXPERIMENT.  i was not much of an experimenter with sound before i had him.  sort of relied on 'gut instinct' and never would 'rework' the sounds or ideas - but blindly repeated them as i learned them. 

it's sort of like acting.  you take something and try even the most dramatic approach.  and then, keep toning it down.  so you see the one extreme, the middle, and the other extreme (and a few in between).   so, when you come to a crescendo - you might wildly play it PAST the point of the crescendo peak, and then gradually pull it back.

five-finger exercises are my fav's - and, scales and stuff to stay 'in form' - but i never have time for that as much as repertoire now because of limited time.  you never want to OVER practice.  i'm realizing that now.  protecting your fingers/hands is extrememly important.  if you do a lot of technique, then go on to repertoire for a little while.  but, whenever your hands are sore.  stop.  do something else and then return.  probably the key to practicing longer and longer is to constantly remind yourself to relax and not to use ALL your energy.  to reserve it (like a long distance runner).  you don't have to play all exercises forte (or any,a ctually).  muscles in the fingers, i've learned, is pretty much only helpful if you are playing thirds or certain trills.  most things you have to deal with are on the 'brain level' of achieving the right fingering, the right sound, and the right approach (flat fingers for most things - results in a 'petting the sound' out of the piano).

[tds]

i am glad i dont have to do any technical routine, yet i remain in good shape.

[lisztisforkids]

If I do a CONSITENT technical routine, the results do pay off.

[thalbergmad]

Please use the search function and you will find over 10,000 similar topics.

Remember, drills are dangerous and could lead to sudden death.

[Bob]

I'm still on the fence.

I did have thoughts about why to do lit over tech.

As a teacher, I wouldn't dare assign something like this to a student.  They would get bored.  So, go with lit.

As a person, tech can get dull from an expressive/emotion standpoint.  Lit is much more interesting to work on.

I agree that this routine does not really develop expression or musical thinking.  But that's not really what I had in mind when I created it.  It's the ony thing I know that works for me to increase technique -- If I want more, I can get more and almost have it planned out. 

[bertrand]

I read somewhere that Andras Schiff's approach is not to do any scales or exercises but just to play a handful of Bach Preludes & Fugues as a warm up ... makes sense to me

The way I was taught was that exercises should be the slave to music-making .... if there is a specific technical problem in a piece, invent some exercises to address that problem, but otherwise don't waste time with exercises .... (unless you enjoy them for their own sake of course - in which case go for it!)

[steve jones]

Bob,

Wow, you should be careful mate, you'll give yourself a hernia with that lot! 

My technical warm up is a few scales and couple of bars from some random Bach piece. Then again, my technique sucks!

SJ

[tds]

Remember, drills are dangerous and could lead to sudden death.

ellowel

[rc]

...invent some exercises to address that problem, but otherwise don't waste time with exercises .... (unless you enjoy them for their own sake of course - in which case go for it!)

Can you spot the contradiction?

All those old sets of exercises are other's solutions to musical problems, in whatever system they happened to come to. Scales/chords/arpeggios are all musical abstractions (like all theory), exercises basically.

I've always approached technical exercises like little puzzles to be solved. If my hands don't already know how to execute a particular exercise, then there's something I can learn from that puzzle.

I like Pianistimo's approach of brain exercises. I'm coming to believe that most technical difficulties comes down to how well the brain is perceiving it. As I was practicing some multiple-voice Dohnanyi exercises today, it dawned on me that I wasn't quite getting the drill until I began to approach it in terms of voices (rather than terms of RH/LH, or fingers...). Once I was hearing it right in my head, it all fell easily together.

Approaching exercises as brain-workouts develops musical imagination as well. The trick is to always think of it in musical terms, instead of the mechanics of anatomy. Interestingly, the less you think of anatomical mechanics the more those aspects will take care of themselves.

[cloches_de_geneve]

Bob,

Why subjecting yourself to such tortures ...? When you could achieve the same result AND having some fun at the same time? Here is my alternative-recepie:

Pick ten Fugues from WTC
Pick ten Chopin-Etudes
Pick five Liszt-Etudes
And five Debussy-Etudes particularly for sound, color

Evidently, you don't want to play all of them every day. You alternate, just spending 30-45 minutes max.

I mean ... do you think your "monster routine" would really give you better results than practicing with all this phantastic music? These geniuses did already all the necessary work for us, we just have to use it

[hartmut]

Bob,

I'm defining technique as all abilities that your body and your brain need to express the musical idea of a certain piece.
The brainwork (I think that's for sure) can only be done by playing literature. You have to have a clear idea of which story is to be told, which emotions have to be expressed and so on.

The bodywork could be done by doing "stupid" exercises. But: to gain all the technique you need for playing all the literature you want to play you would have to exercise 30 h/d because the amount of movements being necessary in all pieces is that huge - impossible to catch really every movement in standard exercises!

So why not just learning literature?

Automatically you will realise where there's a lack of technique, and you will work on them like on standard exercises.
The differece is that you don't have to do 100000000 exercises to be sure that you trained exactly the 100 movements that you need in your literature.

When doing standard exercises you can be absolutely sure that a high percentage of the trained movements you will use never in your life (except in standard exercises of course). Staying in good shape is also possible with playing your stuff, I'm convinced about that

[Bob]

I haven't had great success using lit to really develop technique.

Yes, if I do these everyday in time I get improvements in technique.  These seem more concentrated or dense.  Efficient at reaching the goal of a specific point of technique.  Able to do "this" faster in two months rather than waiting longer if it's in a piece.  More flexible.


And then with the lit, am I supposed to play those etudes every day?  Don't I end up at the same point?  Aren't the Bach pieces going to get extremely dull by running through them everyday?  I suppose I could alternate them, but still.

[ilikefinnissy]

I don't understand the need for all of that hand torture.  I think a lot of the "adult beginner- internet posting-pianists" are the ones with a lot of questions and unfortunately become the ones who still associate the piano with "sports" and physical strain/stamina.  I now know several great concert pianists, and none of them have put their hands through that kind strain - it's simply useless.   If people had more contact with great pianists (as opposed to other beginners on internet forums), they would realize this as well.  I unfortunately listened to internet articles when I started out a few years ago, and wish that I hadn't.  Applying the advice I read was a waste of my time.

The piano is not something that should be fought everyday, I don't see how that kind of mindless work can lead to musical perfection.  Ideally, you should be able to sit down at a piano, play through a piece slowly once or twice, then be able to play what you've been working on at tempo!  If this seems impossible, then you have been forcing your muscles to do something that they can't.  Forcing them even more isn't the answer.

Patterns (1345, 5412, 5123, etc. ) will not help you either.  The reason why literature is stressed to develop technique is because each piece has it's own "choreography" that the hands must learn.  Luckily, a lot of this choreography overlaps in literature, so learning a passage in Chopin could help you out in Balakirev, etc.  I could go on, but i've got to get to class!

Just my 2 cents

[hartmut]

Able to do "this" faster in two months rather than waiting longer if it's in a piece.

Whatfor you want to learn it faster (in the sense of: earlier than you need it in a piece) ?
the answer on that is simple:

you just don't need it! Never! Except if it's in a piece.
So train it when it is in the piece you want to play. If it isn't, there's no need to being able to do it! Never! Because it's not in the literature you're playing.
Also there's no need to play Bach Inventions every day. This is a little less dull than finger exercises because it's music; but it's not funny to play the same music every day. So if you have 3 or 4 pieces at hand you're working on: take those, extract the difficulties you have with and use that as (obviously constantly changing) finger exercises. That helps you to learn exactly what you need

[contrapunctus]

For me to warm up: I improv with scales and octaves.

Then I play some Scarlatti or Bach Sinfonias.

Then I practice whatever scales and arpeggios are in the pieces I am learning that day.

Then I play.

This takes fifteen minutes or so.