Every beginner piano player struggles with playing hands together. This is one of the most frustrating, mind-numbing feelings you have when you’re just getting started playing piano and it’s also a big reason why so many beginners quit.
If right now you’re struggling to play with both your left hand and right hand together you may be thinking “My mind just isn’t wired to play hands together” or “I’m just not good at playing hands together” but I’m here to tell you today that YOU CAN PLAY HANDS TOGETHER. I know because I was once in your shoes as well and I remember how frustrating it was.
You may feel stuck today, like there’s no way you’ll be able to coordinate both of your hands together, but if you keep working on it, one day it’ll click. However, this doesn’t happen by accident – it takes intentional practice done the right way. And, when you systematically attack the problem, it’s a lot less frustrating. Let me tell you about one of my students, we’ll call him Chucky, to demonstrate this.
The Story of Chucky…
Everybody struggles to some extent to play hands together at first, but my student, Chucky, really had troubles. He’s what you’d call a “tough case” and with him we tried everything – playing small sections, slowing down the tempo – but he just COULD NOT pick it up. This was so frustrating for him, he was literally on the verge of tears, but finally one day we had a breakthrough.
First, I had Chucky literally tap on his chest with both hands at the same time. Easy enough.
Next, I had him tap with both hands once and then tap with his right hand once. He quickly got that too.
We progressed to having him tap with both hands, then his right hand, then both hands again. Over time we tried different patterns until he became more and more comfortable.
After a couple weeks Chucky began doing the same exercise on the piano, very simple at first hands together, and then slowly changing the pattern. When we had worked on this for a few more weeks I had Chucky go back to the actual song he was struggling playing hands together with and HE GOT IT! I just saw his eyes light up, he had been so frustrated with this the whole time he had been playing piano, but he finally had his breakthrough.
How Anyone Can Learn to Play Hands Together
Working with Chucky helped me realize that my other piano students could benefit from similar training – utilizing simple exercises to improve specific skills like playing left hand and right hand together. I had my other students simply do these types of exercises 5 minutes per day, incrementally increasing the difficulty, and they experienced progress just like Chucky.
And it actually makes perfect sense. If you think about it, humans aren’t great at multitasking, we can’t juggle 7 tasks at once, and when learning a song we have to think about the melody, the rhythm, the key signature, the time signature, and getting hands together. That’s a lot to handle! If we’re trying to get better at playing hands together we need to make practicing simpler, taking out the other variables to just focus on that one skill.
We already do this when it comes to other aspects of learning piano. For example, think about practicing scales. Why do scales work? There’s no rhythm, it’s literally just straight 8 notes. There’s no melody, it’s just steps up the keyboard. This allows us to only focus on technique. So it makes sense to do the same thing with hands together coordination. Next, I’ll let you know how you can make sure you stay on track with learning hands together coordination.
Staying Focused and Motivated to Achieve Hands Together Domination
So, how do you guarantee you’ll have success learning to play hands together? You follow a proven system and leverage the power of goal setting.
The best system will start with simple exercises that build on each other as time goes on. It should also get incrementally more challenging week by week so you don’t get frustrated or overwhelmed. Furthermore, it’ll have you play with different tempos as you develop your skills so you’ll continue to improve.
With goal setting, focusing on learning small chunks each week will keep you on track in the long-term, utilizing what Darren Hardy calls “the compound effect” to make big strides over time.
You can definitely develop a system yourself, but I’ve built a course based on the lessons of myself and my students that I promise will you help you learn to play hands together. The course is called “Hands Together Coordination DOMINATION” and it’s available today. I’m even offering a 50% discount for now. Take a look here.