Fast Alberti Bass

[brogers70]

I'm looking for suggestions on how to improve my Alberti bass. When I play it fast, I can only go for a little while before my LH gets tight and cramped. The things I've tried so far are (1) treating it as a parallel set, playing the chord as a chord, ie infinitely fast, and then slowing down - that helped a lot for fast scales but not for the Alberti bass (2) practicing very slowly, focusing on keeping the fingers close to the keys all the time and paying attention to the feeling of the release of the key as well as the touch (3) using dotted rhythms (4) trying to relax as much as possible while playing it fast, thinking stuff like "Oh, what Ho, look at my hand over there playing the piano, how nice, la dee da," (5) just playing the Alberti passages in question at a tempo that doesn't cause cramping, over and over (6) concentrating on wrist rotation, without going overboard with it, I hope.

My teacher says just keep at it. That's fine, I'm patient. But I wonder if anyone has suggestions for other approaches to getting to a point where I can play long passages with a fast Alberi bass.

[stevebob]

Would it be feasible to vary the fingering you're using?

[lostinidlewonder]

Consider the bass of the alberti pattern separate from the middle and top. When you leave the bass disengage your muscles on the lower half of the hand (if the alberti is inverted then its the upper part of the hand). Thus you separate the action into two parts while you do the turn the other part is disengaged, this subtle point is important when doing multiple repetitions or at rapid speeds. Difficult point to try to put in words!

[scottmcc]

lost, if I'm understanding you correctly you're describing what I do, which is think of the first note as a sustained note, with the following 3 notes as a tremolo.  in that case, what I do is separate them completely, and play all of the lowest notes alone first, then practice the tremolo by itself, then the whole thing together.  a great example of this is the tremolo section of Beethoven's Pastoral Sonata 1st mvt (op 28, measures 77-103).  the bonus of this is it's not truly an alberti bass, but it's exactly what I was describing above (there's one added note on the beat that finishes the tremolo). 

so anyway, to practice the left hand for this, I would first do c#-d-c#, then do e#-g#-e#-g#-e#-g#e#-g#-e#-g#-f#-g#-e#-g#, and then do the whole thing together.  hopefully this makes some sense.  before I figured this out, I was terrible at playing fast alberti patterns, but now I'm reaching adequacy. 

[brogers70]

Consider the bass of the alberti pattern separate from the middle and top. When you leave the bass disengage your muscles on the lower half of the hand (if the alberti is inverted then its the upper part of the hand). Thus you separate the action into two parts while you do the turn the other part is disengaged, this subtle point is important when doing multiple repetitions or at rapid speeds. Difficult point to try to put in words!

Thanks, I'll try it.

[bleicher]

Play the pattern very slowly, enough to make sure that your fingers, your hand and your wrist are all free. Check that the wrist is free by using the other hand to move it about a bit. Check that the fingers that you're not using are relaxed and resting on the keys.

Then, hold down the notes that aren't part of the pattern (so if you're playing cgeg etc with 5 3 and 1, hold down d and f with 2 and 4). Practise playing the pattern with those two notes held down, but make sure you play it extremely slowly and that your fingers and wrist stay relaxed throughout. Just play the pattern a few times, slowly. Don't play it any faster than you can manage to keep completely relaxed. Then shake your hand to make sure it doesn't tense up.

Repeat every day.

[perfect_pitch]

The Czerny studies at improving velocity is pretty decent. Quite a few of them focus on the Alberti bass pattern, although they usually have different starting notes... e.g

FC'BC' CC'BC' DC'BC' EC'BC'

[brogers70]

Play the pattern very slowly, enough to make sure that your fingers, your hand and your wrist are all free. Check that the wrist is free by using the other hand to move it about a bit. Check that the fingers that you're not using are relaxed and resting on the keys.

Then, hold down the notes that aren't part of the pattern (so if you're playing cgeg etc with 5 3 and 1, hold down d and f with 2 and 4). Practise playing the pattern with those two notes held down, but make sure you play it extremely slowly and that your fingers and wrist stay relaxed throughout. Just play the pattern a few times, slowly. Don't play it any faster than you can manage to keep completely relaxed. Then shake your hand to make sure it doesn't tense up.

Repeat every day.

Thanks, I've been trying this for a couple of weeks now and it seems to help a good deal.

[bleicher]

Excellent!