Key dip

[ted]

What do the experts here say about how far keys should be depressed ? Somebody on another forum stated that in playing the piano, keys should always be fully depressed, not necessarily to the point of using force against the key beds but always registering contact with them.

I think most respondents in general agreed. At the time I didn't think much about it but on closely examining my own playing since I have found the situation to be much more complicated than I at first supposed. With a heavy touch grand action, especially, I appear to use a huge variety of touches, very few of which involve consciously pushing keys against the beds. About the only times I can say I do that for sure would be somewhere like the ending of Rhapsody In Blue or Mazeppa - big sounds, big chords. In places such as the right hand of the Chopin study in thirds or even the right hand of Winter Wind, I'm not really aware of touching key beds as such.

I've more or less come to the conclusion that it's one of those things I'd be better not to waste energy thinking about at all - provided I feel all right and it sounds all right let sleeping dogs lie, as it were.

[Clare]

I never think about whether the keys are depressed to the bottom properly or anything, unless I'm playing a loud, resonant long chord. Then I suppose I think quite a lot about it, mostly because the action involves pushing the keys down without bashing them, and then keeping them there down the bottom but with a relaxed hand.
Other than that, I guess you'd be thinking more about the colours of notes rather than exactly how far down you're pushing them.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, I totally agree with you.

[zhiliang]

But are there any advantages of always playing downwards till the keybeds? Because when i consciously start doing, i feel that the tone that i produced is more rounded and full, giving it more sonority. But for many quick and delicate light passages, i almost never go all the way down. Should we?

Regards,

Zhiliang

[bernhard]

Ultimately this is a question about the mechanical aspects of the piano.

The single most important information about all this is that once the hammer has been set in motion there is absolutely nothing you can do to the key that will change the produced sound in any way whatsoever. So the vibrato movement made by certain  famous pianists (e.g. Arrau and Gould) who should know better, really makes not difference to the sound whatsoever.

Let me disgress for a moment. A few years ago I saw a pianist playing one of the Bach toccatas. Before he struck the very first note he spend a few seconds performing a complicated hand florish before actually landing on the note. Theatrical? Yes. Added drama to the performance? Certainly. Made any difference to the sound? None whatsoever. Irritated the pants of members of the audience (like me) who cannot stand this sort of histrionics? You bet. However, like Arrau’s and Gould’s vibrato on the keys it might have had a psychological component and maybe it was important to that particular pianist to put himself into the mood of the piece he was about to play. Whatever its psychological/performance implications it has no bearing at all in the sound produced.

Now let us look at the key itself. It is a lever, and through this lever the hammer is moved. But all that one can do is to make the hammer go faster or slower towards the string. It is the speed of the hammer (which cannot be altered once it is set in motion) that will determine how loud or how soft the final sound is going to be. Contrary to popular belief – which in some quarters amounts to an impossible to dislodge superstition – striking a key hard or soft, putting pressure, caressing the keys will have absolutely nothing to do with the resulting sound. The only thing that matters is how fast or how slowly you depress the key.

This is easy to demonstrate: place a single finger on a note and depress it slowly pushing as hard as you can (but slowly). In fact stand up and put your full weight on that key. As long as you depress it slowly it will sound ppp. Your nails may go white, and it will add not a iota of power to the sound. Now do the opposite: using the lightest possible touch, barely touching the key, depress it as quickly as you can. You will get a loud sound.

Of course it is far easier to depress a key faster using more pressure, and to depress it slower by using a soft touch. But this is simply one way of doing it. Since the key is a lever, the closer to the wood you are the harder you will have to press to get the same hammer speed, so one way to control hammer speed apart from touch is how far into the keys you play . For the same finger pressure, the closer to the edge of the key you are, the faster the hammer speed, the louder the sound, the closer to the lid, the less speed will be imparted to the hammer, the softer the sound.

So now we have three completely unrelated actions (finger pressure – speed of descent of the key – how far in the key is pressure applied) that can combine in a staggering number of different ways and produce exactly the same hammer speed – which will ultimately determine the sound produced.

So to sum it up: instead of thinking of depressing the keys, think of lifting the hammers at a certain speed. This speed is the only consideration, and controlling it is what ultimately will result into a desired sound.

Now we can add to that the problem of the keybed.

The lever mechanism that links key to hammer is so built that the hammer is sent flying before the key actually reaches the keybed. In fact the hammer is sent flying towards the string at about half way  down . This is called the escapement level. You can actually see this by yourself by opening the piano and leaving the hammers and strings exposed. As you depress a key slowly, you will come to a point where there is a slight resistance. You must overcome this resistance to get to the keybed. It is subtle, so pay attention! The moment you go through this resistance (the escapement level) the hammer is out of your control. So getting to the keybed is in a sense unnecessary. To send the hammer flying, all you need to do is to get through the escapement level.

However if you think of a golf swing or a tennis racket hitting a ball, you can see that even after the ball (golf or tennis) was hit, the player continues with the racket/golf club movement – even though this movement is now unnecessary for the purposes of adding any speed to the ball. However this follow through is extremely important to make sure that the movement up to the point where the racket/golf club hits the ball is correct. Try hitting a tennis ball and stopping dead the moment you hit it and you will se what I mean.

The awesome consequence of this little known fact is that after you pass the escapement level, there is nothing you can do to control the hammer speed. So you must get thoroughly familiarised with this level and direct your efforts and awareness to this level and not to the keybed. This will guarantee the most exquisite control of sound. It also means that after you reached the escapement level and in on your way to the key bed you might as well relax: you only need tension in the key during that microfraction of a second when the key reaches the escapement level.

So do you need to go all the way to the keybed? Only in the same sense that a golf player must complete his swing after he has hit the ball. It does not add to the speed of the hammer, or to the quality of the sound. However, there is an important aspect here: you must keep the key depressed if you want to sustain the sound, since the moment you release the key the dampers will stop the strings from vibrating. But this is a different issue altogether and has more to do with overtone manipulations then with tone and loud/soft. In any case, remember that to keep the key depresse you need minimum pressure, so there is little point in pressing the keys into the key bed until your nails go white.

Now the question is: if by depressing the key fast I generate loud sounds, how can one play fast and ppp? We know it is possible, since people do it all the time. The question is how do they do it in view of the piano mechanism?

Here are two ways (possibly complementary) to answer this question:

1.      The speed with which we press the keys is vertical. The speed of a run is mostly horizontal. So you can still play fast (moving fast horizontally) and yet ppp (moving slowly vertically).

2.      As you play a fast scale, your horizontal movement will carry the fingers, so as a finger press the key, it is immediately carried away to the next note by the horizontal movement. The key that was depresse does not get depressed all the way down, but in instead given an impulse. The moment the finger that gave it the impulse moves to the next the note, the key continues to move towards the key bed, but now without the finger pressing anymore. Because of the lever mechanism the key descent is severely deaccelerated, so that it slows down dramatically and generates a ppp sound in spite of the speed with which it was pressed down.

3.      If the above is correct you can expect that the most difficult passages to play fast and ppp are repeated notes/chords (and to a lesser extent trills) because there is little horizontal movement. In such a case awareness of the escapement level is an absolute necessity. But you can have this awareness and yet know nothing about the mechanics of the piano because the sound you are producing provides the perfect feedback mechanism with which to fine tune your movements.

How do you practise this stuff? Not on the music. Instead try:

Seymour Bernstein – 20 lessons in keyboard choreography (Hal Leonard) where he describes some very unusual and interesting exercises to make you aware of the escapement level.

Finaly there is a danger of concentrating too much on fingers and keys and hammers. This is just an explanation of what is going on. It is easy to get lost in its minutiae. The approach is actually to concentrate on the sound you are producing and let your unconscious guide you towards the best movement. Exactly what Ted says at the beginning of the thread. If the sound you want is clear in your mind, the body will comply.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.