A question for Doper pianists who have studied for years and play well: What are specific shortcomings in your abilities that you are aware of when you play or when you listen to someone else play? What would you improve if you could but know it would probably take a lot more work than you’re likely to have time for? When you play for friends and family who haven’t played and don’t appreciate the subtleties, what are we missing?
It should sound easy. The tempo doesn’t slow in the tough parts and doesn’t quicken in the easy parts. Most popular music should have kind of a swing feel. Minimize use of the pedal, and make sure the melody sings.
Guitarist here. If you are looking for specific piano technique, I can’t help you. If your question is framed from a general music standpoint, I would start with: the ability to establish a groove is the first line of separation between wannabee and someone actually playing their instrument. After that, locking the groove into a steady time - not speeding up or slowing down much. After that, learning to sell the song. From there, you actually start to care about chord facility, theory and technique…
My $.02
any monkey can put in the hours and memorize the sequence of fingers-to-notes. you don’t even have to know how to read sheet music.
what separates a monkey from a “really good” pianist is probably the ability to riff. once you spend enough hours in front of the piano and play enough songs from various genres, you really get a hold of the technique and theory. then you can just pound away at the keys and make up unique tunes that sound “jazzy” or “classical” etc.
however, if you’re talking about what separates your local church organist from a concert pianist? it’s my opinion that the great ones have such great finger control and instinct for the keys. the soft parts are soft, and the loud parts are loud, and there is a world of in-betweens. at least, that’s my take. if someone only can toggle between p and f, eh… the great ones can make all the in-between-loudnesses be heard.
that and supremely large hands. the great ones can span like, 9-10 keys. most people can only do 7 comfortably.
My biggest challenge is eveness in playing. Not sure if the OP is a pianist or not, but think about playing note after note with each finger in your right hand, and having them all sound with the same volume, intensity, and duration. Now think about picking up your hand after your ring finger plays and shifting so that your thumb plays the next key, and so on, and keeping that evenness. Now think about doing that at some very fast tempo. It’s neither easy (for me), nor natural, but it’s required for great playing.
Also, as K364 hints, the pedal covers a lot to the casual listener.
I can do all of that. I still think I’m not very good, as I cannot move my fingers anywhere near as fast as the good people. I also can’t sight read worth anything. Heck, I have trouble reading both staves at once unless I work on a measure by measure level.
Oh, and I also have a lot to learn to be able to play good jazz. In particular, I need better left hand technique.
BTW, what’s up with Firefox not knowing the word staves?
**Eonwe **- you also play guitar; how does that “evenness” translate to groove? It sounds like it is a technique thing you need to master to allow yourself to flow into the groove? How is that different than finding the groove as you learn guitar?
I don’t mean to hijack - this sub-topic feels like it could shine a light on the topic the OP is interested in…
A great pianist has his technique worked out so that it is unnoticeable. A pianist-in-training shows their lack of fluency when the technical demands get greater and the music suffers as a result.
It manifests in different ways with different types of music - in jazz, a great pianist is able to spontaneously respond to whatever musical ideas occur to him, or to him through the other musicians. There’s no hesitation, there’s no slowing the new lick down because the pianist hasn’t fingered it. The music flows through his fingers as he hears it in his head. A pianist-in-training playing jazz is like someone speaking a second language by translating in his head - the ideas must constantly be edited based on what the speaker or pianist has the skills to express. When the groove changes, the great pianist just goes with it; the pianist-in-training may have a hesitation before changing the groove.
In classical, the great pianist is able to take what’s on the page and bring the composer’s intentions to life, whatever that pianist interprets them to be. A pianist-in-training is still playing notes, or struggling with notes. Take a Bach fugue, for instance - a good pianist can play all the notes at the right time. A great pianist brings out the interplay of the voices, so that you hear a conversation of four voices expressing the same idea in ways that are different and changing because of the context. Bach is hugely challenging because of the interplay of the musical and technical demands.
Allow me to make an analogy to reading aloud. Beginning readers may have to stop and sound out an unfamiliar word. Intermediate readers may have to read a sentence word by word, sometimes accidentally obscuring the meaning. Experienced readers may still rush ahead, not allowing time for the meaning to sink in. And then, you get great actors and newscasters who are able to convey what is written, with all its shades and subtleties, as if the thought is coming straight from them. Jazz musicians are rather like storytellers, who are able to spontaneously create or re-create a tale in a different way every time. In both cases, the pianist in training is like a reader who sounded like he didn’t quite understand everything he just said, or who accidentally trailed off for a moment while he sorted through the next thought.
Or another analogy - when you’re riding in somebody’s car, you shouldn’t be aware of when he changes gears or hits the brakes, you should just be aware of the motion - slowing down, speeding up or holding steady. A pianist-in-training may be like someone who occasionally pops the clutch or jars the brakes; a great pianist is like a driver who is able to make the ride completely smooth no matter what the situation.
I see the title question as being different from the questions posed in the OP, so I’m going to answer it separately:[ul]
[li]What separates a good piano player from a great one? Good pianists have usually mastered either technique or feeling; great pianists have mastered both. Which is why the best pianists usually – usually – have at least some classical training as a foundation. (Or, on preview, what Le Ministre de l’au-delà said; damn, almost made it! ;))[/li][li]What are specific shortcomings in your abilities that you are aware of when you play or when you listen to someone else play? I don’t remember the last time I listened to another amateur pianist, but when I play I am aware of my technique shortcomings: specifically, I do not play chords correctly (I almost never hit all three keys at the same time) and my fingering is somewhat sloppy.[/li][li]What would you improve if you could but know it would probably take a lot more work than you’re likely to have time for? I would certainly take piano lessons again and attempt to improve my technique, and I would also take some intermediate theory courses. I’d like to stop being intimidated by advanced pieces (hell, even some intermediate ones). I’d also like to start improvising. And I would run as many scales as I could as often as I could: the value of that practice when playing classical music is inexpressable.[/li][li]When you play for friends and family who haven’t played and don’t appreciate the subtleties, what are we missing? The sloppy technique. Luckily, most of the people who have heard me play are happy just to hear a melody that they recognize, played at tempo and with some feeling. :)[/ul][/li]Sometime within the past year I watched a documentary about child musical prodigies, and one of the kids was this 9- or 10-year-old boy who played jazz piano. His technique was flawless and his improvisation was impressive, but something just didn’t seem quite right…and then I put my finger on it, and it was that there was no soul in his playing. Jazz is as much about emotion as anything else, and his playing – even the improv – seemed very deliberate. But then, how much experience and emotion can a child that age be expected to have/impart, right? I’m not saying that his ability was anything short of extraordinary, but I wasn’t quite ready to hail him as the jazz maestro that some in the film were.
Well done, Le Ministre. Oh, hey - you’re a guitarist, too, like Eonwe; any insights contrasting how to approach fluency across the two?
One of the worst concerts I ever sat through was by a pianist who was technically excellent, but clearly bored with it all. My feeling was that he was not just tired of these pieces, or sick of this particular tour, but that given his choice he would never play a piano again.
It’s hard to define how I perceived it, it was certainly obvious even with my eyes closed. It seemed to have something to do with the way he released the keys, rather than how he hit them.
I knew the pieces well, and knew that he was playing them exactly as written; but he could just as easily have been a player piano mechanism. There was nothing human about this performance.
Awful.
Le Ministre de l’au-delà hit on it quite well. You’re a great player when lack of technique doesn’t impede expression at a high level of dificulty.
Wordman, I’m a pretty amateur guitarist, so take what I say for what it’s worth.
Groove is different. I can be in the groove on keys or on guitar and still be technically non-proficient. I can just hit one note over and over again (in one of these recent threads you or someone mentioned Lindsey Buckingham’s solo in Don’t Stop Thinkin’ About Tomorrow) and be in the groove, and imbue that note with life. That makes me a good (or even great) musician. Being a good/great ____ player involves being able to take that musical feeling and achieve it in more technically challenging pieces. If that makes sense.
I think there’s a place where those curves of musicality and technical proficiency intersect in which you can call someone great. Not all great guitarists need to be able to play with the technical accuracy and speed of Yngwie Malmsteen, nor do they all need to have the soul of Jimi Hendrix, but there’s a minimum level of both of those pieces that elevates a person to greatness. All IMHO of course.
To answer your question in a more practical sense, it’s like playing a passage that jumps from one neck position to another, and doing it cleanly. On the guitar you can easily span a few octaves without any major hand motion, but on the keys you have a few feet of lateral motion that you have to cover to, say, play a 2.5 octave run, and the goal is to not let a critical listener hear, “oh, those are the spots where he crossed his thumb under to shift his hand.”
I love all of these music threads lately! Lots of opportunity to ramble about all sorts of things. 
Makes sense to me, and in fact I think that’s very well said…it was something I wanted to mention, actually, but couldn’t think of how. I should have just sat back and let you and Le Ministre write. 
The expressionist nuances that separate skilled technical piano playing from great piano playing have a lot to do with dynamics. Subtle, controlled and artful use of the pedals can make a big difference. Dynamics make a piece breathe instead of just being a sequence of notes. Fluidity also helps, and the ability to inflect phrasing and melody with subtle emphases in timing.
As with all really good musicians, a lot of that stuff is intuitive, though. Ultimately it comes down not to just having technical command of the instrument, but have enough command and intuitive understanding to inflect the tchnique with emotion. The “feel” and “heart” that people talk about with musicians lies in the stuff that’s not on the page. It’s finding the subtle ranges of tone inside a chord or a riff or a melody.
Here is a very good piano player next to a great piano player.
Two words. Technique and emotion. You need both to be great (that goes for any kind of musician.) I have good emotion but poor technique in both guitar and piano, my fingers are slow and I am too lazy to train them to be quicker. I will never be great or even good compared to many but by the same token there are a number of very technically proficient musicians who couldn’t express an emotion musically to save their lives. I think it is an advantage to have natural feeling in your music, you can learn technique with patience and dedication, but I’m not sure that you can learn emotion.
Och, nonsense - your posts are as welcome as a royalty cheque in the mail, Misnomer.
Aww, thanks…even though I’m pretty sure that “cheque” is a made-up word. 
I didn’t mean to imply that I thought my posts were useless or incorrect – in fact, Richard Pearse just echoed one of the statements in my first post – I just meant that, in this particular thread, you and Eonwe are saying what I’m thinking and doing it much better than I could.
How does the pedal cover mediocre playing? It lifts the dampers so the duration of the notes are similar regardless of when you come off the key?
That’s exactly it. It lets you effectively ignore note duration and just stab at the notes at the proper time; most people won’t mind the long sustain. Also, heavy use of the pedal creates a constant level of noise that fills the space, so maybe you miss or skip playing some notes, but it doesn’t matter much, because that F chord from earlier in the measure is still sounding strong.