Piano Video Lesson: Secret Technique for Balancing Your Hands on the Piano

By playing one hand where you absolutely hear nothing, it gives you a chance to listen to the melody. You could also reverse the hands and do the same thing to make sure you're getting the appropriate balance.

This is LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin bringing a really important subject to you, which is secrets of balancing your hands on the piano.

Naturally, one of the greatest things about piano that makes it difficult is the fact you have different parts with your two hands. I've got a secret technique for you I bet you've never heard before. I'm going to demonstrate using Fairy Tale by Kapilewski. First I'm going to play it for you and you'll hear the balance of the hands with the melody above the accompaniment, which is sometimes difficult to achieve. I'm going to show you some techniques and a surprise technique that you've never heard before, I bet, that is going to be at the end.

So just listen to the opening part just so you know what music we're going to be using today.

Now I've talked about different practice techniques you can use. For example, different articulations. You can play a gentle finger staccato in the left hand to be able to differentiate the two different lines.

So in that way you get the totally different feeling with the two hands. One of the simplest techniques by the way is to simply lean more weight in one hand than the other. Make your right hand heavy and your left hand light.

Now that sounds really easy. Boy, show's over. That's it. But it's not always that simple. Sometimes when you're playing it's really difficult to even hear what the balance is like. Not only that, but you can practice hands separately, but when you put them together it's a whole different story. And you wonder how can you control the melody while also playing the accompaniment and yet hear everything clearly. And this is the secret technique.

Watch.

By playing one hand where you absolutely hear nothing, it gives you a chance to listen to the melody. You could also reverse the hands and do the same thing to make sure you're getting the appropriate balance out of each hand.

Because the way to do this is first you play just the melody by itself without encumbering yourself playing on top of the piano.

Then you try it with the hand on top of the piano and see if you have the same sound. So I can demonstrate that technique playing the left hand now.

Playing the left hand by itself.

Now I'm going to go ahead and play the left hand with the right hand playing on top of the piano silently and see if I can achieve the same sound with the left hand where I can really hear it without the sound of the melody.

You may have noticed when I first started the left hand was a little bit louder than it should have been. So you can check your work by listening to each hand independently on the piano, then add the other hand on top of the piano so you can hear if you can get the same sound when you are coordinating both hands. What a great way to be able to hear things. By the way, this technique of playing one hand on top of the piano and one hand on the piano is very useful for other things like when you're having a three against four or something like that. You're trying to figure out if you're playing it right.

A little bit of Debussy there from the Children's Corner Suite, The Snow is Dancing. So once again, you play the left hand by itself first.

Sounds perfectly even. You do the right hand.

So now, you do the hands together, but you put one hand on top of the piano.

That way you can really hear the evenness. Does it sound the same as when you played the hand without the other hand playing silently? And then you reverse it and do the same thing. Listen to the left hand first by itself.

Then go ahead and add the right hand up here.

Any little deviation becomes painfully obvious to you because you can hear it. Whereas you're hearing it together, it's so hard to distinguish one line from the other because your brain can't always hear everything. So this is a universal technique you can utilize whenever you're having difficulty either balancing the hands or creating the correct rhythm in each hand when putting the hands together. Play one hand on top of the music rack so you can hear things and compare it to what it's like when you're just playing that hand separately without the other hand playing on top of the music rack.

Great technique. Try it out. Let me know how it works for you. This is just another tip here at 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/secret-technique-for-balancing-your-hands-on-the-piano/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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