4/5 trills and trills in general

[Derek]

I've brought this topic up before but I have hit yet another threshold with my trills.  It seems that all of a sudden every possible pair of fingers in my hands can trill maybe 25% faster than they used to?  This includes my ring and pinky fingers of my right hand.

I've noticed an odd progression of their progress:

-I'll go through a phase where the 4/5 trill in the right feels a bit sluggish and doesn't "want," if you get my meaning, to go any faster than a certain speed.

-I'll go through a phase where the 4/5 trill in the right hand magically seems to go as easily and without resistance as any other pair of fingers.


Each time I reach the second phase it seems to be a little faster---I'm hoping this will be permanent eventually.

What is odd is that no other pair of fingers has this alternation of learning phases as my trills improve. My left hand has never had a problem with 4/5. It is a bit of a mystery. I've been told it has to do with being right handed and having slightly more knotted up tendons in the right hand,  so perhaps more learning has to be done to make more muscles move the other fingers in perfect sympathy to allow for such a precise technique.

Oh! One thing I noticed that really seems to help trills improve, is to not imagine trilling downwards, but imagine trilling upwards, as though the keys are above your fingers. My piano teacher Dr. Smith always says in really speedy tricky passages you should focus on picking up your fingers rather than pressing them down, and I think he's really onto something. It seems to apply to almost any fast technique.

[jlh]

It's not the fact that you're trilling "up" that's helping, but that by thinking about it that way, you're releasing the pressure from the tendons that are pressing the fingers down, allowing the tendons that pick the finger up to work freely.  Tension is caused when the tendons are working against one another, so any way you can get the tendons to work FOR you and not AGAINST you, you're on the right track.