How to Fix Notes and Fingerings

A huge part of playing the piano involves learning correct physical habits.

So what happens when a habit doesn’t lead to the desired result? And what happens when that bad habit tends to stick? Any teacher has experience how difficult it can be to change an already-learned fingering or wrong note. The habit, once ingrained, has a pesky way of coming back again and again.

There is a simple rule to remember when dealing with these instances: Any physical habit must first be performed with conscious awareness.

Think about tying your shoe laces. After many thousands of repetitions, you simply do not think about each individual motion. But when you first learned as a child, this was a complex task with many steps needing conscious attendance. It seems that all of our complex physical abilities – such as playing the piano – were built like this: One step at a time until each step becomes subconsciously controlled enough to leave mental bandwidth for the next.

So the secret to correcting a “mis-learned” note, fingering, or practically anything else, is fairly straight forward, at least in principle:

1. Identify the Problem
2. Isolate It
3. Repeat the Correction in Expanding Contexts

Here’s an example of a mis-learned fingering I worked through with an incredibly bright student this morning:

From Debussy’s “Children’s Corner” – Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum, m. 3-4

In this passage, my student had learned the right hand B and E in (marked in red) with fingers 3 and 2. We decided that 4 and 3 would make life much easier, but the bad fingering was already pretty well ingrained. Of course, all attempts to change the fingering “on the fly” from the beginning of the phrase were met with frustration.

A very small but logical isolation of this problem is to play the 5 sixteenth notes starting from the beginning of the measure (from the middle blue arrow).

Still the problem persisted. So we isolated things even more by using “pause practice”. My student played very slowly from the beginning of the measure like before, but took a long pause on the note preceding the two notes in red – in other words she paused on the G below the third arrow to the right. During this pause, she could now very consciously think about the fingerings that would occur on the next two notes. (Side note: taking a real pause and deliberately thinking ahead can take some real self-control and/or coaxing if you haven’t yet learned how.)

Success!

After this was practiced several times with full concentration, the pause could be dropped. And from here it was simply a matter of starting from the second arrow, and then from the first, to put the corrected habit in context.

It is always important to put new physical habits like this into context by the way, because as the area being practiced is widened, the old habit tends to creep back in.

And of course it goes without saying that much of this practice was done under tempo!

Happy Practicing!