The short, lightning fast trills

[yuc4h]

I have searched all over the forums and I feel that this subject has not been discussed in sufficient detail.

My question is: Is there some kind of secret in playing short and very fast trills, those that last only for a split second and still you are supposed to play 5 or 7 notes, like in e.g Yundi Li's interpretation of Sun flowers or in La campanella?

Is the only advice to practice trilling for like 153 years to get better? And yes I have tried the parallel set exercises, they do no good.

At the moment I just practice trilling daily using 12,23,34,45 fingers and trill freely for a random duration with each finger combo.

I am a completely self taught pianist and I have been able to acquire every other technique I have encountered but trilling, I just don't seem to get it.

[ramseytheii]

I have searched all over the forums and I feel that this subject has not been discussed in sufficient detail.

My question is: Is there some kind of secret in playing short and very fast trills, those that last only for a split second and still you are supposed to play 5 or 7 notes, like in e.g Yundi Li's interpretation of Sun flowers or in La campanella?

Is the only advice to practice trilling for like 153 years to get better? And yes I have tried the parallel set exercises, they do no good.

At the moment I just practice trilling daily using 12,23,34,45 fingers and trill freely for a random duration with each finger combo.

I am a completely self taught pianist and I have been able to acquire every other technique but trilling, I just don't seem to get it.

Don't beat yourself up, you aren't the only one.  Martha Argerich said in an interview she hates playing Scarlatti in public.  Why?  The short, fast trills.  She claims to stumble on them every time. 

Then she said something interesting: "I guess I don't lift my fingers high enough,"  a statement at once acknowledging that all technique is not inherent, yet barely disguising a disdain for the techniques that aren't.

One of the many secrets to fast trills is to vary the fingering, and not as you are varying it, but in a more interesting way.  For instance, a trill on C to D, beginning and ending on C:
2 3 2 3 2 3 1 3 2
or even
2 4 2 4 2 4 1 3 2

You can practice trills also like this:
1 3 1 2 1 3 1 2 etc
or
1 3 2 3 1 3 2 3 etc
or
2 4 2 3 2 4 2 3 etc
or for more difficult experimentation:
3 5 4 5 3 5 4 5
or even
3 5 1 5 3 5 1 5

in short, you have to be creative with fingering.  But I didn't mention the foremost thing, which is to have the sound of the trill in your mind first.  The different characters you can get from ornamentation are vast, just listen to Gould's recordings, or Gulda's, or Rubinstein, who was actually very good at trills. 

After you decide how you want it to sound, be it brilliant, or humorous, or intense (Beethoven op109 and op111 for instance), you have to experiment with fingering, and always remember to "shake" them out, and not play with fingers alone.  Visualize a wet dog shaking the water off its body, and that is the feeling you should have when playing trills.

Walter Ramsey

[yuc4h]

Thanks for your advice. I'm looking forward to see some progress 

[archneko]

Ah, don't wear yourself out with trilling. When it gets to things like La Campanella's technical difficulty with 454 trillings, there are things called "tension". Too much of it, and you will get tendonitis. (Possibly  )Anyway, you can master a single trill in just few days, just start SLOWLY. If you don't do it slowly at first, you might lose self confidence, why?.... well, I rather be hearing clear notes then a struggled hammering of fingers, somewhat resembling that funny cat on youtube playing piano, except this cat is running on steroids and enraged with stolen litterboxes of the past, hammering the keys like Hilary Clinton's reaction from seeing her husband lighting ants on fire with a magnifying glass. Whoo..... Drama.. heh