Piano exercises that take beginners to the next level
SerenaExercises are a great way for pianists of all levels to improve their technique. Just like basketballers who do weekly footwork drills to improve their on-court performance, pianists use exercises to level up their fingering technique, note-reading skills and sense of rhythm.By improving upon the individual elements of piano playing, doing exercises regularly helps elevate your overall skill level. This means that, when the time comes to sit down and learn a new piano piece, you're able to better focus on the music itself, making the process faster – and far more enjoyable. With time, this opens the door to increasingly challenging pieces and better self-expression at the piano.There are thousands of exercises out there, so it can be hard to know where to begin – and which exercises give you the most bang for your buck. To make that process easier, we've picked out eight exercises covering hand coordination, note-reading, and musical concepts such as scales, chords and arpeggios.Together, they cover the fundamentals of piano playing, and a sure way to take your playing to the next level.Let's get started.
Exercises for hand coordination
Coordination exercises are especially useful for anyone still working on confidently playing with both hands. By challenging your hands to move independently of each other, each playing different notes and rhythms, coordination exercises help develop so-called "hand independence," an essential part of making progress as a pianist.Here are two exercises to help you practice hand independence.[embed playing with both hands videos]Scales Exercises
Melodies and harmonies are built on sequences of notes called scales. As the foundation of most music, scale-patterns are found in most pieces of piano music. The most common types of scales are major, minor, and chromatic, and practicing these will help with learning new pieces. More generally, scales exercises help us practice moving our hands across the keyboard fluidly. One element of playing scales is fingering. For each scale, there are optimal fingerings that allow us to play the full scale in the smoothest way possible, without picking up our hands. As we only have five fingers on each hand, we use a technique called finger crossovers to continue the sequence of notes without running out of fingers. Mastering this technique will come in handy when playing runs, such as those in the right-hand part of Mozart's "Sonata No. 16 in C, K. 545"[embed C Major video]Chords & Inversions Exercises
Chords are notes played together at the same time. They create harmony between the pitches of the played notes and are commonly (but not only) found in the left-hand accompaniment parts in music. There are many different types of chords, including major, minor, augmented, and diminished. You can learn more about the construction of each type of chord here.Inversions are chords whose notes are in a different order. When practicing chords, you should play them in root position, first inversion, and second inversion.Practicing chords and inversions helps you learn to play multiple notes at the same time, which will come in handy when playing harmonies in your favorite songs. For example, "Forever Young" by Alphaville features just four repeated chords in the left hand. Learning these four chords will open doors for you to play a plethora of pop songs.For now, try focussing on C Major.[C Major Chords and Inversions video]Arpeggio Exercises
An arpeggio is a type of broken chord in which the notes are played one after another, rather than together at once. This creates a rich harmonic effect that adds texture and depth to the piece. You'll find arpeggios in all genres and eras of music. For example, there are many arpeggios in the right-hand part of Beethoven's "Fur Elise".To practice arpeggios, try playing the C Major arpeggio as demonstrated in the video below.Sight Reading Exercises
Sight reading is the process of reading sheet music and playing it on the fly. It might seem difficult to play something that you've never practiced before, but pianists do it all the time. And by practicing with note-reading exercises, can get better at sight reading, too.Learning to sight read new notes and rhythms at the same time can be tricky, so we recommend focusing on one at a time. You can start with notes first, featured in the note-reading exercise below.Once you feel confident with your note-reading abilities, you can practice your sight reading by reading any level-appropriate piece in the flowkey library. Sight reading is all about pattern recognition, so you'll find that all of the exercises we showed you in this article will also help you in your sight reading journey.[Embed note-reading exercise]
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