Piano Techniques: How to Play Trills on the Piano.
It is exciting for any pianist to picture himself or herself playing those LIGHTNING FAST runs up the keyboard and back down in time for the next chord, or playing CASCADING RUNS down the keyboard for a WATERFALL of wonderful sounds, to say nothing of using mordents, inverted mordents, trills, turns, tremolos, grace notes, glissandos, fillers galore, cocktail-piano runs, plus gospel-style runs.

The sign tr denotes a trill. It doesn't denote a tremolo. With a trill, especially one as long as this, it can be played using the note written, and usually alternated with one a semitone or tone above, quickly.

You can hear me play it without the mordent on the accompanying video first. Shortly after, there is a trill so you can discern the difference. You will hear it played first with no ornamentation. Mordents and trills differ from each other in two interesting ways. Bach wrote a mordent on the first note in the right hand which is a “B”. The secret to a mordent is you add the note below and.

Vladimir, below, has given an astounding understanding of the physics of fast piano playing (trills are only a subset of fastness in general). I will add only that I find things work best when you concentrate on the goal of not just speed, but rhy.

Jul 25, 2014 - Piano Techniques: How to Play Trills on the Piano? - Practicing Trills.

Ideally, a pianist would be able to play trills with any pair of adjacent fingers. However, our fingers are of different lengths and strengths. Therefore, you will find that some combinations of pairs of fingers provide greater strength and control than others. Using 2 and 3 is going to be the most favorable fingering, and using 3 and 4 (or, for some people, 4 and 5) is going to be the most.

Exercises for Trills; Exercises for Trills. This is the final post in my short series on trills. I am going to share with you some exercises to develop speed and fluency, as well as a neat tip for slowing down videos on YouTube so you can listen in very slow motion. This is great if you want to research how different pianists handle trills (and indeed anything else), but more on this later.