Switch from separate Hands to joined Hands:
One of the biggest problems in studying the piano is when you go from studying with separate hands to studying with hands together.
To be honest, this step isn’t easy at all and you want to know why? Because it is comparable to a child who goes from walking to running. Several times it will happen to fall, but then slowly, with a lot of training, you will be able to run at maximum speed without problems.
Before you can run, however, you need to be able to master walking very well. The piano works the same way. First try to have a good command of the split hands. Only when this is at a good level can you finally start trying to join hands. Before doing so, however, there are some basic steps.
First of all, try to bring both hands to the same level. This means that the left hand must be as strong as the right before being able to join them otherwise it will happen that the left will find itself following the right by inertia and not by its own will. This is absolutely to be avoided! Each hand must be independent.
Make your hands independent:
To try to make one hand independent from the other you have to do a lot of exercise, obviously with separate hands. It is one thing to make your fingers independent, and another to make your hands independent.
This means that the joint does not count for nothing but it is only the hands that must try not to depend on each other. So the question is not physical but mental. It is in fact trying to reach a certain degree of coordination in the brain in such a way that this then allows us to be able to play both hands two different melodies.
The great Bach was the master of this, who with his inventions for 2 and then for 3 voices, created a truly formidable didactic work.
So what you have to do to make the hands independent is to play a lot with separate hands, and finally try to join them very slowly and in the following paragraph we will see how to do it.
The first notes together
Once you have played a lot with separate hands (and therefore the left has moved to the level of the right), you can finally start joining hands. In doing this you have to play very very slowly.
What should I play?
You must play the same notes with both hands. This is absolutely the first step. You must therefore start giving the same notes to the same hands. This means that for example both hands will play the notes Do Re Mi Fa Sol at the same time. For now it is still too early to try to get the hands to carry out two different activities, they are still very dependent on each other.
So take separate hand exercises and use them imagining that these are for both hands. In this way you will have only one musical staff, but it can be enough to be able to play with both hands. This exercise has a double benefit:
You can start playing with both Hands:
The fact that there is only one musical staff and not the system means that you focus your gaze only on one staff instead of 2. In this way, the concentration you “save” by not reading the other staff can be put in trying to make the hands play together.
So take the first Beyer exercises too, and pretend they are for joined hands (obviously play the part dedicated to the student
Hands Joined:
All right, once you’ve made your hands strong, once you’ve tried to join them by making them play the same notes, it’s time to separate them. Of course I don’t mean to separate them in the literal sense of the word, but I mean in the sense that now each hand has to take its own path.
Yes, to do this there is nothing better than starting with this exercise that you can download below. The exercise is in E minor, this means that it has a sharp in the key (the F #). All the Fa you will encounter in the score will therefore be sharps.
The score is simple but nice, I think you can enjoy playing it. Of course, it is written with quite large time and duration so that you have all the time possible to prepare the notes that follow.
Obviously, once you have mastered the exercise, you can increase the speed of this, up to halve the values (and therefore double the speed of the piece).
I hope you will like it, below you can find the download of the exercise. Good study!