Hi Scott Houston here hey do you ever feel like your hands just aren't big
enough to play piano right I hear all the time from students "Scott my hands
just won't stretch far enough to play these four note chords or some of these
bigger things we're doing right" well you're not alone a lot of people think
that but I've got a few two or three pragmatic things I can show you that
ought to take care of that and make that a non-issue moving forward so let's
tackle that right now in this quick video
okay what we're going to tackle is this this issue that a lot of beginners
really feel like oh my hands too small I just have these you know little short
stubby fingers and Scott I watch your videos you have these long skinny
fingers and I'll never be able to do this right don't worry I don't have any
exorbitant long skinny fingers and you will be able to do this so let's dig
right in at the piano here so the issue is you know people will say no problem
playing these you know three note chords or a triad but the minute you
go to okay how about a c7 chord and then that also has this note attached right
these three plus a B flat on top well then all of a sudden uh-oh you know danger zone
thinking like oh my thumb's not long enough I'm never gonna get there right
and then you you try to get it played it's all messed up and you're giving
yourself the carpal tunnel and all that right well
relax here's something I need to show you listen to what this note sounds
like would you okay sounds good right now keep listening
hey it sounds exactly the same no matter where I'm playing it right well of
course it does well it's a weird thing beginners and I only know this from
having done this for so long a lot of beginning students have this tendency to
want to play way out on the keys they want to play way out on the ends and
what that does then when you have to use your thumb or your pinky if you're doing
something you know on a black note you're in deep trouble because
you got to wrench your hand all sideways well here's how you solve it as
ridiculously simple as this is just shove your hand away you know away from
you toward the piano an inch or two until your finger gets long enough to
play it piece of cake problem solved right that's it same thing happens if
your pinkies gonna play a black note like say you want to play a b-flat major
seven it's these four notes right so you're all good here and then
you think oh no oh you're you know trying to get your pinkie out there just
push your hand away a little bit just Zoop about an inch or two and just very
relaxing-ly will get there so point to be made with this is you should never
have your hands all wrenched around whether you're playing left or right
hand chords you should never have to do that it's just it should just you know
be this pretty straightforward relaxed thing and you may have to put your hands
forward a little bit but you can get to everything you need to like that so
that's one great thing all right so there's one issue just push your hands
away from you all right now here's another one um there are some times when
you're really like playing say you're splitting a chord over two measures
sometimes for like accompaniment reasons you do something like write
something like that or you just you know there's just some sort of a simple thing
you're doing well that's kind of a long stretch no doubt about it but the way
you can do it if you're ever really stretching longer than you can just
reach right just kind of - they called arpeggiate - just try to rock up to it from
the bottom just don't play them all together if you're trying to do this
just go like this instead
ba-dum right but you want to do it real fast and just do it with your pedal held
down and it'll just kind of fake everybody out so I don't care how
little your hands are you can always do that so just kind of rock back and forth
that's like the old octave trick when you want to play octaves if you have a
struggle with that for hand-size reasons just play one first and then the
other like that and you know if you need to you can move back and forth finally the
third thing you can always do if you really are still struggling is you can
always just play an inversion of a chord and I've got other videos about
inversions but basically when you invert a chord you just stack it in a different
order so for example that's and I wouldn't be doing this but I'm just
doing this so you can see all the notes cegb flat that's a c7 chord well if you
want to invert it you just take whatever's on the bottom and move up an
octave and put it on top well by doing that that's usually a much simpler thing
for a lot of people to play you know because they think it's well
it is it's a little bit closer together you can do it one more time and bring that
up here and play like this right that's like a closer hand position than having
to do this although frankly now that I taught you this trick about moving your
hand away this should never give you fits again so there you have it so a
couple two or three solutions I promise that you don't have excessively short
hands it's funny I did live workshops a lot in the past and people always walk
up to me after workshop with kind of a funny look and it was like a scientist
like a Star Trek thing a Vulcan thing they'd walk up and do this to me
they'd be like put your hand up here I want to see how big my hand is compared to
yours and you know invariably it was you know minute differences but yeah the
point to be made here it's just either push your hand away from you or use your
pedal but I would be really stunned assuming you're over the age of you know
ten or eleven maybe if you're a really young kid that's an issue but once you
get to be adult age it's it's normally not an issue it's just a function of
learning a few of these tricks so enough of that hopefully that puts another
little issue to bed and as always have fun playing piano