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.