Evenness during 16th note passages

[orgarnic]

Been having trouble lately with 16th note passages. This hasn't appeared in any of my pieces, but it has in the technical exercises that I've been doing for warmups(trying to nip the problem in the bud). Do you think I should just practice the technical exercises more, or is there like a specific technique that I should try?

Thanks in advance!

(P.S. the exercises I'm talking about are found in czerny's op. 299)

[jonathannyc]

Hello Organic,

I am very familiar with Czerny's Opus 299, which I committed to memory many years ago. It significantly improved my technique, and I still practice various etudes from that volume today. I found that initially playing them slowly was essential to achieve evenness.

Achieving evenness requires a keen awareness of two factors: first, the subtle movements of our wrists and hands, along with fingertip sensitivity to the keys. The second factor is the piano action—is it fast and light, or heavy and sluggish? While we can make some adjustments to regulate the action, we must learn to adapt to the instrument at hand.

When practicing the first two exercises, which are scale patterns, I remain alert to the passing of the thumbs under the hand, which requires a slight raising of the wrist, and those undulations must be very smooth. Since no two hands are identical in proportion, it’s essential to closely observe and discover the movements best suited for our individual hands.

It has been noted in various publications that Czerny's metronome indications can be extraordinarily fast, even irrationally so. I won't delve into that controversy right now, but as a fellow pianist, I encourage you to focus on mastering the Opus 299 etudes at very moderate tempos to gain control. Speed will come later.
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[orgarnic]

Alright, thanks for the advice. Right now I'm doing exercise #2, because my teacher is advising me to go through the etudes slowly and moving to the next one after mastering the one before(I haven't actually mastered the first one because of the reasons in the first post).

Another thing is that if I play the Czerny before all my other pieces, my hands feel sluggish, but if I play something before, then my hands feel more spry. The etudes don't really feel like a warm-up in that sense, because I need to play something before to play them "good".