Piano Exercises Part 2

1. Play Legato between the first and fifth fingers as you shift the hand position one key up at a time.
As you completed the shifting process, shifting from middle C to the higher C reverse the formule to 5-4-3-2-1 and descend all the way back to middle C.

2. Hanon Exercise 1

The exercises start off relatively easy – here’s the first couple of bars from exercise no.1:
Care  must be taken to use the correct fingerings, and to play smoothly and evenly.

Piano Exercises Part 1

These piano exercises won't cost too mcuh of your time. They will help you to improve a few elements of your piano playing such as:

- Improving the independence of each of your fingers.
- Acquiring different dexterities that will allow you to switch fingers smoothy.
- Getting to know the geography of the piano (by playing on different scales and places on the piano).
- Learning to sit well while you play the piano and play smoothly without causing stress and pain in your muscles.
- Fine-tuning your rhythmic sense and your ability to express different types of hand and body movements on the piano.

Rhythm Exercise

1. A very good exercise that you can use when you don’t have access to piano is tapping rhythms with both hands. And what makes it even easier is that you can use any sheet music you have to hand. This is a very good sight reading exercise as well. If the rhythmic pattern is too complex play the basic beat with one hand and use the other one to tap rhythm.

2. Another excellent rhythm exercise will require a metronome. This exercise works great with scales.
Set it to 100 bpm and play your scales two notes within every beat. Then without changing the tempo play the scale again squeezing 3 notes into every beat, then 4, 5, 6 etc. Slow down the tempo if you begin to struggle. The usefulness of this exercise is that you will learn to play varying rhythmic patterns within the same beat.

Correct Piano Posture

Good piano playing is only possible if we are comfortably seated at the piano. Therefore, at the beginning of every lesson and practice session, we arrange our piano bench so that it's the best height for playing and the best distance from the piano.

The best height is one which both allows the elbow/upper arm to fall freely from the shoulder, and allows the forearm to be parallel to the floor when the forearm and hand are in their natural shape -- the way they are when the hand is hanging at the side.

The best distance is one which allows our elbows to rest slightly in front of our center line when our hands are in a neutral position on the keyboard, with our hands in front of the elbows.


The video below displays good posture at the keys.

Correct Hand Position

Correct hand posture is very important in playing the keyboard as it can effect a veriety of different things relating to your preformance. Having the wrong hand position will decrease your dexterity stopping you from playing the right keys fast enough and your performance will also sound sloppy and clumsey.

Arching your fingers whilst at the keys will enable you to access any key efficiently, it will also prevent your hands from getting tired quickly and getting cramps.

Alog with correct hand position also comes the correct fingering, this is to ensure you play the piece fluently and correctly. Your fingers on each hand are assigned with a number, the number you finger is given will play the key which states the same number as your hand.

These are all very important as the right techinique is the building block to then imporving your skills and getting better on the keyboard.

This video demonstrates correct hand postition.

Basic Chord Theory

Each musical scale contains 3 primary chords which can be found at the 1st, 4th and 5th note of that particular major scale. These chords, played in any sequence will work together always and are know as the dominant chords. The first note of the scale is know as the root and is also the key in which the song is played.

A relative minor chord can also be added to a sequence by either shitfing 3 semitones down from the root note or playing the 6th note in that major scale as a minor chord. You can then use the 1st, 4th and 5th notes of this minor scale as chords.

This will be heplful as it will help me compose eaisier and with more knowlage, direction and feel of the song. It is also a good starting point to learning music theory to then progress into modes and other things.

The Song

The song im practicing on Synthesia is In My Life by The Beatles

Synthesia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sDIkjYKIsVg

Synthesia is a game that can help you learn how to play the piano using falling notes.

It is a video game for Windows and Mac OS X which allows users to play a MIDI keyboard or use a computer keyboard in time to a MIDI file by following on-screen directions, much in the style of Keyboard Mania or Guitar Hero. ...