Piano Video Lesson: Should You Strike From Above in Your Piano Playing?

Remember to strike from above in your staccatos and you will be rewarded with a crisp sound, speed, fluency, power and lightness.

Hi and welcome to LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin and today we're going to talk about why you must strike from above in your piano playing.

Now I must qualify this to say that this is not always the case. I'm talking about a very specific technique. In fact, striking from above gets a harsh, ugly sound in some circumstances. For example, when playing large chords, striking from above sounds pretty hideous. Listen to the opening chords to the Tchaikovsky B -flat minor piano concerto striking from above.

It's a terribly harsh sound. When you use the arms, you strike from above, you have no control and just get a crass sound. Instead, what you do is you strike from the surface of the keys and drop all the way to the arms all at once and get a gorgeous sound. No matter how hard you play, it will not be harsh.

So then when is striking from above appropriate? Is it when playing finger work? Well, for slow practice, sometimes raised fingers are a good way to delineate which fingers are up and down so you get clean releases of notes. This is useful, for example, in practicing scales and arpeggios.

However, when going more quickly, naturally you must stay right on top of the keys without raised fingers or you'll never gain the speed. It works way too hard. But to practice the release of notes, practicing with delineated fingers down, with other fingers up and out of the way is terrific exercise akin to stretching before working out, as I've talked about before.

So the real place that's striking from above is really vitally important is with staccatos. And for this I'm going to demonstrate with a piece of Schumann from his album for the young Knight Grupert. And I'm going to go ahead and play this for you so you can hear what this piece is about. And then I'm going to show you how to practice this slowly to get this kind of control and power and speed out of it.

So, when practicing slowly you might be tempted to play it like this.

The problem with that is that you won't get the crisp staccatos. If I were to play that faster using that technique it would sound like this.

Compared to playing it with striking from above, and I'm going to show it to you slowly so you understand what I mean in just a moment, but listen to the difference.

So, here's what you must do in your slow practice to prepare to play quickly and to get that same precision and power in your staccatos.

Notice how it's the wrist that is doing all the work. So, for example, in the fourth measure. And make sure you don't go down to the note before you play it like this. This is what you want to avoid.

Down, down, no, strike from above.

Listen to that difference of the clarity of the staccatos.

And the power you naturally get from the wrist. The other thing to avoid is using the arms for the up and down motion. If you use the arms, they're so big and heavy you'll get this sound.

You don't get the crispness. The arms are too big. They can't give the speed.

You may end up doing this, which is really difficult to avoid if you have this tendency, which is you're using your wrists, but your arms are still involved. Notice how my arms are going to be going up and down, not just the wrists. And it just bogs down. You can't get the speed. You can't get the crispness. When playing it just from the wrist, I'll do it a little under tempo, then up to tempo. Listen to the crispness and notice how the arms, yes, they must go side to side to get over the right keys, but they do no up and down motion. That's all performed from the wrist.

And then when up to tempo.

This technique incidentally is so universal that even if it's not something powerful like this, if you're playing a Bach minuet, getting the staccatos. So, wrists don't have to be powerful as in the Schumann.

They can be light. If I were to play that same minuet using the arms, listen to the difference of the sound.

Or using the arms in conjunction with the wrists going up and down.

But again, just using the wrist, the crispness and the control.

So, that's the tip for today. Remember to strike from above in your staccatos and you will be rewarded with a crisp sound, speed, fluency, power and lightness. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Visit the website for articles on all these videos and you can leave comments and join the discussion. We'll see you next time.

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Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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