Do you ever feel like every piece you learn that your left hand is the hand that's holding you
back? Parts just take longer to learn and whenever you compare it to your right hand parts, it's just
always just lagging behind? Hi everyone, my name is Jazer! In this short video I want to share
with you a concept that one of my old teachers has taught me that drastically improved my
left hand playing and also the way that I think about the left hand. It's a really simple concept
but i really think it can change your life. For example, if I ask you to do a really simple,
let's say five note thing do that little exercise with your right hand and your left hand...
Now I'm speaking to the right-handers here. But if you're like most people, the left hand
will feel harder than the right hand. And, of course, the left-handers are switched around.
Even after 18 years of playing this instrument I still feel like my left hand is lagging
behind my right hand. Before we get into what this concept is, make sure you LIKE and SUBSCRIBE to
this channel to stay in touch with more of these free piano lessons and tutorials. If you notice
in piano music, right hand generally has more technically challenging parts than the left hand.
So you can see their right hand had more of a melodious fast part
and the left hand was more of a...
...accompanying chords and it sort of just stayed in one position.
Unlike the right hand which moves around. Or what about...
if you know what these pieces are let me know in the comments. Now, of course, this depends
from piece to piece but with most pieces left hand is generally playing an accompaniment part
and the right hand is playing more of a flashy and melodious part. This causes many people to think
that the right hand is more important than the left hand. If you're watching this video, it means
you care about your piano progress. And if you want to progress further up in piano. we really
need to discuss and dispel this idea that right hand is more important than left hand. Here's the
concept that one of my older teachers taught me in the past and that's to think about your two hands
as two different individual instrumentalists. Let me explain what I mean. Imagine if within your two
hands your right hand represents a violinist and your left hand represents a cellist. Imagine if
you had a piece of music written for violin and cello. And you went to the violinist and you said
"Hey Mr. Violinist! Here you go, here's your music. You have a part that's melodious and is
going to be very obvious to the audience. So, why don't you practice a lot and try not to make any
mistakes?" And then you went to the cellist and you said "Hey, Mr. Cellist! You have the cello
part. And because your part is the accompaniment part, don't even worry about practicing it.
Just wing it! In fact ,why don't you just go have a beer. And just rock up at the concert and just
wing it." Now that story probably sounds a bit ridiculous but more often than not, I think in
my years of teaching students and also reflecting myself as a student I think lots of students think
about right and left hand this way. That somehow because the left hand is an accompaniment part,
it is less important and requires less practice than the right hand. My takeaway advice for you in
this video, is to think about your left hand parts just the same way as the cellist would think about
his individual part. To prioritize and practice it just like if it were the only part that you
needed to play. After I learned this concept from my teacher, I started to do individual left hand
practice a lot more and that improved my piano playing tremendously. Congrats on making it to
this part of the video! I want to now share with you two bonus reasons about why there is something
to be said about prioritizing left hand more than your right hand. As we mentioned earlier,
the right hand generally speaking has a more technical part than the left hand.
The first reason of why you would really want to prioritize mastering your left hand part is
because once you have done that then you can focus a little bit more on the technically challenging
right hand part when you're playing the piano. When you're executing a piano piece, especially if
it's complex, one your brain has very little real estate to allocate to thinking about the kabillion
things you need to when playing it. So when you master the left hand, you're just allocating
a little bit more space for your brain to then think about what the right hand needs to do. The
more (brain) real estate space you can dedicate to your right hand, the better you'll play it.
The second reason about why you would want to prioritize your left hand, and this is something
not many people think about, is that the left hand often is the rhythm keeping part of the piece.
When you give extra practice to the left hand and try to master it, you are giving your
entire piece of music a much better bass and a strong sense of rhythm.
And that strong foundation, that strong rhythmical foundation inevitably will help you to play your
right hand part better. I think about left hand as the foundation of the huge building. When you have
a great foundation you can build a very, very tall building. In conclusion, as you progress
in your piano playing i want you to remember this concept of thinking about your right and
your left hand as different instrumentalists, And always try to give priority to the weaker hand
just as you would if that was the only part you had to play. Do you have any
special strategies or methods for improving your left hand? Let us know in the comments
.Don't forget to ask your piano questions in the comments, too. 90% of the content on this channel
are answering your questions. Have a great day of practice! I'll catch you in the next one.
🤓