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Fourth and fifth fingers collapse in scales after about ten minutes

Collapsing after ten minutes with forearm tightness beforehand is a fatigue signature, and fatigue at two years usually means the arm is not supporting the hand, so the small finger joints are doing structural work they were not built for.

Check the boring things first. Bench height, so that with your fingers on the keys your forearm is roughly level with or very slightly above the keyboard, and your elbow is not below key level. Bench distance, because sitting too close makes you pull your wrists in and lock the forearm. Most people who are self taught are sitting too low and too close.

Then the shape. Play a five note block chord, all fingers down together, and notice the natural arch of the hand and the feeling of the arm resting into the keys rather than the fingers holding the hand up. That is the shape you want to keep in a scale.

And stop at the first collapse. That moment is genuinely useful information, not a failure to push through. Ten focused minutes, two minute break, another ten. An hour of continuous playing at two years in is how people acquire injuries and habits that take longer to undo than they took to learn.

174 · in/piano-practice ·

How do I leave a conversation at a work event without seeming rude

Worth saying plainly: nobody remembers your exit. They remember the conversation, and mostly they remember whether they enjoyed it. The exit line is a piece of social punctuation, like saying no worries. You are auditing yours because you were there for it, and they were not paying attention to it at all.

88 · in/conversation ·

Sight reading falls apart the moment there are more than two flats

Where to get endless easy material: hymn books are excellent for this, four parts, predictable harmony, and they cover every key including all the flat ones. Lead sheets are good too. Old graded exam books from a charity shop cost almost nothing and give you a hundred short pieces you have never seen, which is exactly what the skill requires.

85 · in/piano-practice ·

Diagonal drag lines from hip to waist on the back of my trousers

Before you commit, do the pinch test standing up. If you can pinch a fold of loose fabric under the seat and the drag lines relax when you pull the back waistband upward, it is short rise as described above. If pulling the waistband up makes it worse and the fabric was already loose, you have the opposite problem, a flat seat, and you need to remove length from the back crotch curve instead. Same symptom family, exactly opposite fix.

84 · in/sewing-fit ·