Robert Estrin: Essential Exercises for Speed on The Piano - From the Piano Expert

how to play fast on the piano.

You've heard pianists who just seem to effortlessly glide all over the keyboard and wonder, how is it possible to play so quickly over so many keys? Well, I'm gonna give you some tips today.

All right, well, first of all, I should let you know that there are no instant answers to playing fast on the piano.

Much like anything else in life, it takes consistent work.

Naturally, developing strength is critical for playing with speed because if you have weak fingers, they will give out if you try to play fast for any length of time.

So, how can you develop strength? That's one part of it.

The next thing is once you have the strength, what techniques are necessary in order to play with speed and fluency? I'm going to cover both of these topics for you.

In this, I'm going to utilize the Mozart Sonata in F major, K 332.

The last movement is very fast, and you might appreciate that.

I'll play a little bit of what it sounds like, and then I'm going to show you some tips on how you can achieve fluidity in a piece like this.

That's just the beginning.

So you get the idea.

It's very fast.

Well, developing strength in the piano, very important.

If you spend a good deal of time in the piano practicing almost anything, you will develop strength.

That's the good news about developing strength.

Sure, there are people who feel that they must practice hours of painful exercises, scales and arpeggios, and certainly there's an important part of scales and arpeggios and other exercises in piano practice.

But honestly, anything you play, if you were to play hard music and play for hours, you're going to develop strength just from the physical activity.

Much like with exercise, if you were training to be a runner or something of that nature, sure, just running a lot is going to help you.

You could do other exercises.

But the action, the exercise involved in the activity itself is going to be almost as beneficial as anything else you could do.

So spending time, of course, with scales and arpeggios and exercises, but just living on that keyboard, spending hours a day, will help you to develop strength.

Now, approaching a piece like this, how do you do it? Well first, you probably should practice quite slowly with the metronome, just to make sure everything is lined up just right.

A speed like that can be very valuable to make sure each finger is hitting precisely on all the keys.

Now, you can go through, and I strongly suggest using a metronome once you have it polished at a speed, at any speed, going one notch at a time.