8 Tips To Help You Play Faster
How To Play Faster: Tips For Increasing Speed and Accuracy
One of the questions I asked a lot when I was a younger keyboardist and something that I have since been asked by my own students is how can you learn to play faster. While I have a few tips for how you can speed up your playing, unfortunately it still involves a lot of hard work and daily drills if you want to achieve success. Don’t despair though, there are ways to make your practise sessions more fun and the sense of achievement you get once you start playing faster is awesome!
Of course, you cannot have speed without accuracy, so this is something that must be developed at the same time.
The first step in achieving faster playing is to pick the section of music that you would like to learn – maybe start with either scales or a solo that you are particularly fond of and would like to master. If you’re not good at picking out notes by ear then you’ll need to find the music notation for whatever you’re going to be learning. Over the coming weeks I’ll add more suggested exercises to get you started.
1. Choosing The Correct Fingers
Once you have your chosen piece selected, it’s time to sort out which fingers to use that will give you the smoothest outcome. Take your time to play through the piece in sections, trying different fingers until playing feels natural and as though it could be sped up easily without your fingers tripping over themselves. The ultimate aim is to have as little movement as possible in your hands.
If you’re already pretty adept at playing scales you’ll find natural ways to tackle a piece but if you’re not familiar with the finger patterns used in scales then that would be a good place to start. You need to get used to crossing your thumb under or your fingers over so that you can travel smoothly up and down the keyboard. One you have a good finger pattern in place then it’s time for the real work to begin.
2. Developing Muscle Memory
There are various studies on how many repetitions are required to start developing muscle memory, but some of the more accepted figures are 300 repetitions per day or 3000-5000 repetitions in total. My preferred method therefore is to run through a short section around 30 times in a row, six times per day for around 28 days (approx 5-10 minutes per run-through). You might prefer to work differently, although I have found that this particular method works well for me personally and the short bursts help to avoid any repetitive strain injury. Quite often I hit my goal before the 28 days are up and can move on to the next challenge, but this will depend on how long you have been playing overall.
3. Get Your Technique Correct At This Stage
Make sure that wrists, hands, fingers are all relaxed. Move your hands further into the keybed rather than playing the edges of the keys. Use slight movement in your wrist when moving up and down the keyboard. If you’re struggling, try raising your wrists slightly while practising, although be careful not to put any strain on your hands during the exercise. The ultimate aim is for your hands to be relaxed so that your fingers can flow easily across the keys.
4. Starting Out Slowly
The trick here is to start at a very slow tempo and once you have achieved accuracy and cleanliness in your playing, only then should you move up to the next tempo, adding a couple of BPM at a time. It can be a good idea to go slightly beyond the end speed that you’re looking to achieve, then slowing it back down makes it much easier to play.
5. Pay Attention To Each Note
Stay focused as you are playing and really give each note your full attention. Pay attention to attack, pressing into the keys to get each note sounding uniform, lock in with the timing of the metronome or track you are practising to and make sure that each note ends in a timely fashion too. If you’re struggling, then some finger independence exercises might help. Don’t lift your hands away from the keys, stay close to them at all times – aim for minimal movement, something that I decsribe to my students as ‘lazy playing’.
6. Train Your Brain To Think Ahead
One of the secrets to becoming a better keyboardist is the ability to think ahead to what’s coming next. It takes a while to train your brain to do this but once you start to get to grips with it, you’ll be able to play pieces through without stumbling between each chord change or section. Another mental trick I use is telling myself to “hurry up” on a particularly fast section – while staying in time of course, but it gets my brain into a more urgent mode for tackling those faster runs.
7. Consistency Is Key
Setting this small goal of six short practise sessions a day is fairly achievable and also becomes fairly addictive as you start to improve. Set a schedule for yourself that you can easily maintain and set reminders. We all get tired after a busy working day and feel as thoguh we can’t be bothered, so make things as easy as possible on yourself by having a small, accessible keyboard close to the sofa, or set up so that you can switch on and be playing within seconds. The easier you make it on yourself, the more likely you are to stick with the training schedule.
8. Other Tips That May Help You To Play Faster
Never underestimate the benefits of training on a weighted keyboard, especially one with wooden keys. This will strengthen your fingers and help to develop more accuracy in your playing, so then if you happen to switch back to a synth action keyboard for performance, the whole piece will be so much easier to play.
Schedule repertoire and technique as two separate practise sessions. Use these technique training sessions to really break down difficult sections so that they get the attention that they need.
Conclusion
This daily drilling of the exercise is one of the best ways to to tackle difficult sections, solos and scales and will help you to hit a new plateau in your training. I personally monitored my progress over the course of 14 days with a particularly difficult solo and unexpectedly managed to master it in that time. This method has now become a part of my regular daily practice, with a new solo, scale or difficult passage of music being introduced each fortnight.
I hope that these tips help with your performance and improving the speed and accuracy of your playing and look forward to receiving your comments.
Metronomes are lovely and can be very useful tools when training, but this keyboardist likes to play along to drummers! Here is a playlist of different tempos so that you can gradually speed up your chosen exercise every couple of days. The slight changes in feel will also help to train your ears, hone your timing and improve your playing, plus stop practise time becoming boring. You’ll be playing fast in no time.