Uneven Scales

[musicluvr49]

I've been working on all my scales, and I've got them up to a nice speed, but I can never play the notes evenly in my weak hand, and metrenomes usually just mess me up. Is there any way to train your weak hand to play evenly, without a metrenome?

[pianisten1989]

play them slow until you can play them even..

[rachfan]

I assume you're playing scales in four octaves in parallel ascending and descending.  First, practice hands alone enabling you to better monitor and correct unevenness. At the beginning, play the scales mechanically ensuring that articulation is strong and even. Next, play the scales more musically. First forte, then piano, and crescendo ascending and diminuendo descending.  Then do both legato and staccato touch.  And as pianisten suggests, stay with a slow tempo.  After sufficient hands alone practice, shift to hands together. Ensure that they play strictly together.  Only then allow yourself to try a faster tempo. In performing a scale, always aim for a smooth, connected, legato touch.  More often than not for most pianists, if a scale becomes ragged, then the left hand bears the most scrutiny.  Bear in mind too that if you have a great day playing even scales, three days later they might start to sound sloppy again. Welcome to the club!  That's why we pianists have to practice scales and arpeggios over a lifetime.

[musicluvr49]

Ok,

I assume you're playing scales in four octaves in parallel ascending and descending.  First, practice hands alone enabling you to better monitor and correct unevenness. At the beginning, play the scales mechanically ensuring that articulation is strong and even. Next, play the scales more musically. First forte, then piano, and crescendo ascending and diminuendo descending.  Then do both legato and staccato touch.  And as pianisten suggests, stay with a slow tempo.  After sufficient hands alone practice, shift to hands together. Ensure that they play strictly together.  Only then allow yourself to try a faster tempo. In performing a scale, always aim for a smooth, connected, legato touch.  More often than not for most pianists, if a scale becomes ragged, then the left hand bears the most scrutiny.  Bear in mind too that if you have a great day playing even scales, three days later they might start to sound sloppy again. Welcome to the club!  That's why we pianists have to practice scales and arpeggios over a lifetime.

Ok, thank you very much. I guess I just started going to fast too soon, and I only practice scales 3 or 4 times a week, so maybe that's why they're like that. I'll give this a try, thank you.

[gyzzzmo]

practise them more, with different rythms, speed, staccato and legato.

[stevebob]

[...] Bear in mind too that if you have a great day playing even scales, three days later they might start to sound sloppy again. Welcome to the club!  That's why we pianists have to practice scales and arpeggios over a lifetime.

I've never been persuaded that there's any reason or purpose for such a practice unless one values smooth scales and arpeggios for their own sake.  And that's fine for those who are so inclined, but it's not a universal interest or need.

[gyzzzmo]

Agreed with Stevebob.
For myself i can say i dont study any scale extensivly unless i need it for my coming projects.

[musicluvr49]

Yeah, I agree that it may not be neccessary for everyone, but for my music school its kind of a big deal. And also for college auditions and stuff.

[gyzzzmo]

depends on what composers youre busy anyway. Playing Chopin doesnt involve much scaling practise, Mozart requires making those riddles every morning.

[musicluvr49]

Thats true, but I'm just starting on the Bach Prelude and Fugue in C minor, and I think it would help a lot.

[cmg]

Uneven scales can result from problems other than lack of sheer strength (fine muscle development).  The crossings with the thumb often can lead to "bumps" if you are twisting your wrist at these points and/or throwing your elbow away from your body.  Keep totally relaxed and your arms should hang loosely and close to your body.  This is the starting point.  Obviously, your arms will move away from your body when necessary, i.e. the right hand playing in the high treble register while the left is playing in the extreme bass register.  Otherwise, relaxed arms, elbows close to the body.

The movement in scale work is horizontal with no (or very, very litle) wrist-twisting to accomodate thumb-crossings.  Try practicing each hand alone for starters and just do a five-note scale:  CDEFG (in C Major, to start), ascending 12345, then, DEFGA (12345), DFGAB (12345), all white keys, and go up a few octaves, then descend the same way.  Do the same exercise in G Major, then, D Major etc. and done slow enough that you can play them evenly.  This will give you an idea of finger weakness without the complication of thumb-crossings.  Do them slow enough to play them evenly, then pick of speed.  Actually, when you do add thumb-crossings, you still want to experience the scale run as if it's just one group of five or four notes, followed by another, in a smooth movement up or down.  No thumb or wrist bumps.

Do this slowly for the next 200 years or so, relaxed, and all will be well.  Hopefully.

[musicluvr49]

Thanks. I actually had that finger crossing problem about a year ago, but my piano teacher helped me out with that, and now I think I do the finger crossing pretty smoothly. I think I'll try the five-note scale thing though, Thank you.

[rachfan]

Years ago a good number of us abandoned "passing the thumb under".  What we do now as an alternative performance technique is to keep the thumb parallel to the hand at all times, including when playing scales.  So instead of the bane of passing the thumb under the palm, one develops a sense of timing by moving the hand into the direction of the scale to prepare and position the thumb for exactly when it will be needed.  Take the scale of C major.  Using this technique, by the time the RH thumb has to take the E, the upper arm, forearm, wrist and hand are already in position  for the thumb (kept parallel to the fingers), to play it, then the C at the next octave, the next E, etc.   Similarly, arpeggios are done with the same kind of arm and hand shift.  Long ago, pianists used to envy those who could play smooth arpeggios passing the thumb under.  Not anymore.  It's all done with hand shifts now.  And in passage work in repertoire pieces, the very same technique is utilized.  I first caught onto this long ago when reading Gyorgy Sandor's book On Piano Playing.

Having said that, musicluvr should disregard this and more appropriately follow the directions of her teacher.    

[musicluvr49]

Wow I never thought of that... I'll have to ask my teacher about it. 

[perfect_pitch]

Instead of playing them as even quavers... try playing with the rhythm.

Try dotted rhythms (say dotted quaver - semiquaver)... then swap (semiquaver - dotted quaver)

Usually helps my students help with fumbles in scalic or rhythmically even passages.

[ted]

In addition to the advantages of hand displacement described by rachfan, there is also the tremendous freedom, for instance in improvisation, of being able to use groups involving all five fingers no matter what the distribution of black and white keys within the group. As an example, take the right hand on Gb,Bb,Db,Eb,F with fingers 1,2,3,4,5, repeated up and down the keyboard. Passing anything under is next to impossible unless the fingering is changed to put the thumb on the F. But with hand displacement the whole thing is dead easy, even at extreme speed, in any inversion, and with any striking sequence of the fingers within the group. You can also get almost as fast with double notes as with single ones this way.

Naturally, piano playing isn't a race, and speed is far from being any sort of a main objective in itself, but for me at least, the advantages of hand displacement make passing thumbs under hard to justify in all but very special situations.

[rachfan]

Hi Ted,

You make very good points here.  I think that "passing the thumb under" is very, very old school dating back to the Viennese Classical period in the 1700s.  It became so embedded in pedagogy that it persists in some quarters even today, despite the obvious advantages of hand shifts.  I would wager that many of the piano "methods" books used by piano teachers have not been revised for years, and still present "passing the thumb under".  You mention improvising.  When I was young I used to love paraphrasing music.  If something was too difficult for me to play, I'd paraphrase the piece quite cleverly such that the casual (not the knowing) listener couldn't tell the difference from the real thing.  As part of paraphrasing I relied heavily on hand shifts, but way back then, I inevitably felt guilty as if I were somehow cheating at playing the piano.  Ironically, it's become more the general trend now in playing not only improvs and paraphrases, but the standard repertoire as well.  While classical pianists were passing the thumb under, I would guess that jazz pianists knew the secret of hand shifts eons ago.     

[general disarray]

Hi Ted,

You make very good points here.  I think that "passing the thumb under" is very, very old school dating back to the Viennese Classical period in the 1700s.  It became so embedded in pedagogy that it persists in some quarters even today, despite the obvious advantages of hand shifts.  I would wager that many of the piano "methods" books used by piano teachers have not been revised for years, and still present "passing the thumb under". 

Yes, these are good points.  But, "passing the thumb under" isn't a black-or-white issue.  The velocity of the passage determines positional shifts:  the faster the passage the more the hand and arm, in positional shifts, is engaged, minimizing the thumb's movement, but not eliminating it.  The thumb still serves as a rudder of sorts, guiding the positional shifts.  The goal is to eliminate extraneous movement and twisting the thumb under is definitely extraneous if and only if it involves hand position distortion.

So, the issue of thumb movement is more complex and subtle than it seems.  Less is more.  But none at all is not necessarily better.

[gyzzzmo]

Sorry, but these comments are abit silly too.
Thumbs under is if you have the bit slower scales, the technique written above is for the extremely fast scales.
There is no 'old school', there is just the appropriate technique for the appropriate situation.

[ingunite]

To my uneducated mind it sounds a bit like instructions for how to put one foot in front of the other in order to learn how to walk or run. Awfully scientific! Never knew there was more than one way of crossing under and over the thumb etc. Always thought the hand movement and thumb shenanigans pretty much checked and balanced each other naturally with little thought or correction necessary.
Can't pretty much any finger weaknesses (pardon the awkward term) be overcome by plain old fashioned practice of scales and Czerny? It will require much time and dedication, and I do not think there are any shortcuts.

[fleetfingers]

The whole thumb under/thumb over debate - which I had never heard of until I arrived at this forum - is strange to me. First of all, "thumb over" is a weird thing to call it. And, why is it such a secret to people? No one ever taught it to me, but it is how I play. Don't you think that as technique develops and you advance in repertoire, it happens naturally?

[ingunite]

The whole thumb under/thumb over debate - which I had never heard of until I arrived at this forum - is strange to me. First of all, "thumb over" is a weird thing to call it. And, why is it such a secret to people? No one ever taught it to me, but it is how I play. Don't you think that as technique develops and you advance in repertoire, it happens naturally?

Ditto.
If I remember correctly, I was initially corrected by my teacher in a non-pushy way when I was a young student, but generally no one then seemed to force the technical issues, instead relying on proper practice habits to bear fruit. I do the same with my students.

[omar_roy]

Don't you think that as technique develops and you advance in repertoire, it happens naturally?

In the isolated case of "thumb over/under" technique, yes.  Though I don't think I would take the statement much farther than this case.