Left hands: hard to read, harder to play. Anything that might help would be welcome, right? Here's what I have found to work.
Reading:
Ditch the "little sentences" if you are using them. Nobody can do that much mind work and still keep up with the beat of the music. Your memory works just fine, so long as you INSIST that it do the job. For instance, is there any good reason why you couldn't just memorize that a note that sits on the middle line of the bass staff means to play the first D to the left of Middle C (which is where you nose should be pointed!) Nope. Rote memory, just like the multiplication tables, capitals of the states, etc. is THE answer to any problems with LH reading That is the ONLY way to read any note identities well enough to read well - on either staff. Every other system is just too slow and too limited. FORCE your mind memorize by not allowing the use of the crutch of translating everything into letters first and locations second.
Think about it this way - knowing the correspondence between note location on the staff to that note's location on the keyboard will then give you the letter name of that note, but knowing only the letter name of the note will NOT give you the location of the proper key to play. Obviously, there are many keys named by the same letter and it does very much matter which you strike.
If you can memorize one location/location pair, you can memorize ALL the pairs.
See my book for additional help in reading, either treble or bass staff:
http://danstarr.com/pages/ebooks.html
Playing:
I'd bet your left hand feels to you like "a club at the end of your arm." In other words, you don't have very much trust in your ability to do dexterous motions using that hand and its fingers. Likely, you have good reason not to trust it. It's let you down many times and played the wrong note.
Unfortunately, your disdain for the left hand quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since you don't really believe it can do the job, you tend to avoid using it. Thus, it stays incompetent. Many, perhaps most, pianists know that the hands must sometimes be trained separately. For too many, however, this often translates to "learn the RH and then add the LH to it." This works when the LH is simple. However, if the LH is NOT simple, the pianist all too often still doesn't do the common sense thing and practice the LH separately. More likely, he or she continues to go over and over the music with both hands hoping it will somehow resolve itself as a problem.
'Course, that just doesn't happen.
Now there is another factor operating here and that is the fact that the left hand is seldom the melody of the song. This means that, even if we play the LH perfectly, it "doesn't sound like the song." It's not supposed to. The LH's main purpose at the piano (there are, of course, exceptions) is to provide harmony and rhythm to the RH's rendition of the melody. It's an accompaniment to the main show - which is the RH melody. Modern man demands this accompaniment function to enjoy his music. Thus,we need to give the LH whatever time it needs, whether we like it or not, IF we wish to have the full sound we have come to expect from a piece of piano music. Few pianists are happy being only "a right hand pianist."
My advice, then, is simply this. Practice the RH till you can play it your sleep. Then practice the LH by itself till you can...well...play it in your sleep. I mean get really good at that LH part. Perfect timing, perfect note indentities, perfect fingering. Suck it up and do the work for real.
Then, and only then, will you have some chance to put the hands together well. I'll talk about that aspect next week.
Reading:
Ditch the "little sentences" if you are using them. Nobody can do that much mind work and still keep up with the beat of the music. Your memory works just fine, so long as you INSIST that it do the job. For instance, is there any good reason why you couldn't just memorize that a note that sits on the middle line of the bass staff means to play the first D to the left of Middle C (which is where you nose should be pointed!) Nope. Rote memory, just like the multiplication tables, capitals of the states, etc. is THE answer to any problems with LH reading That is the ONLY way to read any note identities well enough to read well - on either staff. Every other system is just too slow and too limited. FORCE your mind memorize by not allowing the use of the crutch of translating everything into letters first and locations second.
Think about it this way - knowing the correspondence between note location on the staff to that note's location on the keyboard will then give you the letter name of that note, but knowing only the letter name of the note will NOT give you the location of the proper key to play. Obviously, there are many keys named by the same letter and it does very much matter which you strike.
If you can memorize one location/location pair, you can memorize ALL the pairs.
See my book for additional help in reading, either treble or bass staff:
http://danstarr.com/pages/ebooks.html
Playing:
I'd bet your left hand feels to you like "a club at the end of your arm." In other words, you don't have very much trust in your ability to do dexterous motions using that hand and its fingers. Likely, you have good reason not to trust it. It's let you down many times and played the wrong note.
Unfortunately, your disdain for the left hand quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since you don't really believe it can do the job, you tend to avoid using it. Thus, it stays incompetent. Many, perhaps most, pianists know that the hands must sometimes be trained separately. For too many, however, this often translates to "learn the RH and then add the LH to it." This works when the LH is simple. However, if the LH is NOT simple, the pianist all too often still doesn't do the common sense thing and practice the LH separately. More likely, he or she continues to go over and over the music with both hands hoping it will somehow resolve itself as a problem.
'Course, that just doesn't happen.
Now there is another factor operating here and that is the fact that the left hand is seldom the melody of the song. This means that, even if we play the LH perfectly, it "doesn't sound like the song." It's not supposed to. The LH's main purpose at the piano (there are, of course, exceptions) is to provide harmony and rhythm to the RH's rendition of the melody. It's an accompaniment to the main show - which is the RH melody. Modern man demands this accompaniment function to enjoy his music. Thus,we need to give the LH whatever time it needs, whether we like it or not, IF we wish to have the full sound we have come to expect from a piece of piano music. Few pianists are happy being only "a right hand pianist."
My advice, then, is simply this. Practice the RH till you can play it your sleep. Then practice the LH by itself till you can...well...play it in your sleep. I mean get really good at that LH part. Perfect timing, perfect note indentities, perfect fingering. Suck it up and do the work for real.
Then, and only then, will you have some chance to put the hands together well. I'll talk about that aspect next week.
2 comments:
Great post! I will definitely share this to my two left-handed students. Hope these tips also work well with them.
Thanks for sharing these tips in music teaching. Keep it up and more power!
Dan Starr replies:
Thanks for the kind words from MusicTeacher above. I wanted to also tell you that "left handers" are forced by the machinery of our world (such as cars, doors, and, yes, the piano itself) to be mostly right-handers. I have never seen a leftie have anything but the very same problems as righties. I think if you try these techniques out you will discover the same thing.
Post a Comment