Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 731 Mini Course: Day 6

Welcome to Day 6 of BWV 731 Mini Course! If you haven't seen the material from Days 1-5, access the previous lessons and a score here.

Hopefully, if you have been following my directions in the last 5 days, your playing of this chorale prelude is already getting better and better every day. Up until now you have learned all individual fragments and even combined fragments 1-2 and 3-4. Now it is a time to expand it even further and attempt to play the entire piece without stopping.

As always, take a slow tempo and make sure your fingering, pedaling, articulation, notes, rhythms, and hand position are correct. In order to achieve the best results, I recommend you play this chorale prelude at least 3 times in a row correctly.

If for some reasons some places in this piece are still difficult for you to play without mistakes, you can go back a few steps and play that particular fragment in solo voices and combinations of 2 and 3 voices.

Some people have been asking me questions about the difficulty in playing ornaments with the fingers of 3 and 4 which is often (but not always) the correct way to play the trills and mordents. The thing is that finger 4 is a very weak one.

The only way to improve the performance of ornaments in this case is to build up your finger technique. Some of the best ways to do that I found are through the regular studies of scales in double thirds and double sixths and Hanon exercises.

By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my free video Organ Practice Guide. 

Or if you want to learn to improvise in the style of Bach? If so, I suggest you check out my free 9 day mini course in Keyboard Prelude Improvisation.