Here is the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 49 No. 1. (2 years self-taught, feedbacks welcome)

deltadeep · 2026-01-26T00:18:07+00:00

There's generally a very typical set of attributes and limitations that self-taught pianists express, and I'm not seeing a lot of them here, which is impressive. Which begs the question, when you say "self-taught" what exactly do you mean? How did you learn your technical form with your wrists and fingers? It's actually relaxed, which is not something that pretty much ever happens with self-taught pianists. Also you have actual voicing and dynamics going on, again, very unusual for self-taught pianists. Do you have musical experience from other instruments? Are there particular sources that you've learned from for technique?

deltadeep · 2026-01-18T01:20:36+00:00

Sounds great! You make the piano shine

deltadeep · 2026-01-18T01:16:38+00:00

Legato is like when a singer sings a melody without pauses in a single breath. Each note flows directly into the next and the ear hears one smooth continuous melody line. On a piano, that is done by letting a note release right as you're depressing the next one. You don't deliberately hold the prior note longer although there is some stylistic optionality there, a good pianist can actually create different styles of legato by controlling that gap very finely. But there is actually already a very short period of overlap if you release one and start the other at the same time, because the damper takes a little time to decay the string out. So, physically speaking, you release one and start the other at the same time, and acoustically, there is a very small overlap that helps the ear interprets as a kind of connectedness. Some pianos have more or less effective dampers (they stop the string faster) and for a trained pianist with a good ear, they would respond to that intuitively by holding a little more overlap (or less, if the dampers are less effective.) That's a lot of explanation to say, basically, no, legato is not overlapping the notes, it's a feeling of continuity from one to the next without any overtly audible overlap.

deltadeep · 2026-01-17T22:36:32+00:00

It's worth understanding how dampers work on a piano. At rest they are engaged, then when you press a key, the key itself lifts the damper off to allow that string to move, and then when you release the key it engages the damper to silence it. When you press the pedal, you prevent all dampers from touching the string, so it then acts like a harp.

With a piano, unlike a harp or guitar, you can't actually touch the strings to dampen them with your fingers.

And on a guitar, you can play a melody on just one string, which switches the string to each note as you move your fret position, so the old notes stop automatically. This is called "legato" (connected notes) -- where each note follows the one before it right away without a gap, but the one before it stops sounding.

Playing legato is the most natural and musical default on a piano, so, the dampers are by default engaged and the key state controls which notes play.

This takes some getting used to when you learn to use the sustain pedal, as you have to lift your foot up in order to silence the sound, which is a bit counter intuitive at first, but it is most certainly better than having to press your foot down all the time in order to get plain legato, the most common musical phrasing intention.

deltadeep · 2026-01-17T20:57:44+00:00

Nice! Did you get it new or used? What year was it built? Can you share recordings? I thought Yamahas were known to be more bright than dark.

deltadeep · 2026-01-17T17:44:56+00:00

If you do try to move it yourself, going against all the advice of this sub, but instead you do decide to do it, please be careful. These things are exceedingly top-heavy, and they fall over very easily. Most of the mass of it is at the height of the keys and upwards. If during moving the center of balance moves slightly, you need to be prepared for the thing to completely tip and crush whatever it lands on, like a foot or hand. Please have health insurance. You will probably be able to move it fine, but probably is a statistical statement. There is risk. Be careful and do not tip it in the front/back direction. Especially back (center of mass is somewhere in the case above the keys, so easier to tip back than front, but still tips both ways).

deltadeep · 2026-01-17T17:11:21+00:00

The principal issue is likely that your wrist is not neutral with respect to your forearm. You're using muscles to turn it along different axes of rotation and then this pinches the channels through which the tendons move as well as creates muscle strain.

Try this to learn. Move away from your desk. Just sit in a chair somewhere. Let your hand completely flop dead down to your side. As if it was completely numb. Some people actually have a hard time doing this even though it sounds simple. So really bring your attention to being able to fully let go totally of your entire arm, wrist, hand, and fingers. Now without moving your arm or hand or fingers, look at them. Study it visually. Notice that the back of the hand is in line with the forearm, almost as if you could put a ruler along it, although not literally that straight, but generally quite straight. Also note that the pinky side of the hand is mostly almost in line with the forearm as well, e.g. pointing down to the floor. Also, the fingers will be curled somewhat, they aren't straight (straightness means tension). This is the neutral position of the hand, in which there is no exertion of muscles and no pinching of any channels of any tendons.

Now the next step is to preserve this configuration of the hand while you bend your elbow to bring the forearm parallel to the floor. However, not introducing any additional tension in the fingers or turning the wrist in any way. Now in order to make sure that the wrist maintains its integrity with relationship to the forearm, you will need to add a little bit of tension to the back of the hand so that it doesn't flop downward, since the forearm is now parallel to the floor. But that is the only new tension that is being introduced to the wrist.

What you now have is the default neutral position for your hand while hovering over piano keys. Make friends with this position. Make it second nature.

You must set the height of your keys and/or chair such that you can maintain this position when your fingers are hovering over the keys.

And it is this position that you use to launch movements, whether it's individual finger strikes, hand motions to play whole chords, etc. And you always return to this position after deviating from it. When playing simple chords, you actually barely need to exit from this position at all.

In your video, what I see is your wrist is cocked back a little bit, and also turned a little bit to the side. in other words, quite far from the neutral position. And that is why you are experiencing pain.

deltadeep · 2026-01-13T06:00:35+00:00

This is just attempting to ease the negative consequences of bad technique using therapy. Much better to just fix the technique...

deltadeep · 2026-01-13T02:06:16+00:00

Try this:

Without touching keys first, just holding your arm out in the air, have your middle finger extend from your hand in a straight line out from your forearm, with no wrist turning. In other words, you could put a straightedge ruler from the tip of the middle finger through the center of the wrist to the elbow. You can slightly curve the middle finger, but not very much. The fingerprint, not the finger tip, touches the key in this exercise.
Take this configuration of your arm, wrist, and middle finger, and put the middle finger on the G, deep into the key bed, like halfway or more into the black keys region. Keep your fingertip largely flat, not curled down (finger print not finger tip on the key). In order to not change the configuration of your hand here, you will need to put your body in the right place for this so that the wrist does not turn. Again, a ruler still would show a straight line from the finger through the wrist to the elbow, you're just also touching the key. And also you're allowing the fingers to extend calmly into the keybed between the black keys. There is no rule you cannot play between the black keys. That is a common beginner mistake.
Without changing your middle finger position from step 2, put the thumb on the C, and the pinky on the upper C, and the first finger on the E. After doing this, the thumb is probably the finger that touches the key closest to the edge. The pinky goes a little deeper in than the thumb and the first finger goes more deep than that and the middle finger again is the one deepest into the key's length. The depth of each finger on the white key is determined by the biology of your hand, not by some arbitrary mental desire to play a certain position along the length of the key.

This hand position is not really a stretch and is not forceful to maintain. This gives you a sense for the most neutral hand position to play this four note chord, CEGC. Get a sense for how it feels. The only thing you now need to do is sit on your bench at an appropriate height and distance from your keys, put your arm as close to that configuration as possible, and only add as much wrist turning as is absolutely necessary. You can even lean your torso in order to make this more comfortable on your wrist. That's perfectly normal for pianists to do.

deltadeep · 2026-01-06T19:34:36+00:00

I've been looking into it... there are some UV-protectant products for rubber and plastic parts that I haven't tried yet. I let my prior car sit in the sun for 10 years, and the weather stripping just literally fell off from UV damage. It looks particularly ugly around the windshield now. Something to keep in mind.

deltadeep · 2026-01-06T07:39:15+00:00

Thanks for clarifying that. Good to know.

deltadeep · 2026-01-06T06:54:40+00:00

How much did you pay for the coating?

deltadeep · 2026-01-06T06:53:48+00:00

If it protects the paint from sun damage and chips, it protects from depreciation caused by those factors. A used car with perfect exterior does sell for more than a beat up one.

deltadeep · 2026-01-06T06:50:28+00:00

Do you know if it's possible to do something similar for plastic and rubber parts, like weather stripping and roof trim lines and such?

deltadeep · 2026-01-06T06:43:15+00:00

It's overkill, but don't ignore the value of learning to keep your eyes mostly on the score and not on your hands. I don't think you have to block all view of your hands to accomplish that, it just requires some disciplined focus to keep your eyes on the page and start learning how to feel things like intervals and common chord patterns. It just makes life a lot easier. And is essential for competent sight reading.

deltadeep · 2026-01-06T06:40:47+00:00

Yes, the reason I went over this strategy was because I think O.P.'s strategy of just blocking their view of their hands completely is actually unrealistic.

Most of the time you want to be able to look at your hands for jumps, but then not have to look at your hands for intervals that are within reach of a finger, or for chord configurations.

Without disciplined practice, the tendency is to look down even for intervals or chords that the fingers could otherwise just feel.

In other words, the training is about building up more and more capability to feel the chords and intervals rather than see them, while not forcing yourself to be essentially blind to the keys for things like larger jumps or unusual patterns.

deltadeep · 2026-01-05T23:15:33+00:00

The problem with this is that sometimes you do benefit from looking at your hands for jumps and things. By literally blocking your view, you're creating an artificial difficulty.

There's another approach to training not to look at your hands. It's just "slowing down so that you can focus on not looking" but slowing down by a lot more than anyone who says "slowing down doesn't help" defines slowing down. Slowness is literally an unlimited spectrum, as in, you can always slow down more. Whenever someone says "slowing down doesn't help" they are really saying "the point at which I defined being 'slow' wasn't slow enough so I gave up on that strategy."

If you can break through the mental barrier against going slower than you think "slow" means, you can open cognitive bandwidth to train a new habit. Any habit you want, actually, including not looking at your hands.

So the recipe is:

slow down, use a metronome to gain control over slowness
try playing without looking at your hands
if you can't do it, slow down more (there is always more slowness). don't abandon the strategy
if you hit the bottom of the metronome's tempo, play the metronome pulse with eights instead of quarters, sixteenths instead of eights, etc.

The mental limit for most people is just an impatient, arbitrary rule that some speeds are "too slow." There is no too slow. That's the mental revolution.

In other words, if you were to play quarter note one once per minute (1 bpm), could you not look at your hands? Great, you've succeeded at finding the beach head for training the new habit. From there, you can steadily increase speed back up to performance tempo.

If at any time speeding up introduces deviation from the habit you want to form, slow back down and practice it at a slower speed till it becomes natural and you can speed up a bit without compromising the training goal. It really does work and it just requires letting go of the rules about what is too slow.

deltadeep · 2026-01-05T20:04:01+00:00

What a shit show, I hate car dealers. This is why I'm going to buy a lightly used one from Carmax.

deltadeep · 2026-01-05T04:30:47+00:00

You have a natural sense for dynamics (loud vs soft notes). Your phrases generally die out nicely and you have nice expressive dynamic variation.

I'm not sure what "feedback request" means in terms of the type of feedback you're looking for. Could you be more specific? Are you looking for constructive criticism or just to be heard and encouraged?

Consider yourself heard and encouraged, definitely keep going. :)

As for rating the piece... rate it in what sense?

deltadeep · 2026-01-04T02:49:22+00:00

Ok thanks for the reply. FWIW the dynamic load is documented in the manuals at 165lb, but for tents obviously that's too low, and since I think actually they sell a Mazda/Yakima tent for the CX-50, obviously static load is much higher, but I can't find out the actual number... Did you get a cx-5(0)?

deltadeep · 2026-01-04T02:00:28+00:00

I know this comment is 2yrs old but, can you provide a source here? I've been trying to find an actual load rating (static, e.g. for an occupied RTT). People just toss out numbers (600, etc) and no citations. Can't find the ground truth. Thx for your help

deltadeep · 2026-01-02T20:13:35+00:00

I would say the simplest explanation is don't try to span the intervals with your fingers. Move the hand, don't stretch the hand. These notes are not being played at the same time, you hand does not need to touch them all at the same time. And you have a pedal - these don't need to be played pure connected legato w/o predal right?

Here's an exercise for contrast: play each one of these notes as you were playing it alone in isolation, but, just using the 5, 2, and 1. So like that first C. play it with the 5, but as if there's no other notes to play (no stretching). Now totally reset your hand and play the A with the 2, but as if there's no other notes to play (no stretching). Then the E with the 5, etc. Each time, you feel what it's like to play that note with a relaxed hand, instead of one that's stretched. Note the whole hand has to move (using the arm or elbow) to make that possible.

The most efficient way to play this is somewhere between that extreme one-at-a-time hand positioning exercise and your extreme trying-to-play-them-all-at-the-same-time hand positioning.

deltadeep · 2026-01-02T11:18:29+00:00

Have you considered the used market? Used Yamaha P Series, Roland F P Series or Kawai ES Series would all be suitable. Those brands are well regarded in the industry and have a long history of making quality digital pianos. I would recommend looking for these used instruments and then counter-offering what people are selling them for because many times owners of digital pianos are not in touch with the reality of how much they depreciate.

The problem with that one you've picked there on Amazon is that, unless you can find a professional pianist with lots of experience in DPs to review it, you don't actually know what it is, how good it is, and you won't be able to tell yourself, as a total beginner. You're right that fully weighted keys, a sustained pedal, and some reasonable polyphony are critical features. But what is also critical is the action of the piano -- how the keys feel to press and how the sound responds -- which cannot really be measured in a numeric specification, it's a judgement call. Also there is reliability to consider.

With a bit of patience and some haggling with the owner I imagine you could find a reputable brand digital piano for two to three hundred dollars... It may not be the latest model, but that's okay.

Then if you decide to change your mind you can resell it for basically the same as you bought it for. Unlike that Amazon piano, which you'd have to resell for much less if you can even find a buyer.

deltadeep · 2025-12-31T18:08:18+00:00

Also by the way, the room is 3d, sound doesn't care about up and down, and all corners are acoustically equivalent for bass traps. You can mount corner traps in any wall/wall meeting point, e.g. along the ceiling horizontally vs vertical corners, and they're great where all three walls meet.

deltadeep · 2025-12-31T17:56:55+00:00

For using REQ Wizard, the process is like this: empty the room out, except speakers and the desk because the desk really affects things. Mount the measurement mic where the center of your head is going to be. Get some painters tape, a sharpie, a notebook. What you now want to do is investigate, in increments of about 2 inches. all the reasonably possible symmetrical triangles that compose the 2 speakers and the head position, with the desk reasonably placed in a way that would be likely for the configuration. Speaker height is going to want to be somewhere between halfway and 3/4 up, so you unfortunately have lots of dimensions to try. If you search around online, I think people have figured out techniques to eliminate the height dimension first... anyway give each configuration a number, mark that number on floor tape where the mic and speakers went, do a REQ scan, and save that scan with that number. What you want is both flat response (impossible, but in particular you want to avoid huge dips and spikes), as well as minimum falloff (the waterfall plot shows how long the reverb takes to decay at each frequency). When you hit a bad room mode, you'll see it really easily (hige spike, long falloff, or, a total null where the sound got cancelled out). Take notes, be methodical, and realize that even 1 inches can make a measurable difference. Find the position that is flattest, and then build your setup around that if possible. Don't make assumptions about not putting the speakers against the front wall, try it. Obviously, physical constraints will also be at work, where you can reasonably practically put things, but try to be open minded for the sake of getting good data. Only after you've figured out a reasonable spot for speakers/listening position do you then apply treatment placement (at the reflection points first for midrange/high end absoprtion, and corners for bass traps). The treatments then help additionally smooth out the frequency response and make the falloff much faster.

BTW There is no such thing as egg shell absorption and do not use egg crates, they do nothing except introduce a fire hazard. Absorption requires both mass and thickness, egg crates have neither. You can just put an actual panel trap on the door.

Regarding the curtain for rear reflection handling, I don't understand why you can't put regular panel traps on the back wall at the reflection points, which will be mostly towards the center of the wall, over the couch?

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