I was living in San Francisco during the Loma Prieta earthquake. The power went out for 3 days. My friend and I stayed with some of her students, and it was pitch black. In the middle of all that chaos, I sat down at their piano and played the Maple Leaf Rag in the dark.
I could do it because I had practiced without relying on my eyes. You don’t need to prepare for an earthquake. But learning to find your way around the keyboard without looking will make a big difference to your playing.
Why we look
Your brain gives priority to what it sees. Many of us got into the habit of watching our fingers as beginners, to check the right one was moving or that we were still on the right notes. If you never break that habit it will hold you back.
Here’s the loop I see most often. A student memorizes most of a piece while watching their hands. Then something goes wrong, they look back at the music, and they have no idea where they are on the page. At one recital I watched a performance of the theme from the Goldberg Variations that took 6 minutes, because the student kept starting over from the beginning.
You don’t need to look at the keys to play well. Think of Stevie Wonder or Art Tatum. Chopin told his students to practice in the dark once they knew a piece from memory. In his words, the hand then “acquires an assurance and boldness that it would not if the player is constantly looking at the keys.”
Your body already knows how
When you get up in the night, you don’t turn on the lights to find the bathroom. Your body knows the distances in your home. Playing the piano works the same way. Tracy M., a member of my community, put it simply: “Playing with eyes closed a little each day makes the keyboard so much more familiar.”
That sense of where you are in space is called proprioception. At the piano it works on two levels:
- Your big joints are your GPS. How far your arm turns at the shoulder, how far you lean at the hips, how your ribs shift over your pelvis. These locate you on the keyboard.
- Your fingers are air traffic control. They guide the landing by touch.
The kitty whisker method
Let the fingers that aren’t playing lightly touch the keys, especially the black keys. The groups of two and three black keys tell you exactly where you are. With only white keys under your hand, you’re lost in a desert.
Practice feeling which key you’re on before you play it. If your 4th finger feels a black key on one side and nothing on the other, you know which group you’re in. Find the note first, then play it, instead of playing and thinking “uh-oh.”
For long leaps, measure from the other hand. “My right hand lands right next to my left” feels much smaller than “two octaves.” Whenever a leap feels big, look for a way to make it feel small.
Laura L. tried this on an old piece being prepared for a lesson: “I practiced leaps with eyes closed. WOW!!! It was magical.”
Seymour Fink suggests this: use your 3rd finger, inside the black keys, and jump between the landmark notes D and G-sharp. The keyboard is symmetrical around both notes. You train your sense of touch and the feel of an octave at the same time.
What changes when you close your eyes
You’ll listen more closely. You’ll hear things you haven’t heard before. That makes your dynamics, phrasing and pedaling easier to shape. Jody F. noticed it straight away: “With eyes closed, makes me very aware of the sound and clarity and accuracy.”
It helps your memory too. Jan B. found that “playing chunks with eyes closed makes it easier to remember.”
One YouTube viewer had a jazzy interlude in a piece that always went wrong. They played that section with eyes closed until it was solid. In their words: “now, wow, what was even the problem?! I actually could play it just fine after all!”
Looking is fine, as a choice
This doesn’t mean never look. Looking is fine when you’re playing from memory, for a very large leap, or when you’re watching your hand learn something new. The difference is that you shouldn’t have to look.
When you do look, flick your eyes down, not your whole head, and come straight back to the music. Rose C. was surprised how fast this came: “I was amazed by how ‘eyes closed’ practice… turned into being able to find the notes while focusing on the score the next day.”
How to start
It will feel harder at first. Go slowly. Try a few notes at a time, or one short section. People are always surprised by what their hands can find. One student told me: “Wow, I surprised myself. My hand went right to A.” And from Nelda M., on day 24 of the Journey: “Played like Ray Charles with my eyes closed. Didnt sound anything like him.” It still helped with the problem measures.
Watch me demonstrate all of this in Why Practicing with Your Eyes Closed is a Game Changer.
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