Piano Video Lesson: Why You Must Exaggerate Your Playing When Practicing Slowly

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin and today's subject is why you must exaggerate your playing when practicing slowly.

You know, here's the danger. You might wonder why would you want to exaggerate? Shouldn't you try to play exactly the same way slowly as when you speed it up? When you want to have up the tempo, shouldn't you play it exactly the same way? Well sometimes, yes, that's a valuable technique. But there are many times when you want to exaggerate dynamics and phrasing in your slow playing.

And the reason why is something like this can easily happen if you don't do that. Let's say I'm going to use something you probably all know, the Clemente Opus 36 No. 1, Sonatina in C major, the beginning. Let's say you're playing it slowly like this. Then you play it up to speed and since you've had so little definition of dynamic and phrasing, you end up with...

It all but disappears. When you go faster, you naturally lighten up in order to facilitate speed. So those differences of dynamics and phrasing become diluted. So instead, in slow practice, exaggerate all the elements of the music. Then, when you play faster and play with ease, your hands know what to do.

So the fingers are staying closer to the keys. The wrists are not doing such exaggerated motions. Because they're already solidified, it still comes out. Because you have trained your hands and your wrists to delineate the phrasing and the dynamics. With such definition, that when you speed it up and stay closer to the keys and lighten up, you still have the dynamics and the phrasing are still there. And you can play with ease and it's a comfort and you don't lose the expression in your playing.

Try that in your practice. Let me know how it works for you. Here are the comments at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Articles are accompanying all the videos, so check them out for yourself. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/why-you-must-exaggerate-your-playing-when-practicing-slowly/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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