Transcription
Creative, welcome back! So, finger speed. Now, I want to explore an interesting way of, uh, approaching developing your finger speed. You know, it's one of those things that, uh, when we're a beginner, especially, you know, being able to fly up and down those keys just seems like the most, uh, incredible thing to do. So, it can be a lot of fun.
Now, when we first start tackling developing finger speed, typically you'll be asked to play something like this, where we go up and down a series of notes. And the idea is we start off relatively slowly, like this, and we maintain our structure, our accuracy, like this. You know, there's no, you know, everything's nice and even. And typically, what you'll do is you'll do that, and then you'll slowly start increasing the speed over time until you hit a ceiling. And you keep your fingers crossed that over time that ceiling increases and the faster you get, right?
We can do this with arpeggio exercises. You know, we can have quite a bit of fun. In fact, I've explored a few ideas on the channel for that. Um, but I want you to slot in something here because, you know, this is a really good way to develop fingering. I don't want to dismiss that way. It can be quite dull at times, but, you know, it's a very valid and, um, tried and tested way of developing strength, accuracy, and speed. So, here's what we need to add in when you're practicing.
Let's take these five notes as an example, okay? And let's say you've done this for a while, you're fairly accurate, and you're going up and down those notes like this, and you reach that ceiling, okay? You're going as fast as you can without breaking down. So now, all you do is just switch to forgetting about accuracy, forgetting about, you know, keeping that structure there, and just letting loose, having fun, and just trying to get loose and just, just go up and down those notes like this as fast as you can without worrying about, uh, accuracy, right?
Um, and it might fall apart. It might fall apart, and that's fine, right? It's not about doing things properly now. It's about just exposing your fingers to that unstructured speed, right? That's the idea. Because then, when you, uh, go back to practicing it properly and you introduce that straight accuracy, the, um, the structure back in, then what you might find, what you will find, is that ceiling that you couldn't reach before is, uh, or that ceiling that you, you were at before, has just gone up that little bit more because you've exposed your fingers to that, that bit of extra speed, okay? So it's like we've left that structure behind, uh, in favor of speed. Now we're going to bring everything back together, and that ceiling should increase that little bit more than it did before, okay?
Another way you can approach this, uh, particularly for this exercise, is to start at the bottom like this and then whizz up to the top as fast as you can. And you can approach it this way. It's kind of the same thing because these middle notes might not be accurate, but that's not the point. You're just going for it. You're going as fast as you possibly can, yeah.
So the idea is to switch between prim and proper, structured, accurate, and switch from that, um, to having a break and just going, just going all out and just going, "I do not, I don't care about anything in the world. I'm just letting my fingers fly," okay? And seeing what that feels like. Then stop and bring it back into the accuracy, all right? So you can do this with the same exercise over and over again.
So I want to leave you with a few more interesting exercises. Um, you've got this one, okay? Classic exercise. You can, you can do this till there, until you get utterly fed up with it. Um, you can also do this with arpeggios. So you can use the C major arpeggio like this. Any arpeggio will do. If you want to introduce black keys, it'll give you a new dimension to the position you need to be at. Um, but here you go because you can use this as an example, okay? So that's the C major arpeggio. You can switch to a C sus4 arpeggio like this and move between the two. Really effective, you know.
[Music]
All sorts you can do. Just, just, just any series of notes that repeats. Uh, you can do this with the, um, C major seven arpeggio here. If you are really struggling with the octave, I mean, it sounds nice anyway, but if you're really struggling reaching that top octave, then this is really cool as well. So you can practice the C, the E, the G, and the B like this. You can switch to the C, the E, the G, and the A. Give you a little bit of something to have a go at there as well, you know? So plenty of exercises here for you to have a go at. And don't forget as well, you can do everything in the left separately to try and develop it, and also both hands together, right?
[Music]
Now, that might require quite a bit of, you know, practice to be able to get that sounding accurate and sounding together. But whatever you decide to do to practice that finger speed, um, the thing I want you to take away mostly from this video is that switch. Switch from being ultra prim, proper, and structured to being completely loose, completely carefree. "I don't really care about anything other than just exposing myself to raw speed," and then switch back again. And, and it's this fluctuation between the two, um, that'll kind of help you bring that speed up together, right?
And I must stress that, um, when you are just letting loose, that's not playing piano properly, all right? That's not the point. It's just, it's just exposing your fingers to that raw speed. That's all it's about. Um, you know, so YouTube comments down below. This isn't me telling you to play piano wrong. It's just an idea to slot into your practice which I found really effective.
And here's one more thing to consider. And I do not recommend this all of the time. However, you know, for this, it's just like going to the gym for your fingers, right? So it's okay. You can sit down in front of the piano and just stick your favorite TV series on, a film, a movie, and before you know it, you've done an hour, you've done two hours of this. So it's all good and it's a good way of passing the time whilst you're exposing those fingers to this exercise.
I hope you give this quick tip a try. It's a fantastic way of developing your finger speed and a bit of a different slant on the typical exercises that you might be used to. It's perfect to slot into my best adult piano practice plan as an exercise, and you can grab hold of that by going to the cards up above or the information box down below. And with that, I'm gonna say thank you so much for watching. Like this video if you liked it, subscribe to the channel, and I will, uh, see you. I will see you in the next video. Peace.