As a gym-goer pianist, the one piece of advice that I can give is: work on your triceps. Strengthening it will build stamina for octaves and being concious of it will really release tension from hands/wrists.
@@gixelzalso, it’s not a matter of having big triceps but strong triceps and knowing how to use them. As gym rat you probably know the difference between strength and hypertrophy
As someone who has had numerous doctor/hospital/physiotherapy appointments due to over-practice - I have to emphasize that consistency and patience is the most important thing. Octave mastery is a marathon, not a sprint. Avoid too much tension and listen to your body when your tendons feel inflamed. Come back and practice the next day after some rest! Use the time you're resting your hands to study music away from the piano!
every video form you guys is either awe-inspiring or amazingly helpful!!!! thanks for doing what you do, now it's time to go practice some octave-y pieces :)
Thanks for all the good tips! Not only are my hands tiny, but my 5th fingers are short 😭 Thankfully, they are perfect for playing reliable 7ths for jazz piano 🤣
9:39 "...because you'll die and everybody will die and we will all die." 😳😳😳 6:07 I feel like someone could write a very amusing etude with lots of cluster notes to practice this wrist flick exercise. And who knew curling the second finger would relax and help open the hand? Neat...I will need to try this.
My teacher taught me to flex my upper arm a bit, just like how it would feel if you'd carry a chair with one hand. It releases any tension and heaviness away from the forearms and wrists, allowing them to be more nimble and do all the things that everyone talked about in this video.
When I was (very) young my teacher said I had the potential to be a really good concert pianist. The only problem I had was tension. My forearms burned all the time, lol.
This is good advice. I can't for the life of me manage to do chords with an octave included because of this. I found a cheat method for doing octaves in melody though, by basically catapulting my hand from one note to the next. (Thumb to ring finger.) Even in legato it works, because the pause between the two notes is so small it's not audible. But problem with that method is that it assumes needing to play one note after the other, not both at the same time. I have really small hands and I feel like I can't reach no matter how hard I stretch my hands open. Especially my left hand, which has an even smaller span than my right. So with my left, I can barely even do 7th intervals.
The "trick" of curling the second finger is bs... If your hand is small enough like mine, curling the second means the second would press down another key... I already struggle with not pressing down any key with my 1 and 5, I don't need to worry about 2 too...
My little finger is very short, I can barely reach an octave. My hands are very small for an adult. There are a lot of pieces I can't play. I play what I can and adapt the music for my hands' size.
@@juliejules7780no, if you have small hands you’re unlikely to become an elite performer doing Gaspard de la nuit by Ravel. And since you’re playing at home, investing in an alternative keyboard can be great.
If you can afford it, look into "reduced-size" acoustic keyboard for an acoustic piano. The piano keyboard being standardized to such a large octave span is a problem with the system, not our bodies, that is thankfully starting to be addressed.
@@juliejules7780unfortunately people w very small hands probably don’t win international competitions, just like 5 foot tall person is unlikely to play basketball competitively.
I thought that last guy was flexing but then Asiya comes in and just... Wow... Wtf 😅Whoever wrote that is a complete and utter masochist. Sounds awesome though 👌🏻
6:11 Being and accomplished and well recognized musician is great. You can punch a Steinway & Sons and no one dares to say a thing. Now you, fellow mortal, do a cluster on one of the conservatory's DPs used in theory classes and watch all hell breaking loose... The secret of the octaves is hitting the right notes way louder than the wrong ones. Funnily enough, that's the secret for everything else on piano. 🤔
Hey, thanks for pointing this out! The Heroic Polonaise is Kissin, and the Hungarian Rhapsody is Cziffra. We'll be sure to include it in the video itself next time!
@@tonebasePiano Thank you! I love how Kissin plays the first chord, it sounds so exciting! And I thought it sounded like Cziffra, but then doubted myself because I didn't hear Cziffra's signature extra chord that he adds to the ending of that piece 😂
She wasn't very good at those octaves... Do you not have a better example? That passage leads into the climax of the piece, you can afford to use a little bit of muscle for 15 seconds for some proper sound production. Octaves are marathon, you can't sprint it, but that doesn't mean you're walking the whole way especially if the composer writes fortissimo. Relaxation is a nice sentiment, but there's no way to play fortissimo octaves without some tension, and longer passages (like the Chopin polonaise) will inevitably build some tension. It does take some strength and endurance, and while it's good to teach ergonomic ways to use your muscles without straining yourself, your muscles are still contracting.
still a useful video for me but am I the only person who always found octaves easy in comparison to other stuff? I'm much worse at fast tremolo kind of patterns and arpeggios than I am at octaves lol
but isnt that wrong? using gravitation to go back down is limited in speed (as gravity/acceleration is limited). Shouldnt it be that you need to accelerate on the way down and let the key action do most of the work to go back up? and curling the 2nd finger feels really ugly urgh XD
simple. it's al in the thumbs. period. the biggest bone and muscle mass in the hand. practice octave passages with the thumbs only, and you balance hand weight and arm weight relax your shoulders, and you;re off to the races.
Why don't American men (I guess I might be an exception) know how to wear a simple men's suit? The shirt length, the suit arm length or just general correct size? Why did that guy actually roll up his suit jacket like a shirt in the eighties? These are, let's imagine, performers, after all. Someone send them to wardrobe, quick.
Taubman is rolling in her grave at the flapping fingers and snapping wrists (Beigal and Korepanova). These people will be crippled by 50 if they arent already dealing with chronic pain.
