What do you think would be the best way to learn piano if you could start over?

[CC]

Learning piano has been finally transforming slowly in the last ten years and is starting to catch up to the miraculous advancements made by the semiconductor industry, etc., because of the information age.  We are starting to recognize that it is knowledge, not "talent" (which remains undefined even today, because it doesn't exist!) that creates great pianists, as partly illustrated by the discussions in this forum. A few teachers who teach these transformative methods have been around for decades, but it is only recently that these methods have been discussed in forums, books, internet courses, etc., so that some students know methods unfamiliar to their teachers! For example, you should start learning a new piece by playing it at final speed from day one. Remember how most of us learned a piece by playing it slowly and gradually speeding it up? This method is outright STUPID!  You never perform slowly, so why practice it!? Not only that, but how you play fast is entirely different from how you play slowly (when a horse goes slowly, he walks, but when going fast, has to change to a gallop), so you are conditioning the wrong motions into your hands. Not only that, but when you try to speed up that motion (and don't know the motions needed at fast speed), you are doing the impossible (imagine a horse trying to walk at the speed of a gallop). Nature reacts to your attempt to do the impossible by injuring your hands or creating speed walls.  Practically every pianist knows what a speed wall is; but it is an indication that you are doing something wrong -- correct practice methods should never lead to speed walls. Etc., etc., etc.; many more, but discussing crazyness won't get us anywhere; what we need are the correct methods. To play at final speed immediately, you practice each hand separately and shorten what you practice. Anyone can play one note at final speed.  Two notes presents the first challenge, but is easily solved by moving both fingers simultaneously, but the second one landing on the key slightly after the first one.  We have discovered the concept of parallel play -- fingers moving in parallel, a concept borrowed from computers using parallel processing for increasing speed. The concept of parallelism is, of course, millions of years old (imagine a broom) and is nothing new. Since you can move five fingers on one hand in parallel, you can play these fingers at any speed so that for any group of notes that can be played by these 5 fingers, you will never develop speed walls --there is no speed limit.  This gives rise to the concept of parallel sets: groups of notes that can be played infinitely fast by one hand. This type of development can be extended to solve any problem with speed.  Wife wants help with cooking dinner, so will stop and continue in my next post.

[ranjit]

cc --
Although you're right that there are better and worse methods to learn the piano, and you have valuable advice in your book, these ideas are far from revolutionary. Dozens of people have talked about them even on this forum.

I can't agree with you that talent does not exist. Even if, using efficient methods, you cut the time it takes for the average student to learn by half, there will still be those people who intuitively come up with even better methods which suit them, have stronger memories of various kinds, are precocious in terms of musicality, etc.

It's trivial that you play piano one finger after another, but it takes time to develop certain kinds of coordination, and to get a hang of the gross hand movements, repositioning etc.

When playing the piano, you don't have enough time to think of every single detail, so certain movements need to be programmed at the level of the nervous system, almost like reflexes.

Suppose you laid out your method completely, and you have a dozen test subjects. Would they all progress at the same rate? Would some of them discover methods which were more appropriate to their own situation?

[lostinidlewonder]

Oh CC nice to see you here again. What's next will Bernhard pop in?

cc --
Although you're right that there are better and worse methods to learn the piano, and you have valuable advice in your book, these ideas are far from revolutionary. Dozens of people have talked about them even on this forum.

CC made many people aware of these which was quite valuable when he released his free material. That is why it was talked about a lot more I feel, I do remember people making many referrences to his work as a place where they first found out about these ideas.

For example, you should start learning a new piece by playing it at final speed from day one. .... You never perform slowly, so why practice it!? Not only that, but how you play fast is entirely different from how you play slowly... so you are conditioning the wrong motions into your hands. Not only that, but when you try to speed up that motion (and don't know the motions needed at fast speed), you are doing the impossible. Nature reacts to your attempt to do the impossible by injuring your hands or creating speed walls.  Practically every pianist knows what a speed wall is; but it is an indication that you are doing something wrong -- correct practice methods should never lead to speed walls.

The two points you suggested:

1) Start learning a piece at tempo from day one
2) Practicing slowly has no relationship to playing fast

Point one, yes you should learn pieces at tempo from day one especially if you are training your sight reading. But to then apply this to all repetoire will set you up to only play very simple works which don't challenge you too much if you want to maintain learning efficiency. Playing everything at tempo immediately also neglects the use of practice tools used to solve technically challenging situations. It is certainly not the most efficient path to simply play something that has a difficult section at tempo immediately. You might as well give up on that piece and try something else, the process is just a waste of your time. If you go through chunk by chunk striving to play everything at tempo immediately this will have you going through the piece at a snails pace. Not many people manage to stick to a study structure with such baby steps. Instead you can control larger phrases with a slower tempo and thus learn more of the piece simultaneously. You can get your mind around the entire piece at once and focus in on the larger picture. Simply playing small chunks at tempo bit at a time, I mean this is a system that people do use and some really thrive on it. Those people I am sure must also like doing 50,000 piece puzzles. The danger is that you can really waste a lot of time stubbornly going for those fast movements when you cannot even control them.

It is important to challenge your technical capabilities as this can act as a catalyst to ones progress. If you are faced with a tough pattern you cannot simply throw yourself at it at tempo, you need to break it down and slow down so you understand how the hand moves in a controlled manner and attach a conscious awareness to control it completely. Go too fast and the mental thoughts cannot keep up, things get confusing and uncontrolable, there is no 100% control feeling just an estimation which often has a potential limit much under 100%. That is not a good way to approach your piano playing, to think that it should feel unstable but keep at it and you will learn to stabilize it. There needs to be a flexibility with tempo to allow you to play with total control, then manipulation of tempo becomes more free.


Point 2 about slow practice. You can practice slow and preserve fast movements. You should not play slowly and allow movements which do not relate to faster playing but this is not to say it is utterly forbidden to do so. Some people with lesser practice methods naturally require to understand what notes they need to play and so they merely pick out the notes without caring about how they are actually playing them. Once the notes are more solidified in their memory they can then go about crafting how they actually go about do it in with efficient technique and this is where problems arise especially for those who over step the mark and have choses pieces far too difficult for them to efficiently learn. This process we cannot take away from people if it is a part of their current practice method even though it is less efficient compared to someone who controls slow tempo playing appropriately. It is an important realization in improvement to ones practice method once they break free from such things but some do need to experience it so they understand the benefits moving away from it.

One can easily prove the point that slow practice generates fast if they play something they know very very well. You can play it at ridiculous fast speeds even though you never practiced it in that manner. This is because you have a lot of control with the piece and thus are able to play any tempo at will, add notes, do ridiculous things without losing control, I can play the Fantasie Improptu from Chopin like a ragtime if I wanted to lol. "Control" is the keyword, something that is totally controlled does not rely on specific tempos to produce it without error. If you can only play a piece at tempo and are unable to play it slowly that is a problem especially if you are going back correcting and improving, so too is it a problem if you can only play it slow and have no idea how to do it fast but here at least there it is much easier to solve.

I usually dread teaching students who learn pieces at tempo and can play very fast movements but it is littered with inefficiencies and inaccuracies. Some of them have muscular memorized their works to such a degree that the feeling in their hand only understand this fast uncontrolled playing, trying to slow them down collapses everything as they cannot remember what to play and making changes at speed also causes a collapse because the change can cause a large difference in what they feel in their hands. Because the changes required will often make the feeling in their hand very different it usually requires a relearn what it feels like for them, this is highly inefficient for those a slave to playing at tempo and unable to slow down and insert operations of improvement. If the changes require that they attempt it at quick speed the control of the improvement is much lesser and it takes longer especially if the muscular memory of the inefficeint movements are deeply ingrained. They need to be able to practice a change with slower tempo, play that in a controlled manner which relates to faster playing, then the tempo increase is automatic this produces efficient results much more often.

To play at final speed immediately, you practice each hand separately and shorten what you practice. Anyone can play one note at final speed.  Two notes presents the first challenge, but is easily solved by moving both fingers simultaneously, but the second one landing on the key slightly after the first one.

This leaves you however with highly segmented practice where you may spend excessive time on small chunks to get them controlled. This is a method many people use but we should develop past such things because there are better ways, such as synergizing sight reading and memorization which does not require at tempo playing.

We have discovered the concept of parallel play -- fingers moving in parallel, a concept borrowed from computers using parallel processing for increasing speed. The concept of parallelism is, of course, millions of years old (imagine a broom) and is nothing new. Since you can move five fingers on one hand in parallel, you can play these fingers at any speed so that for any group of notes that can be played by these 5 fingers, you will never develop speed walls --there is no speed limit.  This gives rise to the concept of parallel sets: groups of notes that can be played infinitely fast by one hand. This type of development can be extended to solve any problem with speed.

I don't understand this perhaps you will elaborate later on. Learning a piece by separating the hands is not the most efficient way. You should strive to learn your pieces with both hands. This is not to say you cannot do single hand study but it just leaves you with more work, you still need to solve how both hands work together. There are other tools one can use to get two hands immediately such as simplifying the score but preserving fingerings and movement as if all the notes where still there, playing one hand as written but reducing the other. These tools are much greater than merely isolating the hands then attempting to put them together via brute force. This is actually a large frustration for many people who think you can learn each hand on their own and then putting them together should be arbitrary, in some cases this is true but in many others it is obviously not.

[ranjit]

CC made many people aware of these which was quite valuable when he released his free material.

No doubt, and one might consider me a "success story"

It was one of the first books I read about piano technique -- this was literally in my second month starting out iirc. I found the idea of mental practice very appealing, and would try to run over my pieces entirely in my head. I think he was wrong about acquiring perfect pitch though lol. My ear has improved quite a bit, but I'm still waiting for that day!

[keypeg]

I read through CC's book when I restarted piano which I had done self-taught as a child decades before, and joined PW - which was within months of each other.   Some of it seemed obvious.  Others I thought "sometimes I might do this".  There was one thing in particular which was familiar to me, but turned into such an abstract thing that it would have made something natural, complicated and disconnected for me.

I would not have wanted to start with this book as a start-over.  But I might read through it. Which is exactly what I did.

[nw746]

I've never made a thread about this because I don't currently practice enough for it to be relevant, but in past experience, I've found that a) no amount of slow practice prepares me to play something at the correct tempo, and b) slow practice distorts the music so much as to remove all enjoyment from playing the piece. There is no point in attempting to play e.g. the Hammerklavier Sonata unless you are playing the first movement at half note = 138 and the last movement at quarter note = 144 etc. So the idea of starting just with individual small groups of notes and gradually chaining them together is appealing. I don't know whether it works, but I know slow practice doesn't.

I'm not sure what other ways of learning how to play a fast piece exist. Obviously you're supposed to start with very easy fast pieces (e.g. I've been recommended the Mendelssohn Rondo capriccioso op. 14 & the Fantasy in E minor op. 16 no. 2, as well as Chopin op. 10 no. 4) before working your way up to things like the Hammerklavier. But when one of the main reasons I've always wanted to play the piano is because the vast majority of living pianists play fast music too slowly—for ideal tempi you have to very often go back to recordings from the 1930s or 1910s—it is difficult to know where to look for advice. There is far too much of an emphasis on playing things at a comfortable tempo rather than at the correct tempo.

[ranjit]

I've never made a thread about this because I don't currently practice enough for it to be relevant, but in past experience, I've found that a) no amount of slow practice prepares me to play something at the correct tempo, and b) slow practice distorts the music so much as to remove all enjoyment from playing the piece. There is no point in attempting to play e.g. the Hammerklavier Sonata unless you are playing the first movement at half note = 138 and the last movement at quarter note = 144 etc. So the idea of starting just with individual small groups of notes and gradually chaining them together is appealing. I don't know whether it works, but I know slow practice doesn't.

It's been my experience that there are two kinds of things which can slow you down, and which are easily conflated -- not having a strong enough memory of the piece, and not quite being there technically. I always ask proponents of slow practice what exactly they are trying to address. It makes sense to me that if you can already play a piece at tempo, and are trying to solidify memory or iron it out, then you can play those movements slowly and analyze them. But for developing raw speed, it has been my experience that you just need to play fast.

Edit: In fact, I think that doing something similar to this video is one of the best ways to acquire speed. Once you get the speed, you need to tame it using slow practice and other techniques though imo.

I agree with you about modern tempos being too slow in a sense. There is a strong puritan tendency to think of playing fast as showboating, but at least for me, I find that faster tempos work very well and feel somewhat "transcendent" -- possibly because if you're actually paying attention to the notes, it overwhelms you and that mental activity feels exhilarating and passionate. I think some people just don't like to work to keep up with the notes, and project their lack of listening ability onto the performer. It just takes a few esteemed 'critics' to knock down a new performer who likes to play fast. So, you end up with people who either toe the line and play somewhat musically at a slow tempo, or people who unabashedly play fast and boring (cue Lang Lang). Where are the Horowitzes of the current era, who do both?