I'd like to know the opinion of others on looking at your hands while playing. My teacher says I should only look down when the music requires a substantial change in position. Otherwise he maintains that I should look up at the music at all times on the grounds that if I have a good sense of the keyboard and a good hand position when starting then my brain will tell which finger where it needs to be for each note. I must admit I'm struggling with this a little – especially when he covered my hands with a tea-towel in my last lesson! I've seen it said by an experienced teacher on her website that she doesn’t consider it necessary to avoid looking at your hands, so I assume it’s not necessarily a universally held view.

There's a good reason concert pianists memorise their music

I think thats quite an old-fashioned feeling, more to do with convention/tradition rather than it having any benefit - there is absolutely no reason that you shouldn't look at your hands whilst playing. If you look at professionals playing, you will often see them looking at the keys and their fingers.

However, if you can't play/remember the piece without looking at your hands, then it is a problem.

This, I believe, is why it is encouraged not to look at your hands, as in this case your mind will be remembering where your fingers are going rather than the music. Also, if you make a mistake and can't find where you are in the music, that isn't very helpful.

So it is beneficial to be able to play without needing to watch your fingers, but it is not the be all and end all.

I would suggest that you get used to being able to play whilst following the music, or with your eyes closed, but don't feel that you are compelled to do so all the time.

I think when you know a piece well then there is no problem varying your look between hands and music - the problem occurs, especially with beginners who are struggling to read music when they spend so much time looking at their hands they have no clue where they are and get into a complete pickle with reading the music so end up guessing. In this instance covering the hands and forcing them to actually read the dots makes a huge impact and more often than not they then get it right when it has been a huge mess before.

The trouble with looking at your hands while playing from a score is that it is very easy to lose your place.

Also you hinder the process of getting a 'feel' for large jumps and skips.

But if you have memorized a piece there can hardly be any objection to looking at your hands. After all what else are you going to look at?

But if you have memorized a piece very well you will probably find that you don't need to look at your hands!!

A conductor maybe?
Or, for organists, the words (for psalms and hymns).

It appears to be possible to read magazine features on ancient civilisations while practicing Hanon...

Yes. And this is a major problem for many students, especially at elementary level.

I look at my hands sometimes if there's a particularly nasty bit in a piece. I've only been playing for two years so I lack strength in some fingers. I find it helpful to look at thmy hands to make sure they don't miss notes, move to far or not enough. But my piano teacher ALWAYS picks up on it.

I normally look at my hands when I'm playing a familiar piece. If I'm sightreading, practising something I'm not as good at or playing a part of the piece I'm not as confident at, then I generally flick between the two. If you feel more comfortable looking at your hands when your playing then that is what you should do.



I do this if I know the piece well enough to not need the music. Escpecially as our piano is a shiny one and I can see my own reflection!

1) Learn to play it looking at the music
2) Learn to play it without looking at the music
3) Learn to play it with your eyes closed.

I very rarely achieve all 3 in this list, but I do feel that if I could I would know the piece even better.

In the early stages I do quite strongly discourage looking at the hands.
It's not necessary when your hands are not moving around the keyboard and as has been mentioned it leads to lack of fluency and losing the place in the music.
Apart from holding a book in the way I also play games where the student closes their eyes and I call out finger numbers or 'step up, skip down etc' to prove that they do know where the fingers are without looking at them.
I don't object if something is PROPERLY learned from memory.
I once suggested that a student watched me on a Sunday morning to see how often I looked at my hands during the playing of the hymns. I looked less often that day than I sometimes do!

I think the hardest thing I'm finding at the moment is forcing myself to use the same/correct fingering each time. Once I manage to crack that for a piece I rarely have to look at the keys and it makes things so much easier.

+1 for easily losing track of where the heck I am if I keep looking down

It depends what level the pupil is at - if the pupil is a real beginner, in a fixed 5-finger position, then looking down is not necessary, and a lot of pupils think they need to when they don't. One of the problems that this leads to is trouble on the part of learning to read the notes - they maybe read the once, then end up looking down and trying to guess (which leads to numerous mistakes, and doesn't help the note reading at all..... GRRRRR). As a more advanced student, it becomes more necessary to look down for changes of hand position but then look back up (unless the piece is THOROUGHLY memorised!!!) otherwise mistakes can creep in with faulty memory, and details can easily get missed (plus if the teacher writes something on the music it will not be spotted and internalised....). In any case, even as an advanced pianist, there are times when you need to have an inbuilt feel for the keyboard geography as if both hands are leaping huge distances contrary-wise, you can't possibly keep your eyes on both hands, so practising playing without looking down at all is useful.........

Your teacher is giving you good advice here. Best to take notice, I suggest.


This depends on context. Ok, when I play a piano concerto from memory, I gaze fixedly at my hands. When I sight-read a piano accompaniment, I do not have time to look down at my hands. I have to feel my way around the piano. Horses for courses, really.

I was working on this very thing with an adult student yesterday. Take a ridiculous example, although this did actually happen. RH moving from E to F. LH simultaneously moving from C to D.

This student looked down to check on the location of F. Then she looked back at the music to ascertain the LH note. Then she looked down at her hand to locate the D. Then she looked back at the music to make sure the note she was about to play in her RH really was F...........................

Do I need to continue?

Yep. Learn to feel your way around the keyboard and you will save yourself hours of work in the longer term.

I have to look at my hands when I keep getting notes wrong. After I get them right, I will proceed to trying to remember where they are, and the sensations in the hand and fingers to hit the right notes.

One thing I found useful up to Grade 5 (to cure the looking at hands problem that hurt my neck a little as I was too tense), was to play slow-moving pieces with the eyes closed. It was possible for one of the simpler exam pieces. Playing scales with the eyes closed after the notes have been mastered also helps improve fluency. But that is of course, quite tough for me right now, as I have to speed my scales up first!

I also try to play some of my pieces with my eyes closed, but not just the slow ones - sometimes I attempt the fast ones! Needless to say it sounds awful... I can play all my Grade 6 pieces with or without the score, although with those ones I do find that I need to glance down at my hands occasionally, especially as there are some quite big jumps.

I think it is a good idea to practise pieces in the three ways that Robodoc suggested - looking at the music, not looking at the music, playing with your eyes shut. Although it may be difficult to begin with, you should slowly get better at playing (mostly) without looking at your hands.

All useful stuff I think - remember a mistake is information *.

I get some of my beginners to practise jumping eg octaves without looking - the first few goes may be inaccurate but it improves quite quickly, and it's a useful distance to 'memorise' the feel of, and builds confidence when they don't always have to look down to see where they are going.

*apologies to whoever first quoted that phrase on their signature - I can't remember who I should credit!

Not so!!

You may prefer/choose to work that way but there is no "have to" .

If you hear a wrong note you can figure out by ear how much higher or lower you need to be, and find the right notes by feel.

I am most likely to get a note wrong when I'm sight-reading and have no muscle memory to know where I should be going and this is precisely when I don't want to look at my hands because I am concentrating on the music.

My piano teacher used to make me close my eyes and then tell me to play a particular note or an interval or a chord.

Thanks all for a lot of helpful comments. I must admit since making the original posting I have religiously practiced my pieces with only minimal glances at my hands. I tried the tea-towel routine but quickly had to drop that because the physical presence of the cloth on my hands put me off. So I've been looking straight ahead or even closing my eyes, and I'm pleased to say that it's gone a lot better than expected and I've improved a lot in just a couple of days! I think I was just being a bit lazy before as I'm still a relatively new learner and so the pieces I play can be quickly memorised, thereby lessening the incentive to look at the music. But even so I think I recognise now the importance of getting a feel for where you are on the keyboard rather than relying on your eyes so I shall stick with this and hopefully it will pay dividends when I move on to more complex stuff.