do you find it difficult to execute a fast trailing action perhaps you can't get the
speed or maybe it's that when you're doing it you just feel so much tension
in your arm which disables you from being able to trill for longer than one second
a bad trill is stopping you from creating this kind of very refined beautiful and fluttering
effect in this video i want to share with you a step-by-step guide on how to play trills with ease
and just before we get to it all remember to like and subscribe to this channel to stay in touch
with these free piano lessons and tutorials let's start by talking about what a trill actually is
so a trill is basically two notes that are next to each other played really rapidly like this
this was an ornamentation technique used in the classical period to beautify parts so for example
in the piece i was playing before if we didn't have the trill it would sound something like this
but of course this composer wanted to make it a little bit more interesting so
he did something like this
definitely sounds more interesting i'm first going to give you some key tips on how to do
a trill properly and then in the later part of the video we're going to work on some exercises
i've created for you let's start with the tips to do a wonderful trill you need three things
in my opinion the first thing is a low wrist so i think with the trill it's pretty hard to
play with like a high wrist like that what you want to do is move that down so it's about here
when you have a lower wrist it just means that you have a bit more weight
coming down which then helps you to to then control that trill a little bit better
see this is easier than like this okay so just keep a low wrist to have that weight
to then control the trail properly the second thing you need is to stay
glued to the keyboard stay as close as you can to the keyboard and don't leave it
so a mistake that i see a lot of students make is they do something like this
where the fingers are flying too high up so what i want you to try to do is
imagine you have some glue or something on your fingers and they're stuck here so no matter
what you do you just can't seem to pull them away and try to do you see that there's almost
there's basically zero gap between each time
i play there's no air space between my fingers and the keys
so if i just move it down here
i'll just move my thumb away normally your thumb would be over here
okay but just for the purposes i'm going to move this away so you can see
there's no air space at all okay so keep it very glued to the keyboard and the third thing you need
is good fingering now ideally a pianist should be able to trill with any fingers
but the reality is some fingers are much harder to trill than others let's try two
different options and you'll see what i mean try trolling now with two three versus three four
give it a try now maybe you pause the video just give that a try now i can guarantee you
unless you are an alien or some other animal that has a different bone structure to humans
three four was a lot harder to do than two three
so what are the good fingering combinations for a trill in my 18 years of playing piano these
are the combinations that i've used that i have felt are comfortable the first one is one three
the second one is the most popular one which is two three
and the last one is not too popular i'm not sure if people use it but i find it
good as well it's two in four
if you have other good fingerings to share make sure you comment below because i love to learn
from you too so those are the three things you need you need a lower wrist you need to stay glued
to the keyboard and you also need good fingering to do a good drill using these three tips let's
get into doing some exercises on the piano let's do this exercise on the notes d and e so first i
want you to hold down the d and do a very short trill between d and e so something like this
okay that was level one let's move on now to level two level two is where you hold the e
and you are doing the short trill but from the e like this
now just remember those three things that we said before you need to make sure you're
glued to the keyboard okay so that means you shouldn't be flying up like this it should be
something like this let's say these are the two keys they don't lift up from from the keyboard so
okay let's move on to level three level three is where you hold down the d
and you're trilling for a little bit longer
okay moving on to level four is where you hold down the e
and you're trying to trill just a little bit longer
and just as you're doing these levels every time you stop just make sure you just completely relax
your hand before you start trilling again each time you trill it's actually a
you know you'll feel a little bit of tension and then that's normal because it's a highly
you know coordinated exercise but each time you relax i want you to think about
like for example uh dropping 20 kilos of shopping just relaxing
and when you're when you're drilling you're you're a little bit tense and that's okay if it's if it's
a little bit tense but every time when you stop again try to really relax so relax relax relax
relax just make sure you have those points of relaxing so that you can actually troll properly
and let's move on to level five level five is just trilling normally
how did you go let me know in the comments just one extra tip i have for you before we sign off
trolling on a white white note is not too bad
trolling on a black black note is also not too bad so
it's a little bit trickier though to trill on a white and a black note so something like this
or
and the reason the white and black combination is a little bit difficult is because the black
note is actually a bit taller than the white noise i don't know if you've thought actually
thought about this before so when you look from this perspective you can see the black note is
actually a little bit taller than this white note right so when you're drilling a black and a white
note you just got to make sure you recalibrate all those things again so all those tips that
i was saying to you before things like staying glued to the keyboard with this different height
just got to make sure that's recalibrated again because this one will feel different to this one
just that little height thing it does make quite a big difference in terms of
how fluid you can create it hope this video has been helpful for you for discussing how to do
a proper trill let me know in the comments how you went with the tips and the exercises
that were shared today don't forget to practice every day and i'll catch you in the next video
you