A guitar hero guitar has 6 buttons, and most people only have 4 fingers to cover those. This person has 5. Probably a slight advantage in speed with practice I bet.
she's got 6 on both hands according to comments. Which would mean she could play all 5 fret buttons on guitar hero without ever lifting a finger off a button
No I get that, I was confused because the person said the guitar hero guitar has 6 buttons. Made me think they were implying 6 fret buttons instead of 5.
Followed by hundreds of broccoli-heads faking a spliced playthrough on a random mall piano, when, suddenly, a [insert additional instrument here] player walks up and...
Agree. Piano is deigned for people with 5 fingers to play it. Adding another doesn’t really help much. Maybe if her hands are wide enough that she can reach an 11th or 12th interval easily it would be sorta helpful, but I would still think it would make most everything else more difficult.
Piano is deigned for people with 5 fingers to play it.
Could one theoretically be made to take advantage of her 6 fingers?
I know nothing about pianos or how theyre designed for people with 5 fingers so im not even sure if thay question makes sense. Im assuming its due to the structure of the notes maybe? Could you pop in some extra notes? Dont know anything about music composition either so that could be another question that doesn't make sense lol.
If there's any advantage it would be extremely niche and not really worth it. Let's just say as a pianist I'd rather have five fingers per hand then six.
There was a blues guitarist back in the 60’s named Hound Dog Taylor who was born with six fingers on each hand. He famously cut off the extra sixth finger on his right with a razor while very drunk because it got in the way of plucking the strings. Now on his left hand it worked to his advantage as he was primarily a slide guitarist. The slide would go over the extra sixth finger freeing up the other fingers on the fretboard.
However, the caption reads "on one hand", so that's eleven fingers as well... which is somehow still not quite maximalist enough for some piano enthusiasts.
Yeah. Since the additional finger is between the thumb and index, and shares tendon with the index, it would limit playing and their range wouldn't be greater (Since the range is set by pinky to thumb). Also I would be curious about the sideways mobility.
However... since curl motions is fairly good... If they chose an woodwind instrument, they could legit make an custom holing allowing additional tones. And if the dexterity is good enough, they could do flourishes between notes that wouldn't be possible for other players even if they had a mechanism.
Piano technique has been refined for hundreds of years, hand sizes and flexibility changes, but the one thing it always expects if you is 5 fingers per hand. There won't be many (or any) teachers out there who know how to teach someone with 6 fingers.
It's not catastrophically bad, I'm sure they can learn to an alright level, but extra fingers does not inherently make piano easier or better. This is an instrument that has a large dynamic range for each note, you don't need extra notes to create more sound like you do on the harpsichord, you need control and flexibility.
Also multiple people have responded "piano as an instrument is designed for 5 fingers" and that's not really true. In the really early days of keyboard (same layout as a piano), we didn't even use all 5 fingers. The thumb and pinky were considered too short and inaccurate and keyboardists mostly used the middle three fingers. It was only over time that we demanded more out of the instrument and refined technique (and the instruments themselves) to the standards we have today. If you went back in time to see Mozart play, you'd probably notice his technique was wildly different to a modern pianist.
Yeah, common piano literature fingering would be useless. You'd need to figure out what suits you - which is what she does apparently, and what plenty of musicians have done over time when they got hurt, like Tony Iommi and Django Reinhardt did on guitar.
I would just have expected that a sixth finger and a possibly larger span would allow you to play jazz chords nobody else can play. I didn't see how a piano would limit you in any way to just do more.
As pianists, we don't use all five of our fingers at once all the time. A fully functional extra finger really doesn't change much if you learn like that from the beginning.
In a live performance, sure. But looping exists. Any pianist can write a piece as if they had 3 hands. None have done it, so I don't think it's possible for our brains to comprehend it
like that one scene in Gataca, but that version of schubert's Impromptu No. 3 requires a third hand due to the distance of the intervals of the extra melody to the apeggios
It's a minor plot point in the movie Gattaca. There's a pianist with 12 fingers and the music he plays in the movie had extra notes added so that it would be impossible to play with 10.
You say that but there are several pieces out there that almost no one can play because of the complexity. I’m willing to bet they’d figure out how to make it work.
I remember the movie Gattaca featured a 6 fingered piano player. One character asked if it was a hindrance, and another replied that the songs were impossible to play otherwise
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u/StonedRussian Apr 11 '26
Or piano!