Top Tips on Choosing Your Piano Fingerings
Top Tips on Choosing Your Piano Fingerings
They may be daunting to some but finding the right piano fingerings could be the essential next step in your piano practice. While most beginners will have the aid of their teachers to choose their fingerings, not knowing how to choose the right fingering on the piano will make it harder for you to reach great musical expression, and create technical problems down the line.
You might be thinking: but the score already indicates some fingering, can’t I just follow what it suggests? And while this can be an easy starting point, every pianist is different. The fingering on the score might simply not suit you so well, and forcing yourself to follow something that’s not comfortable for your fingers could limit your ability to play a piece to your full potential.
So, without further ado, let’s have a look at some tips on how to choose your piano fingerings:
Tip #1: Find what works for you
As we mentioned before, everyone is different! The piano fingering that might work for one might not suit another. In older scores, you’re likely to find all kinds of strange piano fingerings suggested on the page but just because it’s written down, it doesn’t mean that you should follow it.
Feel free to experiment and discover what works best for you!
Tip #2: Master your Scales
Of course, how can you figure out the right piano fingerings if you're not sure about your Scales? You must master your scales to understand what works and what doesn’t with your piano fingerings. This way, you will at least already have memorised the fingering when playing scales.
Tip #3: Write it down
So, you've finally figured out the best piano fingerings for the piece you're playing, congrats! So what's next?
It might sound obvious but it's easy to forget: make sure you write them down on your score. The last thing you'll want to do is re-work out the fingerings for each piece as you're about to play, simply because you forgot to write them down on your score!
Tip #4: Repeat fingerings
Every piece is bound to have repeated sections. A good tip to save you some time would be to also repeat your fingerings in those sections. Why make things harder when the score is already repeating itself?
It’s also a great way to maintain emphasis across each passage!
Tip #5: Avoid uncomfortable crossings
A common mistake that many piano beginners make is to over-cross their fingers in uncomfortable ways, harming their playing. Avoid crossing 3 over 4, or placing 3 under 2. Why make things harder when you can always find a more comfortable solution?
Remember, piano fingerings are there to make your playing smoother and more cohesive, and weird finger acrobatics aren't likely to help with that!
Tip #6: Keep adjusting
Just because the piano fingerings worked before, it doesn't mean that they should be the only fingerings you use.
As you progress in your practice, things are bound to change. So feel free to adjust your piano fingerings so that they always work on aiding your playing instead of impairing it.
We hope that this blog has made piano fingerings sound a lot less scary than you might initially have thought. Ultimately, this is just another element of playing the piano where you need to experiment to find what works for you. Every pianist is different and the earlier you discover what suits your playing the best, the better you'll progress with your practice.
