How to practise to make your playing rhythmically flowing and stable can be quite a conundrum. People often struggle to feel confident that they’re playing the correct rhythm and they tend to worry about going out of time. Often they resort to practising with a metronome and try to be perfectly in time but this just leads to more problems, tension and stiff unmusical playing. In this short video, I explain how to approach improving your rhythm and developing a strong sense of musical pulse and metre. Put these 7 keys to good rhythm into practice and you’ll find that playing with great rhythm can be easy and natural.

Beethoven’s Sonata op. 14 no. 1, 1st movement is one of the Grade 8 piano exam pieces 2023. In this video, I explore how rhythm and basic good piano technique can help you create a flowing and stable performance of this tricky piano piece and offer helpful piano practice tips.

Listening to what we play in an examining, scrutinising way might seem to be a skill that’s necessary for developing expressive skills as a musician. I want to challenge this. Whilst we hear what we play and this helps us to make the sound we want, our response to the auditory feedback is entirely natural and needs little, if any, directing. In fact, critical listening might be the cause of a much more fundamental problem that makes people’s playing sound stiff and unmusical.

Feeling and trusting your groove is the best way to keep the tempo solid. Practising with a metronome or listening and checking not only fails to improve any underlying weakness in rhythmic stability, it often makes the problem worse!