When I accept new students that have been trying to teach themselves, mostly from YouTube videos, I often cringe. That's my usual reaction because most of the time these students have been learning from semi-amateurs/non-classically trained musicians who have been handing down bad technique and habits to these impressionable learners. That makes my job a WHOLE lot harder, as I have to un-train them from these bad habits and then re-train them the correct way. One very good and public example is the newest Subway $5 footlong commercial where the famous singer/songwriter Charlie Puth is performing a jingle singing, while accompanying himself on keys. Now, I can't speak to his singing ability, as I'm not a vocalist; but I can attest that his piano technique as witnessed here is HORRENDOUS! As soon as he starts playing (0:08), we can see his right hand bouncing off the keys as high as almost half a foot (no pun intended!). There are even animations of green and yellow lines rendered above his hand that accentuates this fact. "Why is this such an issue," you ask? Well just think: if he's playing all those repetitive chords on every single beat, it would make much more sense to stay closer to the keys than to spend extra time and energy to come back from a mile high for that entire length of the jingle. Also his left hand is just....*sigh* where do I start? Notice his active fore- and middle fingers (2 & 3) are pretty straight, which shows tension, and it doesn't take a musician to know that when doing anything with tension, you'll wear down faster, and the task at hand will be much harder than compared to when you're totally relaxed. We can say that the human hand is relaxed when we naturally let the fingers curve. On to the next issue....the inactive ring and pinky fingers (4 & 5) are at a weird angle and even look uncomfortably squeezed in every so slightly. Again, when we're relaxed, our fingers will natural curl, forming a "C" shape, and all the fingertips will be equally settled on the surface of the keys. Finally, the thumb (1) is mostly inactive, and for some reason Charlie thinks that because of this he can just hang it down off the side of his keyboard. That might be ok if we didn't use thumb at all when playing piano/keys, but we do, so this isn't kosher. And then he does a weird cross-under at the end with his 1st finger (0:21), which is totally unnecessary---he could've finished with his 2nd or 3rd fingers, since they were doing most of the work all along in that area. Thumb cross-overs/-unders only are needed when doing scale-like passages where one might run out of fingers from their current position (for example, playing 7 keys stepping up with the right hand would demand us to execute a thumb cross-under). Of course, after thinking about the whole premise of this short performance by Charlie Puth, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and consider that maybe the Subway commercial executives wanted him to be very "showy." So perhaps the commercial director told Charlie to do all these things that I"m pointing out, on purpose. But I wanted to have a little rant and make a public disclaimer that this is NOT how one plays the keys/piano! So if you are one of those people that is trying to teach themselves any instrument via YouTube videos, please take the technique shown with a grain of salt. Better yet, just hire a music instructor who can teach you the CORRECT way of playing your instrument!
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About this blogHello world, this is your friendly musician friend and teacher, Joseph! This is where I share my thoughts and feelings about anything and everything music-related. Enjoy! Archives
September 2022
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