Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum So-called Arm Weight Method?

I recently found a teacher, and have had two lessons so far. She seems smart and sounds like she knows what she's doing, but it's messing with my head.

I showed her the two Bach Inventions I've learned and she says I'm "digitizing" too much, and gave me a C major scale outline that shows "In" and "Out" positions. She also seems to be suggesting that my fingers remain mostly flacid and that I need to use my arms to press the notes...

So I've done some googling, and this seems to be the "arm weight" method. While I'm not averse to learning a new and better technique, I'm a middle-aged guy, have played non-classical stuff for a long time, and if this is going to be some 5 year tear-down and rebuild project, I'm probably not interested in going through that. But if there is a reasonable, more or less organic way to integrate this into the way I already play, then I have an open mind.

Practically speaking, when I practice "arm weight" on my own, I have no idea whether I'm "doing it right" or not. While I do (I think) understand conceptually what she's trying to impart, I still have no clue on the physical sensation/feedback level. Can anyone recommend any online resources that might give me a better insight into this?

full kudos for bringing this up. I've never understood it. What does playing piano with arm weight feel like? How different can it be to what I do naturally? I know my arms weigh something but so what?

Bring on those insightful replies!!!

I'd love some insight into this, too. I have trouble with playing forte, and some people have told me it comes from arm weight, or even that I have to use my back and torso. I have no clue. Help!

I'm with dire tonic, thanks for bringing it up.

Cathy

Yeah, hopefully some of the heavy-hitters here in terms of formal piano technique will be willing to chime in.

I recently purchased Paul Wirth's Gravi-DVD here:

http://www.wirthcenter.org/support.htm

Haven't fired it up yet - has anyone else tried this dvd?

Someone may come in with a better explanation than the one I'm about to give. In fact, I hope they do, because I have never found an adequate way of typing out the explanation. But I'll do my best.

I am most familiar with "finger-weight" playing being referred to as "isolation". When you play with only your fingers, they are disconnected from the rest of the playing mechanism, which includes everything up to your shoulders (but for practicality, you can usually stop thinking at the elbow). When you use finger weight alone to press down a key, you have to use additional forearm strength because the finger doesn't weigh very much. In order to generate the force needed, you have to add speed, which means you have to use your muscles. The more you use your muscles, the faster you will feel fatigue. So, when your forearms tighten up, one reason is because your fingers are playing independent of the arm. Sometimes this is because of misalignment; sometimes it is because of isolation.

In order to eliminate this kind of isolated movement, your fingers, hands, wrists, arms, and elbows must all be in alignment, and must all move actively in order to depress each key that you play. If the arm is aligned and moving down through the finger, you add the mass/weight of your arm to the finger, and as a result, you don't need to use as much muscle to play the note.

Try this: suspend your arm over the keys and play a five-note scale using only your fingers. Don't move your hand, wrist, arm or elbow. Lock them in place. If you have to, hold your arm with your LH. When you play, the movement will feel extremely isolated.

Perhaps an even better example is what we're doing right now: typing. If your wrists are resting on a gel pad, the desk, etc, and the only thing you're using to type is your fingers, then you are isolating and using only "finger weight". This is much easier to get away with on a keyboard, because the weight of a letter is significantly less than the weight of a key on a piano.

I hope this helped a little..?

. Suggest these vids

[video:http://youtu.be/_CtFxe9pLME[/video]

If you like jump to 9:00

Derulux, I think you pretty much said it well. Which is NOT easy!

Building on what you said, it comes down to efficiency. We can use tiny muscles on the underside of the forearm to control fingers. Because those are the muscles that control fingers Or we can use as much of the weight of bodies as we need to get the same effect. It's about alignment and using body weight and mechanics efficiently.

The big general idea of it is the same as in a sport where the coach say "Put your body into it." It comes down efficient transfer of weight to generate force.

It's the same exact thing in many martial arts including Taichi in particular.

Thanks for the explanations and the videos! I found them quite useful. Some stuff I had sort of experimented with and it was nice to have that reinforced, and some stuff I had heard of but not really thought about, so it was good to see. More things to try incorporating!

Cathy

Graham Fitch has recently written several articles on the history of keyboard technique that I highly recommend. The first is here: http://practisingthepiano.com/history-piano-technique-part-1/

Arm weight means you let the keys take the weight of your arm, instead of wasting energy using your bicep or forearm to hold up the arm. It's an extremely efficient way to play.

The fingers still have to be strong, but they are a support mechanism, not the engine driving the movement. Let gravity drive the movement. (the feeling of arm weight is like doing a handstand on one finger.)

Derulux, Hriechgott, thanks both for your input, more to get a grasp on than either of those videos could offer IMHO. Although I'm a big fan of Graham Fitch, he didn't seem to have enough to say about arm weight. Without having a proper physical demo by a good teacher it's going to remain something of a mystery to me.

I think I've gotten much better with the "arm-weight" part over the years. I spent some time just exaggerating the movements and using gravity to play chords, etc, so that I got some extra oomph and volume, and exaggerating some wrist movements so that it became more fluent and part of what I use to both get around the piano geography and to find differences in touch. But I'm still out of it on how to use the rest of my body. I've also discovered, tho I'm not as good at using it yet, the importance of leaning to one side or the other to help with alignment and reaching things. But I've seen people actually come off the piano bench when they do big fortes. So I guess that's a clue that maybe I should explore, eh?

Cathy

Yep, for big block chordy stuff in ff, it's more meaningful. But for the more fingery sort of playing, I can't see how I can get 'weight' to work.


Call me small minded but I would pay to watch a concert of various performers each coming off their bench in turn. But only if it were the real thing. I don't want artificial slapstick.

+1 for saying thank you for the comments. If I can integrate this in any kind of natural, organic way I want to start incorporating some of these concepts. But it HAS to be organic.

I think it's more important for softer playing (in terms of sound production) than loud playing. If you don't use arm weight, there is a tendency to "brush" the keys and not play to the bottom of the key. It makes sound production very hard to control, and often leads to uneven sound, with slight accents where you don't want them.

Much harder to shape and play soft than loud.

What I'm concerned about is that you have a new teacher who is teaching you about these things, but you are asking for information on the forum. There are several considerations here. One is that changing how you play physically is no small undertaking. It requires careful work with a competent and observant teacher. If you do have such a teacher, then you should be under that person's guidance and work with her. Extra information may be helpful or hinder. You also have learn how to balance your instincts together with what you're told, and know where to let go which time. If you are NOT with someone who knows what they are doing and who just has superficial knowledge, it might be a mess.

I went through this on another instrument the whole nine yards. There were a lot of concepts that I misunderstood and it created a mess. When I came to piano, I was resuming what I had done self-taught decades before, and by then I knew my playing mechanism was off (ironically from that first experience). I am working with my teacher right now with these kinds of things and it is working.

The concept of "arm weight" is also talked about in other instruments. For me it was with violin, and I thought you had a "heavy" arm that kept its weight as a kind of dead weight. The same problem arises with "relaxed" anything, which does not mean limp or flaccid (my original concept). Both of these ideas can come into piano, with the same misperceptions.

DIGITIZING is the idea that the action comes from your fingers (I had that). The bottom line is that your whole body works together. There is a flow along the body - I won't even try to describe it - but it does change how you play, makes things easier, and prevents injury.

For another view -- go to the site below, locate the archive in the right hand column, and start with 2010 and work through the articles in order. Andrew Thayer has helped me a great deal -- but it takes time and patience to read and do the exercises.

His site is: http://pianoscience.blogspot.co.uk/

Well trust me to get it completely ar$e about face.

A quick observation; I notice immediately the more I concentrate on feeling or 'letting' my arm weight somehow participate then my wrist is inclined to sag. The only way I can find to overcome that is to introduce some rigidity into the wrist, which is bad medicine. Either that or I raise some part of the arm (elbow/shoulder) to relax the wrist but this defeats the effort to bring weight to bear. I'll have to revisit this after the next recital but I'd like to make it work.