Left hand improvement

[viperfan]

Hello and thank you in advance for your assistance!

I started playing at age 7 and progressed at a reasonable rate until I stopped playing after high school.  In high school I played with the jazz band and spent a lot of time improvising and playing melodies with my right hand while my left hand was mostly playing block chords.  Over those years my right hand began to develop far beyond my left.

I essentially haven't played for the last for years (thank you college and Army) but now I am very interested in returning to playing regularly.  My right hand seems to have retained almost all of the ability I worked into it, while my left hand is as bad as ever.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that my right hand can play at least 2x as fast and 10x longer than my left hand on any given day.  My right hand seems to be perfectly in sync with my mind, while my left hand is awkward, clumsy, and fatigues within minutes.  I've been slowly working through scales and exercises, but my left hand fatigues so quickly that my practice sessions end abruptly.  On the other hand (no pun intended  ), I don't think it's even possible to exhaust my right hand.

I could really use some advice!  I'm being severely restrained by my left hand...

[brogers70]

Is your left hand much tenser than your right? Here's something you might try. Leave your right hand alone for a while. You went off to college and the army for a while and it didn't hurt your right hand technique not to practice, so just leave it alone. Just work on the left. Give it a couple of months. Do scales and exercises and LH only pieces (there's a thread about that in the repertoire section on this forum). When you do left hand work do it really slowly, concentrate on relaxing your hand and arm as much as possible. If you relax and play very slowly you won't fatigue quickly, maybe won't fatigue at all. It will get better.

If you had a teacher who could actually look at what you are doing with your LH it would help a lot.

[viperfan]

I'll give that a try... thank you very much!  God bless the internet... the only place where you can get helpful advice from complete strangers without the fear of being stabbed.