Piano Video Lesson: How to Practice Bach: C Minor Prelude Well Tempered Clavier BK I

The ultimate practice method.

Here it is. I love this practice method because it really trains your hand and your brain to be able to play this. Hi, I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. And today I'm going to show you how to practice Bach, Prelude and Fugue in C minor from Book 1 of his well taught piano class, the Prelude. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to play it for you. Then I'm going to zero in on the fast section. The whole thing is 16th notes and then just towards the end it gets fast and then there's a little kind of Richard Tateve section and then it closes. It's a great Prelude. I want you to hear it first. Then I'm going to show you a bunch of ways of how you can practice this Prelude and Fugue. The Prelude section specifically and this fast section.

So, now I'm going to show you a whole bunch of ways of practicing it and stay to the end because the last way I'm going to show you I think is the best way even though these other methods are really valuable because it kind of turns this Prelude into all these different exercises that have great value not just for playing this piece but for developing your technique. You know some people spend countless hours learning exercises. You might as well use music as the exercises. That's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do here.

So I'm going to zero in on the part, the fast part that goes near the end like this.

Because everything I'm going to show you in this section applies to the rest of it. But since it's faster, this is the section you're probably going to zero in on doing the most work on because it's faster than the rest of the piece. So, let's start off. Obvious things you can do is turn the metronome on, find a speed that you can play it accurately and play it with at first when you're playing slowly articulate each finger with gently rounded raised fingers so you get the release of notes so the notes don't blur together.

You don't want that sort of thing.

You want the fingers to do it. So, you get the idea. Now what you can do with this is work it up a notch at a time as you get faster, make the fingers more gentle, rounded and close to the keys. Of course you don't raise your fingers when playing quickly. It's only a way to help to practice the release of fingers when playing slowly. When you get faster, lighten up, stay close to the keys. Notch at a time, lesson over. Now I'm going to show you a lot more ways of practicing it. Another handy way of working on this is with different articulations. For example, staccato fingers.

Or, you could play one hand staccato, one hand legato.

And of course you could reverse that.

There are also accents and there's different accents you could do.

Or you could do four note groups.

What else could you do? Rhythms.

You could play different dynamics in the two hands.

And of course you could reverse that.

Now naturally there are other things you could do. Other rhythms, other accents. Some people might even want to do the offbeat.

I'm not sure how helpful that is frankly, but you could just spend hours, days, weeks, months, years with this one prelude, turning it into hundreds of different exercises rather than have to learn hundreds of different exercises and get the same value. And then have a piece so under your fingers as a reward for your hard work. But now I promised you, the ultimate practice method. Here it is. I love this practice method because it really trains your hand and your brain to be able to play this with different note groups. I talked about note groups to start, but listen to this.

Then when you get comfortable going through the whole section that way, then you connect two note groups together like this.

And then even more.

Now naturally I'm just playing through it, but this is the way to identify note groups that you can't have command over.

You don't necessarily have to go through the entire section with all these different methods I'm showing you. You zero in on the parts that aren't under your fingers. Maybe you can play a good deal of it, but you get to this one part and you keep missing it.

Try the various practice techniques right there. Zero in where you need it. You shouldn't just do an equal amount of practice on all of it because you might not need equal amounts on all of it. Now at the beginning you may very well need to work on all of it, which is why a great starting point is playing it with the metronome, raised fingers, articulating everything and get it all clean and do some metronome speeds just to get it under your belt first, into your fingers.

Then strategically use these practice methods. That way you can get the parts that are weak and make them strong and build note groups upon note groups and strategically use accents, different phrasing, different dynamics, all these different techniques to help you master not just this Bach Prelude, but these are techniques that can transcend to other pieces of music and will help develop your technique on the piano.

I hope this is helpful for you again. Robert Estrin, LivingPianos.com. Your online piano resource. Thanks so much for joining me. We'll see you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-practice-bach-c-minor-prelude-well-tempered-clavier-bk-i/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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