The Secret to Being Relaxed Playing the Piano

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin, you're watching LivingPianos.com and today you're going to discover the secret to relaxing at the piano.

There's a lot to this, I'm going to be using a Chopin waltz in A flat Op. 34, No. 1. But first I want to talk about some general principles that are so important.

My father would always say, when people say, how do you relax at the piano? And he said, the secret to relaxation is developing strength. Because if you're weak at the piano, you're going to contort yourself in order to make the music come out. How can you be relaxed? Imagine if you're trying to lift a heavy object and it's just too heavy for you. You're not going to be relaxed lifting it, will you? Now if you were to work out and build up strength, you can lift it and you can lift it in a relaxed manner. Well it's much the same on the piano, but if you're playing piano music and you just don't have the strength of your fingers, your hands, you're not going to feel very relaxed, will you? So there's a lot of truth to that. Is there more to it than that? Absolutely. I'm going to give you a major tip with this Chopin waltz that you can use with all your music and you're going to love it. But I just want to talk about some fundamentals here to get this out of the way because it's so important. One thing is your sitting position.

You know, sometimes you might be tempted just you're in a rush, you just sit down, you don't think much about where the bench is. The distance that you sit away should be precise so that you're comfortable sitting at the piano, not too close. You don't want the bench up against the back of your shins and you want also to be the right height where your arms are relatively level, parallel to the floor. All of this makes a huge difference in the way you can be relaxed at the piano. If you're not sitting and you know that height is so important.

So now one thing I've never brought up in a video before and it's something that I do all the time in my practice and I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, it's so important. When you're playing a piece of music you almost feel as if you're taking little rests constantly with your playing.

So getting to this Chopin waltz, there's this one passage here and if you try to play this whole passage as one continuous passage you would definitely get tense because it just goes on and on. Let me show you what I'm talking about here.

That was pretty miserable. It sounded bad, it felt awful. That's not the way I play it. Let me show you the little secret here that can change your playing fundamentally because that's how with an eight measure phrase and you try to do that whole eight measure phrase and your hand gets tight and tense and you wonder, man how much strength do you need? Well how about if you didn't need that much strength? Watch how this works.

You just take the first few notes and that's it.

Now if that's too difficult to get those notes in a fluid manner you could break it down even further as follows.

I'm ending with my thumb over the G then and then you could go to, notice when I land on the G my second and fourth fingers are over the rest of the chord.

You do that until you can play those notes effortlessly without any tension, without struggling. No matter how long it takes you might just play those three notes being over the G then go the one note further, be over these notes.

Then finally you get to a point where you just whip it off your hand learns the hand position and it's totally relaxed because you're not trying to play eight measures you're just playing a series of notes as I showed you. You can break down to the hand positions and finger patterns.

Then you take the next little pattern of notes and you do the same thing with it.

Then once again you could break it down further.

Notice that the fourth and third fingers are over the next note and then you end here and over those, be over those and then finally the whole passage, the whole half of the passage.

So then you have these two separate little passages that you do and you completely go limp between them with no tension. You release the tension right in the middle of the passage like this.

And even when you put them together you give yourself that moment of relaxation, that complete hand limp but exactly over the keys that are going to be played next. That's the critical part because if you're not that's where the stress and the strain comes in reaching beyond where your hands are. If you land in the wrong place then you have to reach there but if you're already and then the next passage is the same thing.

And that was probably the trickiest one because it's a bigger stretch. So you could break that, once again you could always break these further like this.

So then we have these separate passages and you put them together but with that momentary total limp relaxation.

Do you hear how it's completely relaxed? I'm not straining at all because I'm just playing a note group that my hand has learned. It just naturally just pops those notes right out.

So that's the secret to being able to play with total relaxation.

You practice relaxation within a whole passage so you're never feeling you're playing all these separate notes for a long period of time. You take, you practice these moments when your hand goes completely limp and you're just exactly over the next note group.

And you can have a fluidity and a relaxation in your playing. Now naturally this goes hand in hand with the things I brought up at the very beginning. You want to make sure that you're sitting properly the right distance and the right height and develop as much strength as you can. Obviously that's always going to help you but in the meantime practice relaxation right within these passages in your playing and you can't believe the difference it makes that you don't feel like you're playing an eight measure phrase anymore. You're just playing these little riffs and then you put the riffs together with those moments of relaxation right in the middle of them and at first take as long as you need.

So you can then make the space between each one of those little snippets shorter and shorter and you can just practice two at a time that you could just start with the first one and then make that space a little shorter each time.

You see how that works? I want you to all try this. Find something that you have a long string of notes and figure out where can you relax. Use the phrasing in your music as your guide as to where to lift.

Now here you can see that there are two measures that are slurred so obviously the end of the slur is an obvious place but before the ornamentation boy that's a great place because otherwise you can get cramped.

But you go in like this.

It relieves the tension in your hand. You practice relaxation and that's the secret for you today. I hope this works for you. Let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com or your online piano resource. I'm Robert Estrin. Thanks again all of you for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-secret-to-being-relaxed-playing-the-piano/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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