A passage that feels secure at home may suddenly rush or miss notes on another piano. This does not necessarily mean the memory has vanished. Playing does not become a set of finger commands detached from the environment. It includes predictions linking action to result: the hand expects a certain key resistance, depth, return and sound response, then organises the next movement.
An unfamiliar piano disrupts those predictions. A heavier action may cause soft notes to fail, while different room acoustics may distort the player's judgement of loudness. Treating the problem as “weak fingers” often adds stiffness. A better first response is to use a short passage to sample the feedback, allowing the arm, wrist and fingers to redistribute movement and timing.
A 2024 experiment briefly delayed the sound during rapid piano sequences. Expert pianists immediately adjusted key-descending velocity, which the researchers interpreted as online sensorimotor adaptation. The experiment tested delayed sound, not different pianos, so it cannot establish every mechanism involved in changing instruments. Its more modest implication is that skill includes detecting a mismatch between expectation and outcome, then correcting it quickly, not merely reproducing movement.
On an unfamiliar piano, testing one phrase that requires delicate control can therefore calibrate more effectively than immediately playing the whole piece. The aim is not to force the new instrument to behave like the old one, but to find movements that realise the same musical intention through the action and acoustics now present.
If you practise with <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scoreflow/id6796205656">ScoreFlow</a>, keep the score and phrase goal central during that first run on another piano, listening for changed feedback rather than forcing the old movements to work unchanged.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11326920/
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1690422/full
Discover more from Geoffrey Chen
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.