Piano practice.........

[Megan]

17 people who are really struggling with piano practice right now
Read more at http://www.classicfm.com/instruments...E5Pw0XwYuqP.99


http://www.classicfm.com/instruments...iano-practice/


I can identify with no. 11 and 16.
Sometimes when I have practiced my pieces well, it all goes pear shaped by the time my piano tutor visits.

[Peter]

I'm sure we can all identify with some of those, even piano teachers!

[AeolianHarp]

LOL the one called Keri need to get down the pound shop and get her child some headphones for that DP!

I have yet to do some practise- will do so later. I'm trying out that beginner's first mvt version I have.

I'm listening to Ronald B play the 3rd right now- it never ceases to amaze me! How could anyone play it like that!!! He plays it to the correct tempo and adds all that emotion. Phew!

I bet that is close to how Beethoven sounded playing it.

Can you play the 3rd movement Peter?

I believe not many people can do it!!!

[Decrepit Poster]

Yeah, Brautigam has the technical chops for the third movement for sure, as do a great many AAA pianists. I continue to marvel at the film of Katsaris playing his arrangement of Gottschalk's "The Bango", linked in another thread. How his mind and fingers work as fast as they do is incomprehensible to me. Had I begun playing piano at age three and practiced twelve hours a day ever day since then I doubt I could come anywhere close to what he does.

I don't mean to shanghai the thread, but was recently reminded of something I had totally forgotten about. Many years ago, I believe is was the late seventies or early eighties, I asked a musician friend to teach me the basics of piano playing. He showed me fingerings for some really fundamental stuff and left me to my own devices. My practice session didn't last long because even back then the amount of stretching necessary to reach some of the keys caused my hands to hurt.

I'm a small framed person and have correspondingly small hands. My non scientific measurement of them the other days indicate a span of roughly 7 3/4" in the left hand and slightly less than that in the right, with a ratio of about 5 3/4" in both hands. Those measurements were taken with somewhat uncomfortable stretching. I'd guess that my realistic span and ratio are appreciably less. But then having no keyboard to experiment with there's no way to know my true comfortable reach.

It seems decidedly odd to me that in this day and age one can't easily find pianos with "reduced width" keyboards. There is, after all, no musical reason a key needs to be exactly as wide as it normally is. But scouring the web turns up next to nothing in that regard. I found a very few "junk" keyboards of reduced width, along with a multi thousand dollar keyboard retrofit for existing "normal" keyboard grand pianos.

There are, however, a number of web article about pianos and small-handed players. Here's my overall favorite.

Not that it's a big deal. I don't see myself even taking up piano. Not at this stage of life.

[AeolianHarp]

Pianos well into Chopin's day had smaller width keys- so fortepianos/19th century pianos allow one to reach further!

[Peter]

LOL the one called Keri need to get down the pound shop and get her child some headphones for that DP!

I have yet to do some practise- will do so later. I'm trying out that beginner's first mvt version I have.

I'm listening to Ronald B play the 3rd right now- it never ceases to amaze me! How could anyone play it like that!!! He plays it to the correct tempo and adds all that emotion. Phew!

I bet that is close to how Beethoven sounded playing it.

Can you play the 3rd movement Peter?

I believe not many people can do it!!!

It's not one of the sonatas I learnt, I was always more drawn to the middle and later sonatas, though I did do Op.26, Op.28 and Op.31/2.