Effortless BIG Piano Leaps: The ONE Trick You Need

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin. With a question many of you are probably asking yourself or have asked yourself countless times, how do you make big leaps on the piano with security? When you're jumping from one end of the keyboard to the other, it can be so difficult to hit the right notes you wonder how can you practice it? Well, you're going to get the answers in this video and to demonstrate I'm going to use two different pieces, one on the simpler side the Musette of Bach from the book of Anna Magdalena.

Basically Bach wrote as student pieces and the other one is what I consider to be the hardest part of the Chopin second scherzo, the scherzo in B flat minor. So let's get right into it. I'm going to start with the Bach Musette. So you know which one I'm talking about. I'm going to play the first section for you.

So that's the way it goes and you notice that it jumps from one area to the next. Now if you're on an intermediate level you've had pieces maybe you did the minuet in G which stays pretty stationary.

But then you get to this Musette and you wonder how can you get from one end of the keyboard to the other quickly and the way to do it is to practice the jump without playing the next note after the jump as follows.

You see how I'm over that and then once again.

And you practice with that space and what then you do is you make the space less and less and you can work on each one of these jumps independent of the others as follows.

Now at first you might find that you're overshooting or undershooting. You'll see something like this. Watch my right hand. I'm going to go too far in the right hand just to show you what you're likely to encounter when you practice this way.

See how I went too far? So then the next time I overcompensated I went not far enough.

So you see it's a meticulous process of getting the preparation for the jump. Watching where you end up and not playing that note. And then eventually you get to the point where you can be right over it every time.

When you can do that then you start playing it but not until after you're over the notes even though it's rhythmically distorted. But you purposely do that to gain the security first. Then you shorten that gap little by little like this.

Then you do it again. Then you do it again.

Then you try it with a smaller gap. You try to get there sooner but you still make sure you're there before you need to play it.

And then you shorten it so much that at a certain point rhythmically there is no gap but you're thinking that moment. That moment is moving like lightning to get over it before you play it so you're absolutely sure you'll get it.

And then you work on the next one as follows. Every time you have a jump this is the way to work it out.

Now we're going to shift ourselves to Chopin. What I consider to be the hardest part of the entire scherzo.

And I'll show you what that section is first.

There are a whole heck of a lot of jumps in there and each one can be worked out just the way I showed you to work out the jumps in the Musette of Bach. So you start off on the first one.

My left hand didn't go quite far enough that time.

There we go.

So that's the first one.

And then the second one is also one to be practiced independently. Once you get the first one then the second.

So I can show you all the places by going through it and stopping before each. Although you wouldn't want to practice through the whole thing that way necessarily. You might want to work at each jump independent of the others. But these are all the places that you have jumps.

A more effective way to practice this would be to work on each jump independent.

So first on to get the first one so you can get there on time.

And notice I'm getting over the octave E flat and I want to make sure I'm there before I play it. So I absolutely have total security.

And you can just practice those three notes, the two octaves and the chord.

And then little by little get rid of that little hesitation.

And that is in a nutshell how you can make big leaps on the piano with total security. Practice getting over the leaps before you play them. And you can study your hands if you're overshooting or undershooting until you're right there every single time. And that's the first time you play it. You never play it before because otherwise what happens is you'll be missing it over and over again practicing what you don't want. And you want to be avoided. This way you practice and gain the security of getting over the jump before you have to play it. And you'd study your hands and make the accommodations so you're right over it. Then you first play it. Then you lessen the time little by little until there is no rhythmic distortion.

And you move on to the next jump. Whether it's in Bach, Chopin, Liszt, whatever it is. And you'll gain the security you need. You'll just automatically land in the right place and it becomes seamless.

That's the lesson for today. I hope this is useful for you. Once again I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks so much for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/effortless-big-piano-leaps-the-one-trick-you-need/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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