On fast repeated notes

[iratior]

In my piano lessons, I was taught that the way to do fast repeated notes is to change fingers on the key.  But later, going through an old ETUDE magazine, a writer by the name of Guy Maier disparaged the idea of doing fast repeated notes that way, and said that a good pianist could do repeated notes, sounding as fast as though machine gun fire, by some other method.  Could anyone in this forum know what the method is, and share it with us?

[richard black]

I've never yet met a pianist who even claimed to be able to repeat with a single finger quite as fast as can be done, on a decent piano, with 2 or 3 or 4 fingers. However, I often repeat _fairly_ rapidly with one finger - I find the 4th quite useful for that, oddly enough. The trick is to practise until you find a way that works for you.

[gore234]

When playing classical pieces, I use more than one finger. The fingering I use is 43214321  or 12121212 when playing notes grouped in 4s. For triplets, I use 432121432121. There are some keyboard players in bands that probably use 2 hands for repeated notes on a lead voicing for doing solos.  If I was going to play something like C,C, Octave C,C,C, Octave C, repeatedly very fast, I would use the left hand for the first note of the triplet and the right hand for the other 2 notes. There are other methods that I havent learned yet.

[bleicher]

I've been having lessons with my current teacher for about a year now. The exercises she's given me include repeated notes played both ways; changing finger and with the same finger. When repeated notes come up in pieces it normally works better to change finger (eg 4321) but I played a piece recently which my teacher and I both agreed worked better when the repeated notes used the same finger. So I guess my advice is to work on both techniques, so that when there are repeated notes in a piece you have a choice of fingerings to try in order to find out what works best each time.

[scott13]

Try small bouncing motion (up / down motion) of the wrist combined with regular finger motion. Allows you to get very fast with a single finger

[iratior]

Thanks for the advice, but I think I'd need a slow-motion video to have a chance of figuring this out.

[nyiregyhazi]

Thanks for the advice, but I think I'd need a slow-motion video to have a chance of figuring this out.

When using a single finger I think the trick is to do as much as possible from the finger itself and to avoid a particularly direct line into the key. It's good to have the knuckle high and feel as if you coming back towards yourself rather than aiming straight. The wrist tends to move slowly up and down- but not up and down into each individual note. This also works very well for repeated octaves. I could never do them until I started sourcing the movement primarily in the hand. Longer levers are inherently slower, so whole arm actions tend to be problematic. The rest of the arm is involved in balance, rather than in generating the movement of the key.

[iratior]

This morning I did some experimentation.  I took as my test cases a short example -- the opening of Lizst's transcription of the opera "Norma" -- and a long example -- Scarlatti K. 141 -- in hopes of stumbling into the right way to play so as to be able to do fast repeated notes without changing fingers.   I think there were times when I did stumble into it, but could not prevent stumbling out again.  So there does seem to be a way to do it, it will just take practice.

[nyiregyhazi]

This morning I did some experimentation.  I took as my test cases a short example -- the opening of Lizst's transcription of the opera "Norma" -- and a long example -- Scarlatti K. 141 -- in hopes of stumbling into the right way to play so as to be able to do fast repeated notes without changing fingers.   I think there were times when I did stumble into it, but could not prevent stumbling out again.  So there does seem to be a way to do it, it will just take practice.

I don't think many pianists would stick with one finger for either the most rapid notes or for particularly prolonged ones. I find a single finger quite good for clarity in the bursts of repeated notes in the Black Mass sonata. However, I couldn't imagine any would have a hope in hell of keeping it going in that Scarlatti sonata.