3 Ways to Make Trills Easier on The Piano

This is livingpianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin with 3 ways to make trills easier. You hear concert pianists playing trills and they sound jewel-like. And you wonder, how can you achieve this in your playing? Well, I'm going to give you 3 tips or techniques that will really make the difference in your trills.

Number 1, a very, very simple technique is to go ahead and play with rounded fingers. If you try to play trills with flat fingers like this, it's very difficult because you only have 2 joints that you're working with. Rounding your fingers, use all the joints of your fingers.

So that makes it much, much, much easier.

Now, the most fundamental aspect of being able to play trills well is to measure your trills. You have to know specifically how many notes you're playing. You have to work out a trill that you can negotiate faithfully. Otherwise, you might play a brilliant trill, but how do you end it? You might end on the wrong note because if it's not measured, you're taking a chance. It might end right, it might not. It may sound like trills are just a whole bunch of random notes, but I guarantee you that any trills you've heard on the piano that you were impressed with were measured trills. So for example, if you were to take the famous C major Mozart K545 sonata, and at the end of the exposition and at the end of the whole movement, you have it.

And how is that done? Well, by knowing exactly how many notes I am playing.

And you don't even have to play that many notes. If it's too hard, the reason why you can do whatever you want with trills up to a point, you have to have the right notes, obviously, is because the trills are a license for creative expression. So don't feel that you have to play a zillion notes. You can make a trill sound absolutely beautiful, even just playing sixteenth notes in this case.

And you know what? If you play the trill cleanly and execute it faithfully, it's fine. There's no set number of notes that you have to play in a trill. That's why they're not written out. So figure out exactly how many notes you're going to play with the trills and with rounded fingers. But I said three tips, and there's one more here that's so important, and that is what fingers to use on a trill. And you notice at first I used three and two.

Three and two are very strong, but you know that the strongest trill fingers are three and one.

So three and one whenever possible. Now sometimes, you know, the nature of piano music is you can't always use the fingering you want to on trills. Sometimes it's two and four. What you want to avoid as much as possible is five and four.

Well, I guess you should practice this, I guess.

You know, the only time you really have to do a five-four trill is if you have other notes that you can't use other fingers because you've got notes under that need to be played. Five -four is really, really awkward. Four -three, a little bit better. Five -three, a little better. Five-four is really the hardest trill. And there are sometimes you have to resort to five-four in, for example, counterpoint. Try playing a Bach fugue, for example, and sometimes you have a voice down here and then a trill up there. And yes, you will have to do a trill on five-four, but otherwise use your strong fingers. Three -one are great. Some people even suggest alternating three-one and three-two.

You might try that and like it. Personally, I like three-one and three-two whenever possible.

The other fingerings, four-two, five-three, and last resort when there's no other choice, five -four.

So remember the three tips. Play with rounded fingers so get all the joints involved in your trills.

Measure your trills so you know exactly how many notes you're playing and use your strongest fingers, likely three -one or three -two, on your trills. One last little bonus tip for you, lighten up when you play trills. If you try to play trills with a lot of arm weight, it's going to be really hard to support your arm weight when you're playing a trill. So try to just feel that you're just hovering right over the keys and the fingers are doing all the work and you'll have great trills. Let me know how this works for you in the comments here at livingpianos.com and on YouTube. Once again, we are your online piano resource. I'm Robert Estrin. Thanks for joining me and all you subscribers, keep it going, keep these comments. Let's keep the discussion going here. We'll see you next time.

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