this one is for all of you beginners out there so we've got four exercises that are going to help you to improve your hand independence your dexterity and your control using really really simple exercises so this is a great way to just wake up your fingers and start to develop the muscle memory that you're going to need to be able to play the songs that you love [Music] the first exercise we're gonna look at is just based on the five finger scale so we're going to take our right hand thumb or one finger and place it on c and then we'll take our left hand five finger and place it on the c below that and then all we're going to do is walk up five notes and back down now this looks really simple but if you're a complete beginner this is actually quite challenging getting the fingers to cooperate stay relaxed to apply even pressure as you play through the notes so think about starting on the lowest note and everybody's just working together going up a step up a step again and then up and then just down a step down a step to c now eventually you're gonna get comfortable and when that happens you can start to build your speed but make sure that you stay in control so once you've arrived at a place where you can play that at a pretty quick tempo and stay in control this is where you can start to work on some of the hand independence parts so here's what i mean we're going to play smoothly so connected notes with our left and we're going to play detached which is staccato that's the word for it with our right hands so we're playing the same notes but our hands are now kind of doing things a little differently and again this looks really easy but as soon as you go to try it you're gonna see that it takes quite a bit of concentration now you can switch the rolls as you can see my left hand is playing staccato now and my right hand is smooth or legato so see if you can do that see if you can switch the rolls without breaking your scale so do it seamlessly you know starting staccato here and then switching the rolls on demand just like that you can have a lot of fun with it and then the final little sort of modification for this first exercise is to switch up the rhythms and this will develop your hand independence so i'm going to play quarter notes in my left hand while i play eighth notes in my right hand so that means for every two notes i'm playing with my right i'm playing one with my left and then i'll switch and we're really working hand independence here and the real trick again comes when you're trying to make that switch without breaking in between so that's exercise number one exercise number two is based on the contrary motion skill which is really all we're playing so sounds fancy but it isn't you're gonna make like a little butterfly with your hands and your thumbs are gonna share middle c and then all you're gonna do is play one two three and then your thumbs are gonna come underneath to tuck and then your hands reset and you finish the scale let's do that again together on c like butterflies moving out two three thumbs come under hands reset so we can complete the scale and then we can travel back down exactly the way that we went up when we run out of fingers we want our ones again we're going to take our third finger that's three cross it over top reset our hands so that our ones can join again in the middle so in one go it looks like this [Music] so once that gets comfortable i want you to work on dynamics and this is where some of that control comes in so we're going to start softly gradually applying more pressure until we build and then bring it back down so it's a [Music] crescendo to a decrescendo so this will help you to build control in terms of how hard you press the keys and so while it's a simple exercise you're developing a really important skill that will enable you to pull the most feeling and emotion out of the music and the phrases that you play when you're playing songs and you can do this on on any key in any key you just have to keep in mind the key signature so if you're a beginner it's great to stick with c to start the next exercise is something we fondly refer to here at piano as the claw so this shows up in our foundations and basically what it is is you're going to make a claw so you're going to use your one let's do one handed time here one three and five i'm gonna place it down on c and this is just what we call a chord and then you're gonna mirror that with your left so five three and one now if you're a total beginner it might be really difficult for you to play all three notes at the same time without mashing these guys down too and if that's the case remove the third note and just play the shell and we're going to claw our way up the scale and it's going to look like this and back down now this is another one of those exercises that looks really really simple but you would be surprised at how many people really struggle with this one so if that third finger's giving you a grief just do the shell one in five and go up the scale that way so this is just building that dexterity that muscle memory that you need to be able to play chords which are going to become the basis and the foundation for all of the songs that you eventually play so this is a great way to get your hands comfortable with chords so spend some time on that till you master it and then we come to our fourth and final exercise where we're taking the concepts of that claw and we're breaking them up so this is where we are really starting to work on some speed and dexterity and this one is a tons of fun so i'm demonstrating all these exercises for you hands together but if they're challenging please feel free to take them hands separately until they feel comfortable so same idea as the claw but instead of playing them all together in solid form we're going to break them up so it's going to sound like this i'm going to play it for you fast and then i'll show you how i did it [Music] so much fun to do so you're going to of course start slow at the beginning and there's a little bit of a wrist movement and rotation that will help here so you want to make sure you have great posture so you don't get fatigued you want to stay relaxed and you're just playing your one three five resetting the bottom finger up a step getting into your chord shape one three five and you complete that pattern all the way up until you find that your lowest finger lands on c say in the c position so then what you're going to do is you're going to repeat the high note g and work your way back down now it's the top finger that is doing the kind of the renegotiating and it's really what's resetting the hands so when you play this your other fingers shift down allowing you to complete the exercise so again feel free to work this one hand at a time as much as you need until you're ready to put it hands together and then challenge yourself to see if you can build some speed and of course you can play with different volumes you can play staccato and legato you know the hot detached and the smooth in the other hand to make an even greater impact in terms of control and dexterity and hand independence so i hope you enjoyed these four exercises if this felt like it went too fast for you or if you want more um please head on over to piano.com we've got step-by-step lessons that will guide you through everything that you would need to be able to take these skills and apply them to songs so we'll see you there [Music] [Applause] [Music] you