Is it possible to reset one's playing or should I just quit altogether?

[lazze]

Dear esteemed pianostreet forum members,

How do I even begin this post.. Let me begin with a TL;DR:
I don't know how to practice and I'm not even sure I can even play the piano properly. I don't know where else to turn, so I thought I might give it a try here.

Now for the meaty bit, which I shall try to not make too lengthy:

I have, on paper, played the piano for 23 years, but I've never learnt how to practice, nor have I learnt how to "actually play the piano", if you ask me.

When I started out at the age of 9, I attended "general piano lessons" in Denmark, which is pop and rhythmical piano playing, and no classical piano whatsoever. I somehow managed to play piano for 10 years without ever practicing a single scale nor arpeggio on the piano, as technique was never on the "curriculum" that my piano teachers cared about. This, I have come to realise or think, has put me at a severe disadvantage.

Style-wise, my primary genre is blues and boogie-woogie, and since this is a very physically demanding style of music, I came up with my own messed up solutions to problems I was having; sitting too high on the bench so I could "relax" my arm, or sitting too low or adequate height but forcibly lifting my right shoulder to get some momentum to relax. Before I learnt the fact that one does not actually press / hit piano keys, I have played with so much strength that I at times have bled from under my fingernails.

I would say that I in recent years have finally learnt how to sit on a piano bench as well as the approximate distance from the piano, but I can still struggle with this. One day the height feels fine and I'm content, but the next day it feels stiff and cumbersome, so I never manage to find that .. optimum platform or foundation, shall we say, from which I can try to figure out how one plays the piano, knowing that at least I'm at the right height and distance.
For reference: I sit quite far from the piano so that my elbows are in front of my torso, and heightwise I aim to sit so that my elbows are approximately at the same level as the piano keys, with my back being straight.

Education-wise, I have a master's degree in rhythmical piano, but when I entered in 2013 and thought "now I can finally get some help on how to learn how to practice", I was sorely disappointed. They were not able to offer any help. My first piano teacher at music college said about technique "if what you're doing is working for you, it must be right," to which I replied "but it isn't working..", to which he replied "then do something else". How the f*** do you expect someone to just do something else when they only know one thing and have no imagination for anything else?
Needless to say, I was a horrible piano student and didn't practice anywhere as much as I could and should have, because I simply didn't know how. Nothing was rewarding, nothing was enjoyable, it was just 5 years of long, hard labour and anxiety.

Now that I've finished my master's degree and subsequently an education within IT, because I cannot live from music in Denmark, I'm wanting to get back into playing and practicing, but I find myself hitting a brick wall, realising that - I still don't know how to practice after 23 years, and I am in no way convinced that I actually know "how" to play the piano, how to press the keys (except you do the literal opposite, I've come to find out), how it is supposed to feel and sound. I am completely lost and have fallen into a pit of despair where I am afraid of practicing anything, because I am afraid of doing it wrong and I would rather avoid doing it wrong so as to not have to unlearn more bad habits than I am already struggling with.

So while I know the theory of scales, I am not certain I am playing them right, because I do not know what "playing something correctly" is supposed to feel like. Arpeggios I still cannot do.

Through enough "banging my head against the wall" I have overcome "playing" in general, as well as pieces like some Nikolai Kapustin preludes and his concert etude #7, but I've never really been on top of any of it, which I blame on my glaringly obvious lack of technique and understanding of how to play the piano.

So my question sort of is.. How do I go on from here? can I reset myself somehow, start over? or should I just quit altogether and sell my piano?

I still have my old Hanon book and play it occasionally, though technique is more than mind-numbing finger exercises; I have been looking at getting into some Czerny (maybe his works for children? Surely I cannot mess that up?); I have acquired Isidor Philipp's "Exercises for Independence of Fingers", which I am slowly starting, and I have acquired Penelope Roskell's "The Complete Pianist", but that is far too overwhelming at this point. Coupled with the fact that I don't know how anything at the piano is supposed to feel when playing, I could very well be wasting 100% of my time by doing everything incorrectly as I more or less feel I have been doing up to this point.

Please help, any suggestion is welcomed.
If you got this far, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,
a truly despaired pianist

[keypeg]

Shorter answer here.  I've been on a journey in this regard for a while and will continue to be - wouldn't be the only one.  The saying is that fixing how one plays is harder than building it correctly in the first place - teachers usually stress this - the rub being that as students we can be misled, mistaught, or get on the wrong path on our own and never realize. And then there is this mess.  You've got two things: how you learned to play which you need to fix - how to practise.

For how you learned to play, it seems to be physical things, such as pounding the keys for volume, how you set up your body and what to do instead.  The what to do instead is itself a tough nut to crack.  For finding a teacher to address this, that teacher is rare and one must also beware of gurus with a one angle fits all approach  i.e. finding "what to do instead" --- the "what" may come in small increments.  Also know that there are two sides to a same thing: what you do wrong with one part of the body will bring in compensations with the rest - but if you fix one thing, it can also start fixing some of the rest.  Patience.

How to practise might be: aim for one thing at a time, making it small and simple.  The trickiest thing is to know "what to do instead" so that you can practise that "what".  If you've got a "what", do it with something simple, and for a short time.  If you're really rewiring your reflexes, it's a fine focus and your brain will be fried in a short time - it might be less than a minute.  Short sessions on a given thing - return to it when you're fresh again; let go.  Sleep is a time when your brain and nervous system start arranging things on their new shelves so more is there for you the next day(s) - allow this to happen.  Change can be incremental and gradual, so that you don't really notice it, but after a while something has changed.  Maybe you come back to something that was hard or awkward, but now it's not awkward and when did that happen anyway?

You will have a mix of positives and negatives.  You will have strengths, things you learned and acquired, which will carry you and you can keep.  Some things you know may end up having a new face: maybe this thing here worked for a different reason you didn't know about.  There may also be different aspects to a same thing, all of them true.

[brogers70]

It is definitely possible to reset one's playing, but I think it requires finding a good teacher. Without that you are likely to feel completely lost and have no idea whether what you are doing is making things better or worse.

I had been mostly self taught for 15 years and had developed a very tense, uncomfortable and stressed out technique. I found a good teacher and asked her what she would suggest doing to rebuild a proper technique from the ground up. It took about a year, starting with just doing wrist drops to two-note slurs, then very slow scales, for just 20 minutes a day, and not doing anything else at the piano, so that you only give your brain the experience of making good motions. Gradually we went on to very simple pieces (even though I'd been playing quite complex stuff with my tense technique). The good news is that it can be done. It helped me a lot; now I feel totally relaxed and at ease with the piano. Also, you'll get a year where you make great progress with very little practice time - you have to wait until your relaxation is pretty well ingrained before you go back to practicing a lot. In the meanwhile, you can study theory, listen carefully to lots of great music, do ear training, whatever you want. It's doable, but you do need a good teacher you trust, in order to have faith that you are not just wasting a year of your life.

[ranjit]

Seconded the other comments here.  I have changed my technique over the past couple of years, often quite significantly. I was self-taught in the past and had things to learn and fix.

The most important work,  I think,  can be away from the keyboard. You want to try to envisage better movements. Watch people play,  analyze them,  watch some instructional videos,  take some lessons, analyze some more... then observe your technique, learn to feel where you're tense, analyze and problem solve some more, then read some books and see if those give you ideas on what to improve,  rinse and repeat.

I find that pianists are like athletes of the hands. Excellent piano teachers can spot minute issues in hand placement and the balance of the use of the hand muscles (and wrist and so on) very quickly. As you learn the piano in that manner, you learn to see these things for yourself.

I would also suggest you check out these YouTube channels: Denis Zhdanov, Danae Dorken, Josh Wright, PianoCareer. Not an exhaustive list, but for now I generally find the advice on these to be great.

[anacrusis]

So my question sort of is.. How do I go on from here? can I reset myself somehow, start over? or should I just quit altogether and sell my piano?

In my experience, yes you can. Even if you can't get it as perfect as somone who was taught properly by the best teacher in the world since age 4, you can improve significantly enough that it's worth the effort.

As someone who spent more years than I care to admit reworking my technique basically on my own, I would also advice you - don't go at this alone. Find a good teacher who knows how to help you even if you have to burn through 15 unsuitable teachers to get there. It's so, so difficult to discover where you are going wrong if you aren't already seeing it on your own. Having somebody else's eyes, years of accumulated wisdom and emotional support when things inevitably become frustrating is invaluable.