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One of the great skills of being a good pianist is your ability to navigate the keyboard fluently. As a beginner, you will need to build up these skills as you would build any muscle in your body.
This dexterity will take a lot of time and patience and will require a variety of different exercises to help you. Today I’m going to introduce you to one, relatively simple exercise that will get you started.
One thing you don’t want to do is to lift fingers that are not playing a note too high off the keyboard. The further up they are, the further they have to come down and, whilst you are beginning, this might not be a problem, once you’re moving faster around the piano, you will be held up if your fingers have further to come down to find the next note.
Your fingers also need to remain soft and relatively rounded in shape, not stiff and board like!
So, say hello to the ‘piano crab crawl’ exercise. Yes, I did say ‘crab crawl’, not pub crawl.
You are going to begin on middle C with your right hand.
Find that nice flat position from arm through to the tips of your fingers.
Put your thumb on C and then lay your fingers over the top of the next five notes with a nice curved shape to your hand.
You are then going to walk up an octave in thirds using thumb and middle fingers to press notes 1 and 3, then 2 and 4, 3 and 5 etc (C,E, D,F, E, G etc). Let’s demonstrate…
You will notice there is a little bit of lateral wrist rotation (although do not be fooled, it comes from the forearm rather than specifically the wrist) Graham Fitch has done some really super videos on wrist technique that are well worth a watch on YouTube here
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Comments:
The ‘crab crawl’ is a really useful exercise for someone who has never had piano/keyboard lessons and has no doubt fallen into bad habits over the years of playing. I look forward to more of these lessons.
Many thanks.