The Power of Musical Snippets in Your Practice

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the power of musical snippets in your practice. What you’re going to learn today is one of the most valuable techniques you could ever use in your piano practice. The amazing thing about it is that you can use this technique with almost all of your music! It’s incredibly valuable, especially for something fast. I’m going to play the beginning of the B minor Scherzo of Chopin. It’s a little rusty, so I can practice it in front of you. You can see for yourself how this technique works in the accompanying video.

The technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing.

When you’re working on a fast section like this, you could do the obvious thing and put the metronome on a slow speed and do metronome speeds to work it up. But the problem with that approach is that you might hit a wall where you can’t get any faster. Why is that? Because the technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing. This is particularly obvious on a wind instrument because the breaths come in different places. It’s a whole different experience. Even on the piano, fast playing feels different from slow playing. You try to get faster and faster with the metronome, but sometimes you just can’t get any faster.

I’m going to show you a completely different technique using musical snippets.

Just play the smallest possible unit that makes sense to you. Take a tiny number of notes. You can just take the first two notes, then take the next two, and then put them together. Now you might not want to go note by note. You might instead consider note groups that fall under your hands. Some snippets are basically broken chords. You want to get over the next note group as soon as you hit the new hand position; otherwise, you’ll never gain speed. So as you finish one note group, you get your hand in position over the next note group.

You can work through your music this way, gaining confidence and playing with the technique you’re going to eventually use when you play the whole piece.

This technique is great for fast music because you’re playing up to tempo, but you’re just playing a few notes at a time. The number of notes that fit under your hand at a time is usually the right number. Or, you could take even less. Let’s say you’re playing four notes, and it’s not even. Try just playing two or three notes. Try this in your practice, particularly with fast music. It could be almost any piece of music. Just practice little snippets, little groups of notes that fit under your hand at a time, and get over the next position of the next notes that are under your fingers. Work through pieces this way, and you won’t believe the progress you can make when you hit a brick wall practicing with progressively faster metronome speeds. But it’s important to go back and forth. Sometimes metronome speeds are the way to go, and other times using musical snippets can give you an epiphany that takes you to that next level. If one doesn’t work, try the other. You can go back and forth. Let me know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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