You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - More on Hand Independence (Piano Nerd Alert) - #155

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

In today's episode, Peter and Adam give you tips for working on hand independence. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Ennis. And I'm Peter Martin. And this is the You'll Hear It podcast. Jazz advice coming at you. Yeah, I'm trying to get some intensity. Yeah, you see how I respond? No, I know. Well, you're listening, which is super important.

Number one, listen. But, no, I'm into this topic that we're going to talk about today, and I've been focusing on it intensely, and I'm glad we got this question. Oh, good. So I finally got your tension. I got your invigoration. I mean, usually I'm phoning these in, but this one I'm way into. Okay, good.

So you guys might not want to drop off on this one. So we got hit up on Twitter from Benjamin, who is at Ben Day. Wow, he's got a nice little Twitter handle. That's pretty cool. At Ben Day. At Ben Day. Yeah, Ben Day. And he says, you'll hear it episode ID.

Continuing on the solo piano chops episodes, building left, right-hand independence, walk a line with my left hand and solo in my right, or break some of my rhythmic left-hand comping habits while soloing. Since you're a runner, I'm almost wondering. what the Couch to 5K recipe is for building left, right hand independence. So thank you, Benjamin, for that question. And, yeah, actually, Adam and I are both runners. And Couch to 5K, I believe, I don't actually know.

That's like a plan or a program where you... Yeah, I did this in the past maybe 10 years ago. The Cubs said, it's how I got into running. I did some kind of app or something on my phone or it was on the website. I forget where. But anyway, it's a schedule. Ten years ago on your flip phone? Yeah, totally.

No, it's a schedule. Actually, no, man. I had an iPhone, you know, 2008. Wow. Big baller status. Yeah, yeah. There we go. It's a schedule, and it gets you, you start off walking and then walk, run, and then you, you know, gradually increase your distance of running and, you know, how you build up anything.

And you can. I love the couch to 5K part, though. Like, is there something where you have to, you have to actually get off the couch for, is that step one? Get off couch. Yeah, couch to solo piano style. Yeah. But, you know what? I don't know if there is a couch to 5K.

I mean, you can intensely focus on your left hand for a while, but something that Jeffrey Keiser said really hit me the last time he was in here. He recorded a course for us here at Open Studio. And you'll hear it podcast. And you'll hear it podcast. Yeah, it's coming out soon. And both the course and the you'll hear it podcasts are coming out soon. But he was talking about, I mean, Keyes has an amazing left hand.

I mean, he's like a true two-handed pianist. And he said it's, a lifelong pursuit and it's basically it's very simple whatever you practice in your right hand practice in your left right that's it and it's i've started doing this since then because i never i mean i would practice my left hand but i would practice like you know walk in a baseline and left but now whatever i'm working on in my right hand i do it in my left hand as well and i do it both hands together and i i mean i don't know if it's couched a 5k but i'm starting to see like real connection with my left hand now for the first time in a while

I feel like I'm making like big strides on it. So that's my first advice. Big strides. I got you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, that's something I don't practice. No, but, so I mean, and we'll get into some nitty-gritty stuff that you can work on actually for solo piano technique, for sure.

Yeah, in the paid courses. My first bit of advice, something that's been really helping me at the paid course. So that has been really helping me in the last couple of months is to just really include my left hand and everything. Yeah, you know, yeah. Yeah, I think that that's, I guess we knew this, but I remember when Jeffrey said this as well, it was like a light went off. And I was like, wow, I should have thought of that before. And I guess I've gone through some phases of maybe hitting on that, but just as a concept, I love, you know, sort of a simple kind of umbrella thing. And then this idea of everything that you're doing with the right hand, that you do it with the left hand.

I mean, that's going to start to put you in the left hand in a position to be able to compete a little bit. If you go into weightlift, do weightlifting, I mean, no one's going to, you know, just do their right arm with the dumbbell and be like out of balance or whatever. But as pianist, because, I mean, it really just is such a testimony to the mental aspect of playing and why this right versus, you know, dominant versus non-dominant hand, how that is a lifetime battle. Yeah. But we have to also, you know, force our left hand to do things that are not that natural. But, you know, with having the right hand lead, if you think about two-handed things, and we can all do some things two-handed, you know, lines, improvised lines,

simple rifts, whatever it is, wherever you need to start where you're playing both hands together, and then you take the right hand out and just play the left hand. You might have a little bit of trouble doing that because your right hand's leading your left hand. You know, your mind's kind of got everything linked up together. Right. But that's a good way to do it too, where you're playing stuff together

and then you try to challenge yourself at that same tempo or intensity, volume, whatever, with just the left and what you just did with both hands. Well, and one thing I think that Kieser was talking about with this, too, is that he thinks of it as leading with the left hand when he's doing both. Like, that's what you concentrate on. Yeah. Because then you can never go beyond what your left hand can do. Right.

So here's the cool part is since I've kind of started practicing everything with both hands equally, on the gigs, you naturally start doing more. Yeah. And then that snowballs on itself, right? Because that's when you really grow, right? It's when you start throwing that in and you start feeling comfortable and you start getting that confidence in it. Yeah. And you start knowing like, oh, I can use that. this. And then it just makes you want to practice that way more and realize the value of it. I mean,

imagine if you could, anything you could do in your right hand, you could do with your left hand at both. You would be like, you would sound sick. Yeah. And you could, you would really use that. You know, you could really use that. It'd be very useful to be able to do, you know, unison lines, up tempos or whatever you need to do. And you actually go into using your right hand, you know, you're a big proponent of practicing the same voicing as you do in your left hand. Yeah. In your right hand. I think that's also great. It also

kind of makes you a two-handed pianist very useful in solo piano situations. Yeah, well, and I think that there's, yeah, there's the practical we got a tornado siren model. Do you hear it? Oh, you know, it must be the first That's the first Monday. Ooh, we give it away our secret of when this was recorded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, it's just a test of the tornado

sirens in St. Louis, which are being used, time of year. Yeah, we had one the other day in the middle of our session. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They could have skipped this test. We already know it works. Yeah, we know it works because one came rolled on through the city. Yeah, but I think that the application, like what you said in terms of solo piano, certainly a lot of times for these things to come up. But even there's just the actual value we get from practicing these things. And like I've always done stuff just more of just

sort of challenge and try to develop things in a way. I'm trying to remember. like a term like muscle confusion. Yeah. I think it's some kind of thing when you're working out. It's a weightlifting thing. Yeah, like where you don't always do the same thing to kind of challenge your muscles to push them in a new way. And I would like it, but it's basically anything the one hand doesn't normally do.

So I would practice baselines with my right hand, like down in that range. Awesome. I think that's great. Yeah, just to get me thinking differently because I'm like, okay, if I'm going to have the left hand thinking differently and independently, I got to do the same thing with the right hand. Yeah. And then the left hand soloing.

Sometimes I'll comp, you know, with my right hand on time, you know, flipping my hands over each other. and solo with the left hand. Because we're kind of talking about two things. And I think the question was about two things. There's just the building up of the left hand, kind of getting it closer to being with the right hand. But then there's the actual independence

and being able to do two different things independently, which is a little bit of a different skill, but it depends upon that left hand really being well developed to be able to do it. But I think you're right with the muscle confusion thing. You have to do things that feel uncomfortable. You just have to. You know, you have to, when you are learning a tune or practicing a tune,

And as much as you're playing the melody with your right hand and comping and doing a baseline with your left, you have to flip that. You have to practice the melody with your left and practice comping with your right. And you know what? You will use that. If you get comfortable with that, it's a great sound on a solo piano thing. And it's very useful to be the pass that melody off between the hands and even have a middle hand where you can comp around, you know, you're using the thumb and index finger of both hands as sort of like your melody. and you're comping above it, you're comping below it, you're comping around it.

You know what I mean? So there's a whole bunch of stuff to practice in this regard. Yep, good stuff. Yeah. All right, well, thank you for the question, hitting us up on Twitter, and you can hit us there because we're trying to up our Twitter game, right?

We talked about that. We're trying to up our Twitter game. Yeah. Man, I don't like tweeting. Well, we can read the people's tweets at least. Come on, man. I'm into Instagram. I like Instagram.

Instagram. Okay, well, hit up Adam on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is yours public, though? I think so. I don't know. Okay. I mean, it's not verified or anything.

All right, so actually just hit us up at Hey Open Studio on Instagram or Twitter. How about that? I'm good with that. I'm good with that. I'm good with that. And what would be great if you give us a rating review, we really ask for these a lot. But we're consistent with it, you know. Are we begging?

Yeah, we do, quote unquote. Yes, sir, I think you brought it up. Okay, so we're going to read just as an example. Do your own, but this is an example from 67 Vintage from, the UK. The title of this review on iTunes is, if I could give it six stars, I would. You can.

That's a true fan. That's someone who listens. You're lazy. You didn't do it. And it's five-star review. Always funny, always interesting, often very insightful. I mean, not always funny. Well, we're always funny, but we're not always inside.

I love that. Sometimes insightful. And short, what more could you want? That's right. Curing world hunger, but short of that. Well, in order to keep it short, you'll hear it. Thank you.