How to play both hands together from the start: piano practice tips from Melanie Spanswick

Video blog number 17 focuses on the importance of playing both hands together from the start. This will probably happen gradually in the first few weeks of learning, but it’s important to build this aspect into piano playing fairly quickly.


Publications

Melanie Spanswick has written and published a wide range of courses, anthologies, examination syllabuses, and text books, including Play it again: PIANO (published by Schott Music). This best-selling graded, progressive piano course contains a large selection of repertoire featuring a huge array of styles and genres, with copious practice tips and suggestions for every piece.

For more information, please visit the publications page, here.


2 Comments Add yours

  1. I can’t imagine trying to go from one hand to two after one having started with one. I feel like it would be like learning everything all over again.

    I always try to remember to do things right from the very beginning. I won’t rush through just to finish and then go back. I take one step at a time. Once you have practiced something incorrectly, it is very difficult to correct it later on.They say a stimulus enters long-term memory (that is, it is “learned”) after it has been attentively observed 7 times. But if an “incorrect” stimulus is first learned, it then takes an average of 35 repetitions to learn the “corrected” stimulus. So in other words if you are practicing a piece and you are playing an A key instead of B key, it will take you 35 more times to re-learn it with the correct key. Why waste all that time when you can just start off with slow, attentive practice right from the beginning?

    1. I agree with your comments – thanks for reading 🙂

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.