5 common bad habits (and how to correct them)

When learning to play a musical instrument, it’s inevitable that bad habits will crop up in the early stages. It’s crucial that these habits are correctly dealt with in order to progress. In this post, I’ll address some of the most common bad habits that arise when learning to play the piano and explain the methods and exercises that can be used to correct them.

Playing with weak fingers

Young beginners in particular often have a tendency to play with their fingers bent at the first knuckle joint, resulting in weaker fingers and poorly controlled playing.

The ‘Energize Your Fingers Every Day’ series by Helen Marlais and Timothy Brown contains a number of fun exercises that address this problem. For older and more advanced students, I recommend ‘Pianoforte Technique: on an Hour a Day’ by Geoffrey Tankard and Eric Harrison, which contains a number of useful technical exercises. I particularly like the Preliminary Five Finger Exercise and the Weak Fingers exercise (1), as they require students to play with strong fingers, resulting in controlled playing.

Stopping and going back to the start

Students who have recently started learning to play the piano tend to react to a small mistake by stopping and returning to the very first bar of the piece. This is unhelpful as it means they simply play through large sections of music that don’t require work, resulting in unfocused practice sessions. It can also mean that they find it difficult to start from different places in the piece – an important skill when playing music. Finally, it can lead to students equating little slips with big mistakes that they find difficult to recover from.

This particular habit requires that the student simply stop themselves stopping when they make a mistake, and either carry on or pick up again from the nearest possible place.

Staring down at the keys

This habit arises when students feel as though they need to look for each key before they play it. Not only is this untrue, but it can also be prohibitive, for two reasons. Firstly, it means that the student isn’t following the score and could easily get lost. Secondly, it stops the student learning the geography of the keyboard, as their hands don’t learn their way around as successfully when they are simply looking for the next key.

A very simple way to tackle this problem is to hold a book over the student’s hands while they are playing. Students are usually worried when you propose this, however, they find that it is ultimately an encouraging exercise, as they quickly realise that they can play perfectly well without staring down at their hands.

Becoming tense

It’s very common to inadvertently raise the shoulders and tighten the hands and wrists whilst playing the piano, creating unnecessary and prohibitive tension. Students themselves often don’t realise that they have tensed up until their teacher makes them aware of it.

One way to avoid and eliminate tension is to incorporate a quick warm up into lessons and practice sessions. Here is one idea for a warm up:

1. Sit up straight (not slouched) towards the front of the piano stool, at the correct distance from the piano (not too far away or too close).

2. Raise the shoulders and hold in place for three seconds, noting the feeling of tension, before relaxing them.

3. Shake the arms and hands before allowing them to go floppy.

4. Finally, raise the hands to the piano, ensuring that the forearms are parallel to the floor.

Students should repeat this exercise whenever they feel like they are becoming tense, pausing regularly during practice sessions to check for tension.

Emphasising the first beat of the bar

The mathematical way that notation is divided up accounts for a common tendency to instinctively emphasise the strong beats in a melody, particularly the first beat of each bar, leading to unmusical playing.

One of the best ways to fix this issue is to ask the student to sing (or imagine singing) the melody. They will inevitably sing through each phrase without unnecessarily accenting any individual notes. When they go back to playing the melody, ask them to concentrate on playing it in exactly the same way, listening carefully to avoid any unnecessary accents.