The way to increase your speed on the piano is to practice very slowly and accurately, with painstaking attention to every detail of technique (hand position, finger shape, type of action) and the music (volume, phrasing, touch, overall structure).
Forcing the speed does not work. Your brain needs enough time to attend to all the details and assimilate them and when it is rushed it can never quite manage to do that.
When your mind and fingers really know exactly what they are supposed to do then speed comes easily.
Hanon's exercises are useful, but you are not supposed to play through them mechanically to the point of causing pain. Piano playing is about co-ordination and getting rid of excess tension. It is not about building bigger muscles or huge athletic endurance. If it hurts you are doing it wrong, or doing too much, or both. You have to know exactly why you are doing each exercise. They are best used under the guidance of a teacher that knows what they are doing.
You want to play faster? Here is one way. Pick a Bach fugue in 3 or 4 parts or a 3-part invention. First mark in a sensible phrasing. Then spend a week or two working out an optimal fingering for both the phrasing and your particular hands. Mark it in neatly in pencil on your score. Now start to practice very slowly, hands together - as slow as you need to to get the fingering and phrasing perfect. If there are any stumbles or hesitation then go slower. Just do a short phrase, or a couple of measures. Then repeat it until it becomes fluent. It might take 10 repetitions, it might take 20. If it isn't fluent by then, leave it and move on. Next day it will be better. Continue in that way until you can play the whole thing. Take a rest every twenty minutes or so. Concentrate fully at all times and listen to the sound you are making.
At the same time as learning the hand and finger movements study the piece musically. Memorize the various themes and counter themes. Work out what keys they move to. Marvel at the way Bach manages to set theme against theme with varying time offsets, and create fleeting harmonies and tensions and how the lines dance and weave playfully. See how the themes are sometimes augmented, inverted, or otherwise varied. Figure out what keys the piece passes through, and how it gets from one key to another.
Spend a few months on the piece, working on it every day. Combine the phrases until you can play the whole thing flawlessly, but still slowly. Resist the temptation to speed up. And continue to work on small sections. If you find the slightest technical difficulty find out why and fix it. It may need a change of fingering, or a slightly different position of the hand on approach, or just more repetition. As you work you will notice subtle beauties in the music that you never suspected, and you will learn how to bring them out for the listener.
When you know the piece forwards, backwards, inside out, When you can stop and start anywhere, could play the chord sequence by itself, or the treble, or the base, or one the inner voice, when you know every little nuance, and you can play it entire with total fluency and control ...
THEN (and only then) play it at speed
- and prepare to be amazed.
) you will be able play as fast as you like (or as required), really. Speeding through Hanon will not quite help if you don't learn a piece properly and your fingers don't know what they're doing.
