pseudo-metronome

In part 1, I’ve mentioned that all the students really need to remember for scales are just the turning points, the “where” and “when”. Now, here’s how to get through the turning points - curve your fingers and practice the turns.

Curved fingers vs Flat fingers

Curving your fingers may sound simple, but to some of my students, it is an unnatural thing to do. Some of my younger students have fingers almost the length of Ikea’s short pencils and what’s worse, is their fingers move like the Ikea pencil too. It’s as if their fingers are missing the 3 part joints or an ice-cream stick stuck to each finger - stiff and simply refuse to curve at any point of time. *faints*

For students with good fingers/hand posture on the piano, this is usually not a big problem. But for those without, you’ll be shocked to see how they twist their whole arm (and sometimes body) just to successfully get through the turning points of the scale. Now, this is a good time to get them to start exercising the stiff fingers of theirs and kick the bad habit.

Here’s a few ways to know whether your fingers are curved properly:

1. Your hand should look like the picture above (on the left)
2. If you place a flat surfaced eraser on the top of your hand, it should stay on your hand as you play.
3. Your palm should be the same level as your elbow, with your elbow bent at 90 degrees. Sometimes, you may need to adjust your piano chair to a comfortable distance and height.
4. Your palm should not be resting on anything at all. Please don’t be lazy.

While some may argue that flat finger playing is actually a valid piano playing technique, I never encourage my students in the early grades to play with flat fingers from the start. The flat finger techniques are seldom used in the early grades, and besides, it’s easier to get the students to flatten their fingers posture than to have them curved at a later stage.

Once they have gotten their hand posture right, it’s just a matter of getting the scales to sound smooth at the turning points. In order to achieve a perfect sounding scale, all the turns for the different scales needs to be practiced individually.

This is how I usually go through scales practicing with my students (using D major as an example):

1. Play the scale with only the right hand first for 2-3 times
2. Identify the 2 different turning points
3. Practice first turning point with curved fingers
   (ascending) Fsharp G A (down) G (turn) Fsharp <- notes
   (ascending) 3 (turn) 1 2 (down) 1 (turn) 3  <- fingerings
4. Practice second turning point with curved fingers 
   (ascending) Csharp D E (down) D (turn) Csharp <- notes
   (ascending) 4 (turn) 1 2 (down) 1 (turn) 4  <- fingerings
5. Play the scale again and this time it should sound significantly smoother

Yes, it’s a lot of hard work. Piano playing is mostly about muscle memorization, so getting it right the first time is very important. You don’t want to have your muscle remembering the wrong fingering, the wrong notes, because it takes a lot more time to unlearn the mistakes and relearn the correct ones.

I’ve actually enrolled 3 of my students for the ABRSM Grade 1 Practical Exams at the beginning of the year and getting the students to stop playing fun tunes and focus on scales, broken chords, (boring) exam pieces and sight-reading feels like forcing medicine down their throats.

In the past few months, I’ve seen scales played using amazingly awkward fingerings that I’ve never imagined possible. I have absolutely no idea how these kids come up with their own creative fingerings, but what I do know, is that they didn’t practice!

So the correct scale fingering should go like this.

Ascending (Right Hand) | Descending (Left Hand)
1 2 3 (turn) 1 2 3 4 (turn) 1 2 3 (turn) 1 2 3 4 5

Ascending (Left Hand) | Descending (Right Hand)
5 4 3 2 1 (turn) 3 2 1 (turn) 4 3 2 1 (turn) 3 2 1

Well, it actually isn’t really that hard, after playing it for a couple of times you would realize that the fingerings were annotated in the only logical way to play the scale. Although some teachers would get their students to just memorize and recite all the fingerings, I find that method ineffective and confusing, especially when it comes to adding key signatures.

I prefer to let the students go with the flow of the fingers and keys, then just remember the turning points. The turning points of the scale are typically either in the 3rd finger or 4th finger, depending on which hand and the direction of the scale. The pattern is always the same - alternate between turning at the 3rd or 4th finger.

Ascending (Right Hand) | Descending (Left Hand)
1 2 3 (turn) 1 2 3 4 (turn) 1 2 3 (turn) 1 2 3 4 5

Ascending (Left Hand) | Descending (Right Hand)
5 4 3 2 1 (turn) 3 2 1 (turn) 4 3 2 1 (turn) 3 2 1

So with only the turning points to remember, they can concentrate on the key signatures and hopefully remember to press on the accidental keys when they need to.

I’ve always been a big fan of Jon Schmidth’s music. His music is often uplifting and inspiring to listen to and while going thru his website I happen to chance upon his note-reading guide which seems to have gotten a lot of good reviews and feedbacks.

Notes reading is something that all students will struggle with especially when asked to do sight reading. During my first few months of teaching, I’ve seen students whom after learning music 3 years, still counts the notes one by one, line after line, which is equivalent to a student reciting the 2 timetable to figure out what’s the answer to 7x2.

My method teaches the students to figure out the first note using the quick F-A-C-E method, then continue their note reading based on distance relevance from the previous note (somewhat similar to what Jon Schmidth’s note reading guide has). Doesn’t work all the time, but works relatively well for running notes or notes that do not skip too far off. Good enough for the Grade 1-2 level, but I’ll still need to find something better that could help them improve their notes reading so I’m going to try teaching some of it to my students this coming sat and see how well this really works.

http://www.jonschmidt.com/catalog/freestuff/note_reading.pdf

If you’ve tried it, let me know how it goes as well yar?