Tips for fast octaves?

[slurred_beat]

What are some good tips for getting fast octaves? I can't play octaves very fast, if I try to go fast my forearm feels tense and I still can't play them fast as professional pianists. Maybe I need more practise. But even if I practise the octaves a lot I still can't go fast, I hit a "speed wall". Anyone have some ideas?

[ranjit]

You need to mentally clump several octaves under a single "hand motion". You also need to learn to effectively "micro-relax", by which I mean relax for a split second before the next movement, so that you can sustain bursts of octaves without fatigue. One possible way is to slightly change which muscle groups you're using for the octaves. It's a bit tricky to explain, but occasionally using the forearm or other muscle groups instead of the wrist, or vice versa while sustaining passages of octaves, or even different muscles in the forearm itself helps balance out the tension while playing octaves, which helps you play them for longer periods of time.

I have found the following videos to be very helpful.

[chrismaninoff]

I have been working on a few octave passages recently so I'm with you in the struggle, haha!

Obviously, being relaxed is the key to sustainable fast octaves.  I find that choreographing the motion, so that it's not just a simple up-down on every octave, is necessary.  For instance, in one piece I have short runs of octaves up the first five notes of a C minor scale. I think of it as an inverted parabola motion of my arm.

It's also important not to balance your weight between both fingers, but to choose one to give more sound to.  This way you don't lock up. 

Never try to play at your maximum speed as well, unless you are absolutely sure you can do it with minimal tension. "Going for speed" often results in a slow, tense and clunky series of octaves, while treating them more humbly seems to create musical lines, in my experience. 

Just some tips from my recent experience. 

[lelle]

I don't have the fastest octaves but for me, speed and ease in octaves requires keeping my hands and arms very free from tension as I play them. If I brace my hands even slightly (which I see many people do) octaves become more and more difficult and uncomfortable to do.

[slurred_beat]

Thank you all. Some people say you should use the wrist for octaves kind of whacking your hand up and down. This feels a bit difficult I think, I get tired from it. Is this the wrong way?

[lostinidlewonder]

A light loose thumb is essential.

[anacrusis]

A light loose thumb is essential.

I agree. Find a way to hold the octave span without tensing any of your fingers.

[slurred_beat]

Allright thank you all

[roncesvalles]

There is so much involved in octave playing (fingers, wrists, arms).  I thought I had octaves down--I practiced them every day (scales, arpeggios, jumps, repeated notes, figures from repertoire), but I've lately come to the realization that although I could play fast I wasn't playing with control.   There are different principles I'm practicing with now, and I know practice much slower.  The first is to make sure your fingers are relaxed--so when you first go to practice, play your first octave and lift your hand, letting your fingers come to a rest and especially feeling them relax.  Then try to play multiple notes and do the same thing--with this I'm trying to set a baseline of relaxation--this comes to be more important when you play legato octaves (with the fifth, fourth, and sometimes third fingers involved).

The next thing I focus on are my wrists.  I've had the habit of keeping them completely rigid and just using my arms--I could do this fast, but inconsistencies would emerge if I had to play extended passages, and there is a harsher tone in which I couldn't get the nuances I wanted.  So I try to focus on keeping my wrists loose.  I often do this with exaggeration, having almost floppy wrists (like a kind of effortless basketball dribbling going mostly with gravity on the way down without my wrist trying to leverage extra force and then relaxing completely as the arm rebounds), just to make sure my wrists are relaxed.  As you get more comfortable a flexible relaxed wrist will help you shape tones better and connect tones (having a tensed, fixed wrist translates into tension for the entire mechanism--hand, wrist, arm, shoulders).

[ranjit]

What worked for me for fast octaves was to minimize hand motion. It helps if you have a relatively large hand (can span a bit more than a ninth at least), so that you can keep your hand in a neutral octave position without stretching it too much. Try and keep your wrist slightly elevated. You don't want a lot of wobbly motion of the wrist because that will slow you down. You want to be close to the keys, and near the middle of them if you're playing both black and white keys. Keep your hand and arm relaxed and try not to bend your wrist outward (which is a very common tendency). Gradually learn to feel the "bounce" of the key and use that as a springboard to the next octave.

That said, you do want a bit of wrist "wobble" so as to not have tension, but it's very slight and thus imperceptible. You should be thinking about clumps of notes and not just a single note -- what I've found to be very useful for training this is to alternate quickly between playing a melody using single notes, and playing it using octaves. It tricks you into thinking of the melody and not worrying too much about whether or not the octaves will come out properly.

[nick.burke]

Some people say you should use the wrist for octaves kind of whacking your hand up and down.

I don't understand this technique, it has never worked for me, even though it is recommended in the AMEB (Australian Music Examination Board) technical workbook. That leads me to asking if anyone actually finds this technique helpful?

[j_tour]

That leads me to asking if anyone actually finds this technique helpful?

I'd never heard of it explicitly, but it makes some sense to me.

I use a lot of octaves, both hands, in all kinds of improvised music, and I'm very familiar with the soreness (if not actual pain) on the forearms when you're really just hammering it out, like in some rock and or roll or whatever.

So, I guess anything that displaces that pressure is probably an improvement.

I'd have to try it and see what I actually do at the keyboard, which I don't really feel like doing right now, but it seems reasonable to me.

[roncesvalles]

It's something I do.  When I practice intense octave passages, I often do so slowly with a very  very loose wrist, making sure there's as little tension as possible between motions, rather than preserving tension that gets communicated from the wrist to forearm and sometimes the fingers themselves.  I used to just lock my wrist and play with my arms, but I think my tone quality wasn't great or nuanced enough.  In actual practice the looseness of the wrist amounts to a suppleness rather than a floppiness, a suppleness that can help shape the tone a little more than merely playing octaves with the arm.  It's a bit like dribbling a basketball--once the wrist becomes governed by tension or locks there's a limit that gets placed on both velocity and control, when keeping everything supple allows all of the elements of the mechanism to work in tandem. I think this can make things like the rebounding from the keys and motion to the next keys involve a smaller range of motion, which theoretically could point to faster playing.

I'm just an intermediate level adult learner, and I'm shying away from repertoire that really pushes me technically, but approaching it this way has helped me shape octaves better and generally feel more connected to them in things like my improvisations, where I use octaves a lot.  They feel more fluid and less like physical exertions now, although I'm by no means at the point where I'd test it out on etudes and the Mephisto Waltz.

[lelle]

I don't understand this technique, it has never worked for me, even though it is recommended in the AMEB (Australian Music Examination Board) technical workbook. That leads me to asking if anyone actually finds this technique helpful?

I don't, I generally lock up my arms when I think that way. For me it's been more about learning how to relax as much as possible and "just doing it" without locking myself into thinking it has to be done using a stereotypical movement, as in reality I think it's a blended mix of many subtle movements. I know not everyone likes this way of thinking, though.

[j_tour]

LONG after the OP, just an afterthought:  check out Lisitsa Valentina on the Liszt "chromatic" falderol here .

On consideration, I think a lot of the soreness and fatigue for rock and roll piano is due to some kind of showmanship or a mythos of how "real <insert gender>" play piano.  So, just like Jimmy Smith created the illusion that jazz organ's basslines are mostly performed by the foot, which is not true, people like Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard or Johnnie Johnson created the idea that rock and roll piano must involve a great deal of effort.

But, experience, and observing performances like Lisitsa's above, and so forth, shows this to be an illusion.

And I do have the Liszt Grand galop on my short list, so to speak, so it's not in any way intended to deride the composition:  I happen to think it's clever and witty.

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Good general rules:

avoid unnecessary wrist and arm tension - everything should be as relaxed as possible and a loose wrist is advisable

minimise horizontal movements, both "into" and "out of" the keyboard when traversing white note to black note, and vice versa

minimise vertical movements, as they will decrease velocity

in a long octave passage, if you perceive the section as an agglomeration of groups and subdivide accordingly, not only will it be more musical, you should have less tension

For interest, here is a video of me playing alternate chromatic octaves in a recital, where it is shown both a tempo and (iirc - it's three years since I did this) slowed down to about 30%

My rh is better in this than the left: though there is nothing in particular wrong, my left wrist is a bit high and I think there is some tension in the arm. My rh octaves are better than my lh in general terms and that's probably not too unusual.

[j_tour]

Here's an interesting case study:  Mac Rebennack aka Dr. John doing the old Dixie Cups hit record "Iko, Iko."

Look at how Mac is approaching the octaves in the LH (and the implicit RH octaves for the tune) from below the keyboard.

I would say that's a textbook example of how not to do octaves, but the only thing that saves him (and by extension, me) is that there's always some contrary motion about the wrist and arms.

Not just hammering down like a technician, but introducing flexibility into the mechanical routine in both hands, even though it is a repeated motion.

[slurred_beat]

I wonder why there is so many different opinions on how to play octaves?  How do they teach octaves if nobody can agree on how to do it?

[ranjit]

You will find it happening whenever you are talking about some aspect of advanced technique. The point is, all the advice answers can work to an extent and aren't mutually exclusive.

[brogers70]

I wonder why there is so many different opinions on how to play octaves?  How do they teach octaves if nobody can agree on how to do it?

My impression is that for any difficult technique on the piano, multiple things have to be done correctly for the technique to work smoothly. Maybe there are issues of finger and wrist relaxation, arm weight, forearm rotation, or what have you, to make something work beautifully. When you are missing one of those things, it doesn't work. When you add the last piece that is missing, all the sudden it's great. So you naturally think that whichever of the several issues you mastered last is the key. But it's not; it's just the last one that you learned. Others learned the components in different orders, and they each think the last one they learned is the key. So then they argue about what's important is playing octaves or trills or whatever.

[ranjit]

When you add the last piece that is missing, all the sudden it's great. So you naturally think that whichever of the several issues you mastered last is the key. But it's not; it's just the last one that you learned. Others learned the components in different orders, and they each think the last one they learned is the key. So then they argue about what's important is playing octaves or trills or whatever.

That's a great insight, had never thought of it in that way. In addition, the mental sensation differs from person to person, which make them often describe things in different ways. For example, from experience, people in the Russian school go on and on about finger strength when that's not exactly what they mean, and this sort of thing can be super confusing for a beginner; I know it was (and still is) for me.

[lelle]

My impression is that for any difficult technique on the piano, multiple things have to be done correctly for the technique to work smoothly. Maybe there are issues of finger and wrist relaxation, arm weight, forearm rotation, or what have you, to make something work beautifully. When you are missing one of those things, it doesn't work. When you add the last piece that is missing, all the sudden it's great. So you naturally think that whichever of the several issues you mastered last is the key. But it's not; it's just the last one that you learned. Others learned the components in different orders, and they each think the last one they learned is the key. So then they argue about what's important is playing octaves or trills or whatever.

I think that's a good point. Somebody who learned piano through playing many finger exercises and have very good supple fingers may perceive octaves as played more with an arm/wrist action, while somebody who has rather stiff, sluggish fingers may need to primarily think about loosening and activating the hands more.