Practicing These As a Beginner Will Really Help Your Piano Playing Grow!

​One of the best and fastest ways to grow your piano playing is to establish a plan of action. This is how we truly accomplish any goal that we set for ourselves in any area of our lives; not just our piano playing.

It’s usually pretty easy for us to engage our imagination and see ourselves playing our favorite Chopin Nocturne or Beethoven Concerto, but if we don’t come up with a way to accomplish what we’re seeing in our minds, it’s not going to become a reality.

Both are necessary to reach our goal. So we need to come up with some specific actions to do each day that will propel us towards the finish line.

​Piano exercises do just what their name suggests – they exercise our fingers. Not only do they help us learn notes and where they are on the keyboard, they also strengthen our fingers and hands so we can play the notes that we’re learning faster and move easier across the keyboard.

As a beginner, you need to practice and learn exercises that will work all of your fingers.

The best exercises that I recommend for this purpose are Five Finger Exercises.

• You will learn how to set your hand up in C Position and play all of the notes using all of your fingers on both hands throughout these exercises.
• The exercises use all of the same notes in each variation but change up the order that the notes are played in giving an extra work out for your fingers and your brain.
• Don’t worry if you don’t know what this exercise is exactly…there is a visual example of it in the video that I go over at the piano and I’ve included a link for you to find it online and download for yourself, for free.

After working on these 5-finger exercises you then want to move on to some really easy pieces.

The best pieces that I recommend for this type of practicing are Nursery Rhymes.

• Not only are many of these songs familiar to some degree for most of us, they have simple melodies that are easy to play and don’t include any difficult rhythms, or a lot of fast notes, or advanced articulations.
• Easy nursery rhymes will keep your hand in the same C Position that you learned and practiced on in your 5-finger exercises which just helps to reinforce the technical work in a different and sometimes more enjoyable way.
• The video contains a link where you can find many nursery rhymes for free and I play some at the piano so you can see my hand in C Position and how easy it is to play these familiar tunes.

The next thing you want to add to your “must practice” list as a beginner is to include scales in your daily practicing.

• Scales teach us to play the same notes simultaneously with both hands.
• They also teach us how to start moving across the keyboard into other hand positions in addition to the C Position we first learned.
• You will find a link to download a whole sheet/set of scales that you can start practicing on right away – plus I play some at the keyboard for a visual and audial example.
• Make it your goal to learn as many of your major scales before adding in the next item for your practice list.

As you advance through this list from finger exercises to nursery rhymes and then through a majority of your major scales, you’re ready to start learning some easier versions of classic piano pieces.

• Look for pieces that are in the Level 1 category to begin with.
• Pick pieces that incorporate what you have been practicing successfully and don’t pick pieces that use a lot of techniques that you haven’t quite mastered yet.
• In the video below I include a link for some specific pieces that are great for this level of playing and you will see whether the piece is labeled Level 1, 2, or 3 to make it easier to select the right ones.

Now we’re going to add in a couple of new and more advanced types of technical exercises that every pianist will come to love…eventually.

• Hanon exercises involved playing repeated patterns of notes that are meant to train your hand to play and move across the keyboard at the same time in these various patterns. I recommend learning the first ten exercises and then actually going back to each one with your metronome to increase finger speed and coordination.
• Czerny exercises involve even more challenging techniques while still building on the same foundation you’ve already established. They make you move faster and over the keyboard a lot more while doing different things in each hand.
• There is a link for these exercises as well in the video description.

While you may not be able to do all of this each day in your practicing, you can adapt it to your own personal time. Take 1 week or 1 month to work on 5-finger exercise and nursery rhymes. Then move onto scales and easy piano pieces. Then try going back to review what you started with.

​In the general scheme of things, the more you accomplish on this list in a way that fits in with your own schedule and goals, the faster those goals will become reality and your enjoyment of playing the piano will match your growing confidence. 

​If you like my tips and lessons, you will love the courses over on my website. Whether you are a beginner looking to get a solid foundation to build on or you are looking to take you existing skills to that next level, the online music courses on my website https://www.pianolessonsontheweb.com will help you do just that.