Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Another use of Brendan's advice

Some months ago, Brendan advocated the use of "wrist flapping" to facilitate some types of double note playing. I have found over the last couple of weeks that this trick really works wonders in the right hand figures of certain stride pieces.

Waller, Johnson and many others frequently used a lot of rapid double note figures, often chords split into fourths or, harder still, alternations of one note against three, as in Carolina Shout.

While not difficult in quite the same sense as similar things in classical pieces are difficult, the rhythmic insistence nonetheless made me feel tired at the end of something like Gladyse or Carolina Shout.

So I tried holding my fingers a fraction flatter and using Brendan's wrist flapping - now these things are much easier and the rhythm sounds better too. It didn't happen at once, but a couple of weeks and I'm used to it. Thanks again, Brendan.

Can you clarify what wrist flapping is?

i too want to know what wrist flapping means? i read from Abby Whiteside that some double 3rds are played by pulling upper arm, which i tried and worked well for some passages.

Hmm... Horowitz flaps his wrists a bit in the video of Rach 3...

I'm not sure exactly how the technique works or how to achieve it, but it looks like Horowitz did this quite a bit in that concerto when he had repeated notes or especially repeated chords.

Huh... still without explain

Yeah - i'm intruiged to. Will someone please explain... x

You keep your arms steady, move your wrists in an up and down motion to hit chords/repeated notes.


It takes a little while to build up speed, but most if not all professionals have used it, regularly use it, and it is a very accurate method.

If you keep your fingers in contact with the keys, elbow relatively still and move your wrist joint up and down you will get a rough idea of it. When you actually play it's a good deal more subtle but that's the general idea.

O yeah my teacher was having me do that one some repeated chords in the Khachaturian toccata. Worked really well actually.

Ahhh ok. I did that with Prokofiev's Toccata. Works awesome. But i discovered it before Brendan (yeah right)