Piano Video Lesson: The Best Piano Exercises (Part 1) - Broken Triads

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin with a technique video for you today. This is an exercise that I learned in college, in conservatory, and it's a great way to build strength, so I'm going to share it with you now. Sometimes, you don't have a lot of time to practice, but you want to get the maximum amount of strength to be built in your technique. So you want something that's going to really exercise you much more thoroughly than repertoire or even scales that are pendulous and maybe you don't want to learn a whole etude of notes that are hard to figure out.

So this is an exercise that's all based upon a pattern of chords. It goes from a major triad to a minor triad, to a diminished triad, to an augmented triad. If you don't know what these terms mean, there will be future videos explaining exactly what they are, but we're going to have the notes for you here so if you can figure it out.

So we start off and the notes of the triad in both hands, so we're going to start in C major. So there's a C major triad, but we just start with the top two notes in the right and the bottom two notes in the left hand. And then you go back and forth through the scale notes. Notice how I use all five fingers and the independence of the fingers is critical here. After you do the major, then you do the same thing in the minor which just has one different note. The E goes down to E-flat.

Then we go to the diminished, you add one more flat. The G becomes G-flat and you keep the E-flat. And finally the augmented where everything changes. You start with like you were starting from the beginning except with not C, E, G, but C, E, G-sharp. Notice that's all whole tones, all whole steps. You do this in every single key. So you start in C then you go to C-sharp, then D, so it just goes on and on.

You get the idea. Here's the great thing. The whole exercise just takes a couple of minutes, so three minutes or something to go through all the keys, but boy is it a workout. And better than that, it's all fingers. And the independence of the fingers is strengthened and you build strength. It's not in an outstretched position and so there's nothing with any phrasing or dynamics. You can focus solely on your finger motion. It's strictly an exercise, not a piece of music. Easy to learn because once you've figured out the very beginning, you just transpose it up a half step again and again until you get back to C and the top octave.

Try this exercise. You'll develop a lot of strength. I hope you enjoy this. Thanks a lot. This is once again Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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