Piano Fingers – Are Yours in Great Shape?

Good morning. This is Duane and we’re doing a series on practice ideas, things that will help you improve your piano playing by way of practice. Yesterday I talked about a technique called run around the chord progression where what you do is swing, basing our left hand with a kind of syncopated kind of thing.

That allows us to use a broken chord in our right hand at the same time so we can develop some independence like that between the two hands.

Today, I’d like to talk about a drill that really wears out your piano fingers quickly. That’s good. You want to, it’s like working out. You want to get to the point where you can’t move your muscles much more. You want to get really tired when you’re working out in a gym, don’t you?

You want to put the time in and it’s the same way in piano practice. Ont thing that really gives you a good workout is called a tremolo. A tremolo, as you probably know, is a rapid alternation of the chord. I like a four-note chord or a five-note chord like that, and you just rotate your fingers like that.

You don’t count the time. It’s not like 1 and uh-2, it’s not like that. You just do this as rapidly as you can. You can do it on any chord. It gives you a good workout and it’s nice if you change chords like this. It may not sound too good but your fingers are getting a great workout, and too, once you do that, you can use a tremolo-fired run. In other words, once you start the tremolo, you can run up an octave. Just keep your fingers going in an upward or downward rotation like that.

I’m doing a tremolo on those four notes and then I just take those four notes up the keyboard and down. I just take one chord, maybe C 6th and just do that, get the tremolo going, and take it up, back down, take it several octaves if you want.

Anyway, it’s a good exercise. The great pianist Erroll Garner, among other wonderful techniques he used, is sometimes he ended his songs with a tremolo like that. Let’s say that I’m ending “Misty”, I can’t think of–I’ll just end it. He’d end with a little flip like that, but see what I’m doing? I’m going from E minor 7th to E flat 7th to D minor 7th to D flat 7th, just going down by a half-step, and home to whatever the tonic key was, in this case, C.

You can get a lot of workout in a big hurry on your fingers. Your fingers will be weary after you do that a little bit. Do a little bit of that every day and you’ll find it will increase your dexterity and also you’ll actually be playing some things you can do in songs that way too as well.

Okay, that’s it for Practice Idea #2. We’ll see you tomorrow with Practice Idea #3. Bye-bye for now.

***For lots more good stuff on piano playing come on over to my website at https://www.playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips – “Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions!”

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xni5uZYd3UE&feature=youtu.be

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