Alberti basses crop up so frequently in much of the music we play, that learning how to play them well is a very useful skill. Often, and certainly amongst a lot of younger piano players, is the common problem of the stiffening up of the thumb and inflexible wrist.

 

 

An excellent first tip:

When you are initially practising the Alberti bass, hold the wrist with your other hand, so that you can feel how much tension is in the wrist when playing. When you are aware of how much tension there is, as if by magic, any problem (especially a wayward thumb), seems to go away. But not always. This is when you need to do some simple exercises.

 

Practise the Alberti bass in block chords: 

For pianists with very small hands, who cannot stretch all the intervals between the notes, this is difficult, and so we advise playing the chord blocks only with notes they can stretch. This is also an excellent way of learning the chord progressions too.

 

Try practising  the block chords very slowly, making sure all the notes go down at the same time, with firm fingers and a flexible (i.e loose) wrist.

 

When you are secure both with the notes and the fingering (again, another essential for accurate practising), you can try breaking the Alberti bass in to different rhythms, disciplining your fingers to accent different notes and so on. For example, if your Alberti bass uses the notes of C chord in the following order of C- G-E-G, with the common fingering 5-1-3-1, you can practise going from 5-1, with an accent on 1, then 1-3, with an accent on 3, then 3-1, with an accent on 1, stopping briefly each time in between the change of fingers.

 

When you do this, try to maintain a comfortable curved hand position, a thumb that is as relaxed as possible and close to the hand, making sure that it is really just the fingers that are, so to speak, doing the walking.

 

You can impart a small degree of rotation in the wrist to aid movement, if this helps, and particularly when you start to play the bass a little faster. Remember to do this very slowly first, building up speed as you wish, bit by bit. 

 

 

Eventually, the Alberti basses will get easier to play, your thumb should cause less of a problem and your fingers in general will benefit from the exercise workout.