Why Your Fingers Don’t Do What You Tell Them To
Control
For any pianist who has been learning for any amount of time, you will have noticed that sometimes your fingers just won’t cooperate. You might be playing a series of notes that are all supposed to be played with an even rhythm, yet your fingers don't land on the notes when you want them to. You might also be trying to play a chord or jumping across the piano and seemingly sometimes being able to get the right notes and other times being nowhere near.
Many players assume that they simply need to strengthen their fingers, and often this can become a source of tension in the hand as you try to force it to do something. But strength is almost never the limiting factor. The real limiting factor is that your brain is trying to control a movement that it has never performed before. It’s very rare in daily life that we need our fingers to be as precise and independent from each other as we need them to be when playing the piano. So it’s also very rare for your fingers to cooperate in every situation that you want them to.
This is also compounded by the fact that, if you get something wrong on the piano, many players instinctively try to restrict the movement in their arm, hand and wrist in order to prevent the error. However, in the long term, this has the exact opposite effect. Over many pieces, you will come across the same musical ideas with slight variation, and therefore you need flexibility within your movement to adapt. Instead, staying relaxed and building repetition into the movement means that your brain becomes familiar with that movement pattern, rather than restricting the movement in the hope that you can get there faster.
Coordination
Interestingly, our fingers are not really designed to move completely independently. Our fourth and fifth fingers, for example, share tendons and therefore don’t have quite the same dexterity and freedom of movement as the others. In fact, I often find that, for many people, when they’re playing quick scales, it is the fourth and fifth fingers that they struggle to control the most.
If you think about it, your entire life your brain has learned how to grip, type and hold objects. But playing a piece of music, controlling how hard you press a key, aligning your wrists and fingers, remaining accurate and jumping around the keyboard requires a completely different level of control.
This means that you’re building entirely new movement patterns that your brain has to become familiar with. When we learn a movement, the connections between the nerve cells responsible for that movement become stronger. This strengthening happens at the crossing between those nerve cells, known as synapses. But in order for those pathways to become consistently reliable, they need to be reinforced hundreds or even thousands of times. Over time, what initially felt uncontrolled and awkward gradually becomes a familiar movement.
However, this is true whether you repeat the movement in a relaxed way or by forcing it. When you lock up your arm, wrist or hand, you remove variables that could cause you to play it incorrectly in that moment. But you also strengthen the pathways for a way of playing that is likely to cause restricted movement or physical problems in the long term.
Ultimately, if you repeat a movement many times, regardless of how you perform it, your brain becomes better at reproducing it. This is also why it is so difficult to undo tension or mistakes that have been drilled into your playing. Eventually, the movement becomes automated, whether it’s a good movement or not.
Training
So how do you actually build up control in your fingers?
Well, everything that you practice should be done with the future in mind. Remember that how you play something now directly affects how you’re likely to play it in the future. This is why it’s important, when learning a piece of music, not to forget to include dynamics and character from the very beginning. Once you’ve learned something one way, it becomes much more difficult to go back and change it. In a similar way, while it is perfectly normal for your brain to struggle with movement patterns it isn’t used to, it’s important that the way you become familiar with those movements is one that will stand the test of time.
So if you come across a moment in your playing where you lose control or your fingers don’t cooperate, the aim is to play it in a way that is relaxed and correct as many times as possible so that you strengthen the pathways responsible for that movement in your brain. This will likely mean playing it much more slowly so that you have a greater chance of being accurate. It will also mean isolating just that section so that you’re focusing on one problem rather than many different problems within a larger context.
When I first learned to drive, I remember getting in the car and immediately stalling. Then I panicked, tried to drive when the car wasn’t in gear, and the whole thing was a disaster. The reason for that, in this context is pretty obvious; those movement patterns weren’t familiar to me because I had never practiced them before. It felt strange trying to control all of those things at the same time. However, over time and with repetition, those movement patterns became automated, and now it’s something I don’t have to think about at all. If I had tried to drive by locking my leg so that I had very restricted and fine control over the biting point or by gripping the gear stick tightly to make sure I changed gear correctly, not only would I have looked very odd, but it also wouldn’t have been an effective long-term way to drive. Instead, I simply needed to repeat the movements correctly over and over again by going through each step slowly.
The same is true for learning any motor skill, particularly the piano. Initially, it requires slow, thoughtful and intentional movement, but over time those movements become automated. So be patient with yourself and focus on staying relaxed and playing slowly enough that you can remain even and controlled without tension. Your fingers are learning something genuinely new, and the goal isn’t stronger fingers, but familiarity.
Matt