I'm trying to learn to play piano and I have no hand independence whatsoever. I'm teaching myself with a decent amount of progress (as far as playing one handed goes) but I'm at a loss. I'll be buying a keyboard soon, but at the moment I'm limited to about 30 to 45 minutes a day after school gets out. Tips?
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Even 45 minutes of daily practice is enough when you've got the right exercises.– SovereignSunCommented Jan 6, 2018 at 8:23
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2 Answers
As a first exercise, if you really have absolutely no success with hand-independence, try this:
Learn to play a sequence of notes with one hand that you can play very easily and with very little thought. For example, using the right hand, play five consecutive notes of the C major scale using fingers 1-2-3-4-5 and maybe down again: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1.
Play this repeatedly until it is almost automatic, and then start to do something unrelated with the other hand, such as:
tapping the top of the piano, initially in the same rhythm, but then tapping only on every other note played by the right hand, or every fourth note.
Instead of tapping, you can then move on to other movements with the non-playing hand, such as just touching the keys and not actually playing them. When you can do this, you can then move on to playing the notes with the other hand but very softly.
When you get to the stage when you can play quietly with one hand at half the speed of the main playing hand, you should find you are well on your way to hand independence.
I highly recommend playing scales, hand separately and then hands together. Doing this alone gave me hand independence. If you are practising scales already, but you still have no hand independence, just find some hand independence exercises on the internet and practise them every day. It's very important when playing scales or do other difficult exercises that you start very slowly. It's also extremely important to use correct fingering when playing scales: using the right fingers. You can usually find this simply on the internet.
