One of the things that I see students holding them back is the need to play their reportoire at the tempo the music is written for. The problem with this is that you end up with a very broken piece of music that takes a long time to fix and build again.
At the weekend during our Pitch In session on rotation we covered speed with one of the exercises. All we were doing was playing from C to G and G to C. The focus was on rotation but we also had in and out movement to work on and make sure that there was no twisting. It was quite the mental exercise.
Of course, we can all sit down and play these notes very quickly but the question is, are you in control?
Often there is a mental gremlin telling us that we must be able to play this as quickly as possible. Scrimp on technique as long as we can knock out the notes very quickly. Scrap the musicianship because speed is king!
We have to tell this mental gremlin to zip it! Or, completely ignore it. The important thing is technique with the exercise above. Try the following exercise. Play with the right hand, starting on G and moving toward middle C. Read each step and do the instruction. Time how long it takes you.
- Play the G with finger 5
- Prepare with a short rotation to the right then rotate to the left on to the F with finger 4 making sure you come straight down on to the key.
- Prepare with a short rotation to the right then rotate to the left on to the E with finger 3 making sure you come straight down on to the key.
- Prepare with a short rotation to the right then rotate to the left on to the D with finger 2 making sure you come straight down on to the key.
- Avoid twisting by moving finger 2 in to the black key area without curling. Rotate to the right as a short perparation then rotate left on to finger 1 on C
If it takes roughly as long to say this and do it as it does to write it then you’re on the right step. The more you go through this, the quicker it will get because the movements will become intuitive.
The likeliehood of it is, you didn’t have an audience, so ask yourself ‘who cares?’. Nobody is listening apart from you. Only you should care. You know you can play G to C quickly but this time you paid attention to the tiniest of details.
I’m not suggesting that you pay this level of attention to every passage you play. Some teachers may disagree. Take the passages in your repertoire that are challenging and apply the above level of attention to it. You’ll soon find these tricky passages as easy as the rest of them.
