A Less Mellow Touch?

[rubinsteinmad]

Hi,
I'm stupid at touch. When I play Bach & Liszt (the Bach Partita no. 1, Prelude and Gigue; the Liszt Rigoletto Paraphrase; the Liszt Tarantella from Years of Pilgrimage), I always occasionally have a horrible mellow touch. Also, at those places, I am also too heavy. Does anyone have suggestions?

Thanks Thanks 

[michael_sayers]

Hi,
I'm stupid at touch. When I play Bach & Liszt (the Bach Partita no. 1, Prelude and Gigue; the Liszt Rigoletto Paraphrase; the Liszt Tarantella from Years of Pilgrimage), I always occasionally have a horrible mellow touch. Also, at those places, I am also too heavy. Does anyone have suggestions?

Thanks Thanks 

Hi rubinstein,

I am not sure exactly what is being asked, but for instance rapido finger work can be like water flowing out of the hands, as with the string-of-pearls sound here:

Mvh,
Michael

[skryabyn]

I've been concentrating on this a lot lately, and i can give you my experience. A lot of it has to do with my visual imagination. When I first started playing, I looked at the keys and naturally, since the surface is what you see, I subconsciously was "aiming for," or targeting, the surface. As a result my fingers would lift off of the keys, from the air, and come down on them. Once I realized I was doing this, to get a deep tone, I spent a lot of time re-visualizing where I believed the notes to be. And because I wanted depth, I chose the bottom, or keybeds, where I soon realized I could sort of "walk" along the bottom, and that gave me a "wetter" legato sound, because the notes would naturally last a bit longer, and it also gave me a stronger support and stability - like resting my arm on my fingertips down at the keybed at all times and transferring weight, as opposed to resting my hand on the surface (still stable, but less so) and pressing down to the keybed. But when I tried to play Haydn and Mozart it made me go nuts, because I couldn't figure out how to lighten it. At first it was helpful to try and ricochet off the keybed in an empty, weightless sort of way, as opposed to lightly pushing off as I had been doing for deep tones (like a swimmer coming to the edge of a pool and pushing off). But what I eventually discovered is that to make the notes pop, I have to re-visualize where the "notes" actually are within the keys yet again, and aim for the escapement, halfway between the key surface and the keybed. And not just aim for it, but try and slightly hook it with my fingers. The key surface and keybed can still be used as nice reference points and for stability. But the keybed no longer supports any weight, really, for this style, it's just something you touch a little to constantly reassure yourself that it's there, if that makes any sense.