Sacrificing feeling for techinique

[faa2010]

These days I have felt that I have gone backwards instead of foward in my piano playing.

In the past, I felt I had the feeling to play something even though my technique was almost nothing.

I decided to emphasize more in the technique and getting advices of experts online, but what I am finding out is that I cannot get the instructions even though I can understand them and I am giving all my effort to put them in practice. (one of them seems to be already fed up with me)

It makes me feel upset, depressed, wanting to cry (I am a very sensitive person). And as more I am focusing in the technique, more I feel I am losing the joy of playing, the feeling.

Even I am thinking that I don't have what it is required to become a pianist.

What can I do?

[iansinclair]

What can you do?  Hang in there.  Over the years I have found -- with almost every piece I have learned or conducted -- that there will almost always be patches where I have been struggling with technique and the feeling goes to pieces.  And the same thing would apply at stages in your learning to play -- there will be times when you are learning some aspect of technique that you didn't have (and may not even realise you didn't have), and you will feel that your ability to convey feeling in the music has vanished.  Not to worry.  First place, it hasn't really vanished; you are just concentrating on someting else at the moment.  And, when you do get over whatever hump it was, you will find that your ability to convey the feeling has improved -- because you have better technique.

[db05]

This happens to me too a lot. When I was studying and then performing for my piano exams, my playing wasn't too hot. Scales and Czerny were particularly bad.

If I don't feel the music, the technique goes to pieces. That's what I realized.

More specifically, I can only play well the pieces I memorized by note names. I learned the note names by listening to recordings, reading the score, and sometimes taking note of chord changes.

It was time-consuming, and naming every note may be optional, but that gave me a chance to train my mind to think fast. Sometimes it's not the fingers slipping but the mind. But if it's only a scale or a short study, there's little emotion to go on. My mind doesn't have enough of a hold of such things.

If you can find recordings of the pieces you're learning, it would help a lot. Better if you could learn something you can already play in your head (although too much mental radio can be annoying).

Another advantage - when you can imagine the sound, you'd remember why you're studying these techniques in the first place. It could give you more motivation to practice.