Improvise your own. Among the advantages are the ability to tailor them to your specific needs and build keyboard vocabulary which produces the sounds you enjoy rather than those people say you ought to like.
Hi I am an intermediate level piano player who is looking to improve his finger technique. I tried some of Brahms 51 exercises and they were helpful. Do you guys have other suggestions?
The Chair of the Keyboard Division at Juilliard is a former student of the late Dorothy Taubman. Her former assistant, Edna Golandsky, is still very much alive.Accordingly, those who have not heard of these two individuals (whose sole specialty was/is piano technique), should avail themselves of such.Every, and I mean every single one of the music department chairs of "any" music school in the world, has listened to/viewed the Taubman/Golandsky Videotapes.Secondly, my coach is Dr. Thomas Mark (a former Taubman Practice Coach). He has taken their non-exercises/etude/scales/arpeggios approach and integrated it with the widely known "Alexander Technique."This man (a degreed Philosopher) delineates an epistemology (detailed thought process) associated with a carefully choreographed whole body approach to playing the piano. www.pianomap.comSo, you can beat your head against the wall, like I have and millions of others before you (who have played thousands of hours of worthless exercises/studies/Etudes) et al. "or" you can join the rest of us in a scientific logical study of the kinesiology associated with the playing of this great instrument.
Isn't technique simply a matter of finding the best physical movement to achieve a desired "sound"?That being said, I've always wondered if applying this ideology to actual pieces instead of playing mindlessly through finger exercises would do the trick.
Isn't technique simply a matter of finding the best physical movement to achieve a desired "sound"?
I strongly disagree with this mentality. I mean... kind of. The physical condition of the hands and fingers plays a very big part in what one is able to do at a piano. If your hands aren't developed, you need to use larger and more inefficient movements to play. This is also my biggest issue with the Taubman philosophy: they completely disregard any need for physical conditioning.
You cannot conflate physical strengthening and conditioning with motor skill learning.
they require separate distinct types of biological adaptations, meaning they don't require the same sort of challenges that force them to occur.
Also it's actually the larger movements more often than not then what happens at the hands and fingers that is underdeveloped and unrefined. If your hands are capable of doing the motion where you can pretend to pluck a fly out of the air like a zen master, you can hold a milk jug, and you can dribble a basketball, your hands are more than developed enough (unless your are hyper-mobile at certain joints).
Then it's both ways, then.
But then I think the quality of sound is really mainly about the "attack" or "gesture". Of course, having good "conditioning" may be necessary for these movements.