Coordinating hands

[leel]

I'm well pas retirement age taking my very first music instruction.  I can play hands individually, but putting them together is just not happening w/o extreme replaying at slower than slow paces.

Any suggestions, or is this something everyone goes through & I just have to slog?

[outin]

I'm well pas retirement age taking my very first music instruction.  I can play hands individually, but putting them together is just not happening w/o extreme replaying at slower than slow paces.

Any suggestions, or is this something everyone goes through & I just have to slog?

Yes, everyone goes through it, some slower and some faster.  Just keep at it, it wil get easier.

[iancollett6]

 Keep with it, each time you practise you will get a little bit better and hence you will want to practice more, the more you practice the better you will get. It's a cycle!
 It will get to the stage where you want to spend every waking hour at the piano....I cant wait until I retire!...only another 24 years.

[hfmadopter]

I cant wait until I retire!...only another 24 years.

Hmm, seems like yesterday 24 years ago. Now I'm waiting on 20 months if all goes well. Have to say, it's not as black and white looking as it was back then !! Might be better if retirement plans were more of a sure thing. Of course they are having a meeting explaining our plans this month, on the week I'll be away on vacation, figures. Nothing is etched in stone for sure.

Well of course, some are community workers or government officials, in that case you might make more than if you stayed working. The rest of us get to pay for it.

[outin]

Well of course, some are community workers or government officials, in that case you might make more than if you stayed working. The rest of us get to pay for it.

Really?
That's not how it is here...the longer I stay the more I'll get, but still a lot less than my salary (that's why I need to get a good piano and loads of sheet music until then). But we're kicked out at 67 or so...unless things change drastically. So that's another 20 years...I might still end up doing something totally different, I doubt our field of government will exist that long...

I never actually thought about retirement before the piano thing...now I think it would be kind of cool to be able to play as much as I want every day...I'd better move to the summer house with my piano(s), otherwise I'll make my neighbours grazy...

[nufan]

Any suggestions, or is this something everyone goes through & I just have to slog?

It's definitely something everyone goes through. However, there are some strategies to ease this process, and I'm sure your teacher can assist. What I usually do is:

1) Learn both hands separately at a very slow tempo.
2) Combine both hands at this very slow tempo.
3) Then separate hands again.
4) Return to 1 with "slow tempo" instead of "very slow tempo".

Having played both hands together at a very slow tempo then makes your life a lot easier when putting them together at a proper tempo again. There are certain pieces that support the process of coordinating your hands. Pieces from Bach's "Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach", for example, are excellent and so are the first ones from Schumann's "Album für die Jugend". Since you've just started, Bach's 2-part inventions are out of your reach, but these are too brilliant pieces that will definitely improve your coordination skills once you've reached a certain level.

It takes time, but it's worth it!

[dima_76557]

Any suggestions, or is this something everyone goes through & I just have to slog?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (I have written this more than once already):
Slowly, hands separately, BUT:
1) Try it with eyes closed
2) Try it on an instrument with the sound disabled
Only then hands together, same drill (1 & 2).

From a certain age, you HAVE TO concentrate on the movements before you can enjoy beautiful music. This is true for people of different ages, so, please, don't think it's too late for you to learn to play well. Good luck!

[hfmadopter]

Really?
That's not how it is here...the longer I stay the more I'll get, but still a lot less than my salary (that's why I need to get a good piano and loads of sheet music until then). But we're kicked out at 67 or so...unless things change drastically. So that's another 20 years...I might still end up doing something totally different, I doubt our field of government will exist that long...

I never actually thought about retirement before the piano thing...now I think it would be kind of cool to be able to play as much as I want every day...I'd better move to the summer house with my piano(s), otherwise I'll make my neighbours grazy...

Well listen, that comment is mostly tongue in cheek and a common gripe of us common folk who aren't on the public dole.. I do hope you live to be old enough to get full enjoyment from your grand piano when you get it outin !! You guys croak young over there, we get another 10 years on you here but I hope to fool the system personally !

[outin]

Well listen, that comment is mostly tongue in cheek and a common gripe of us common folk who aren't on the public dole.. I do hope you live to be old enough to get full enjoyment from your grand piano when you get it outin !! You guys croak young over there, we get another 10 years on you here but I hope to fool the system personally !

My statistical life expectancy would give me almost 20 years of retirement...but who knows when R-4 decides to end the world...

[gregh]

Think of what drummers go through-- they don't have as many keys to choose from, but they have twice as many limbs to operate!

It's normal for everything to fall apart when you put both hands together, you're doing just fine. It goes better when you get a feel for it. Work on short sections at a time, going as slowly as you need to. Heck, throw tempo out the window and just get your fingers moving in the right sequence if that's what it takes-- here they move together, there it's left and hold while right right, or whatever. I've even drummed out the rhythms on my knees before returning to the keyboard. Short sections, over and over. Then there will probably be large sections that you can play, because there tends to be a lot of repeated or similar patterns in one piece of music.

Don't think that you have to play through from beginning to end every time. Work on one sticking point at a time.

[iansinclair]

To hfmadoptor and outin -- believe me, retirement is wonderful!  I can practice what I want, when I want, and play for whom I want to when I want to do it.  It's great!

There is this little matter of money... but she just retired as a public school teacher, and will be making almost as much in retirement as she did teaching -- and more than I ever did working.  Sigh...

[hfmadopter]

To hfmadoptor and outin -- believe me, retirement is wonderful!  I can practice what I want, when I want, and play for whom I want to when I want to do it.  It's great!

There is this little matter of money... but she just retired as a public school teacher, and will be making almost as much in retirement as she did teaching -- and more than I ever did working.  Sigh...

Nothin against "her" but I rest my case !!!!!!!!

I am indeed very much looking forward to retirement. Just hopefully it goes as planned.

[brogers70]

Nothin against "her" but I rest my case !!!!!!!!

I am indeed very much looking forward to retirement. Just hopefully it goes as planned.

I'm not sure you should rest your case. Retirement plans are just a part of compensation. There are a lot of very intelligent, ambitious, capable, well-educated people in this country. If public school teachers were really over-compensated, you'd think that be a flood of those people into public school teaching. I'm a retired Navy doctor. There's a good military retirement plan because after the Vietnam War most people in the country still wanted the world's biggest military and an aggressive interventionist foreign policy, but didn't want their kids to be at risk of getting drafted. So we ended up with a volunteer military. And if you want to attract capable people into an all volunteer military you need good pay and benefits, including a good retirement.  The price of American kids not being subject to the draft is a big line item in the federal budget for military retirements. It's all just economics and what the market will bear; there's no "dole" involved.

Regardless of when or how you retire, though, it's definitely great to have unlimited time to practice. And the hand coordination will get better over time with lots of slow practice.

[nyiregyhazi]

Running two separate autopilots simply doesn't work, unless you have awareness of how they associate. Forget going slow for long stretches. Go at medium speed for very short chunks and do everything in reference to the clarity of meetings. Finish a small group on a meeting of both hands and just observe the sense of relationship between the hands on the note you arrived on. This can be done for as little as two quavers plus a note or a bar plus a note. But until you have the opportunity to notice literally EVERY moment in which the hands arrive together, you'll feel lost. Hands separate practise is essential, yet tells you virtually nothing about the many anchor points you must set for yourself in order to feel secure and coordinated.


Remember that it's when you deliberate stop at a predefined destination and stay on the note for a while that you learn the most. Before you can feel truly secure when passing straight through every note, you first need to get a foundation of self awareness of every meeting. This actually requires you to repress the physical habits that keep driving you onwards in the separate hands. Going on must be a choice, not an unstoppable physical habit. The classic mistake is to always be ploughing on forwards- without ever really noticing the relationship between the hands on each point of arrival, or having a chance to assess the quality of the meetings between hands. When you plough on forwards on two unrelated autopilots you never feel secure and cannot observe enough to learn anything better. When you regularly stop to observe where they take you and the exact path that gets there, you have what makes it possible to link the hands with certainty (which means you can start to let go again and merely flow through the points of awareness, without stopping for them).

[leel]

I'm going to have to try this in order to understand it more fully--some things work out better when actually do e, rather than spoken. Thanks for the advice.

[leel]

Thanks to all of you. I'll try to incorporate all your suggestions.

[leel]

Thaks to all of you, it's finally working! 

It still doesn't sound like music, but the hands are together.  Onward & upward.