You're an aspiring pianist and you want to make this a great year of piano. Here are
10 quick piano skills I want you to focus on this year that will really elevate your
playing to the next level. The skills 1 to 10 will go from easy to hard and
I also suggest resources to help you to achieve these skills. Let me know in the
comments which out of the 10 you're working on right now. Number 1 "SCALES". In [Music]
arpeggios scales are fundamental for developing finger strength and agility. They also teach you
lots of Music Theory by getting you used to key signatures if you're not sure where to
start I suggest you to get this alred scale book it lays out all the scale so you can
easily learn them one by one skill number two hand coordination and Independence at its core
piano playing is very fun because it's all about coordinating and playing different parts with
two hands the better you can do it the more professional you sound let's compare this
one to this
one
one was doing very similar movements and one was doing completely different movements focus
on building hand coordination and hand Independence I've actually come up with
a course myself called the hand coordination boot camp that helps beginners to learn how
to coordinate their fumbly hands we're currently running a new year sale make
sure you check this out before this month ends the course is filled with Progressive exercise
that will help you to build on your piano skills so that you can coordinate your hands and play
the songs you love skill number three finger independence aside from hand Independence you
also want finger independence and that means you want your hand to be able to play notes
and have control within each finger without affecting other fingers I recommend the Hannon
book
lots of great exercises to build finger independence number four rhythm control
lots of students come to me and they can play Beautiful notes but they currently
lack this skill of playing in beats easiest way to mitigate this is to use a
[Music] Metron
skill number five pedaling this is piano playing without [Music]
pedal this is piano playing with
pedal great thing about learning to use the pedal is you just need to learn this technique
once and you apply this exact technique to any other piece with pedal the skill of the exact
timing of stepping down on the pedal and raising it and stepping down again for the
new measure there is no variation to this skill for any piece you just use this one
skill for all pieces with pedal so learn how to use this sustained pedal and your
music is going to sound amazing after that skill number six site reading I used toest
this when I was a bit younger but as I grew in my piano journey I realized how important
it was to learn how to digest and read music it really increased my ability to learn pieces
faster music is a language how do you get better at Languages by reading and
engaging with it every day so read a bit of new music every single day
skill number seven octaves practice your octaves you can do them in scale
form you can also do them in arpedio
form practicing octaves build strength and Precision in your hands it appears a lot in
music too so make sure you practice octaves skill number eight Dynamics and articulation
Dynamics is about the loudness or the softness of notes articulation is all
about how it's played whether it's legado Lush and long or Stato short and detached
when you're able to play very loud and very soft and also have great articulation which
is play short and also long Legato passages your music will have a different dimension to
it soft
focus on creating great dynamic range very very soft and very loud playing and also
different articulations short and also long Legato passages skill number nine
is memorization develop the skill to memorize your pieces as you do your repetitive practice
it will Aid in your performance of the piece in front of people and it will also
deepen your understanding of the structure of the piece we come to the end here skill
number 10 is voicing and voicing most of the time in piano playing is all about playing
the right hand louder than the left hand assuming that the right hand is playing
the melody and left hand is playing the accompaniment so tell me which one's
better
or
in the second excerpt the right hand was a lot more pronounced it stood out a lot
more and as a listener it's a much nicer listening experience to have
that hierarchy right hand louder than the left hand easier set than done not
easy to practice this one so make sure you really take time to learn how to adjust the
volumes learn how to control right and left hand and push right hand up a little bit more which of
these 10 piano skills are you currently working on let me know in the comments let me know also
which of these 10 you want more in-depth tutorials on catch you in the next piano [Music] tutorial