Piano Video Lesson: How to Play With 2 Hands on the Piano

Because the hardest part about piano playing is putting the hands together, practicing first small sections at a time, hands separately, really breaks things down so that you can play hands together. Hi, I'm Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource with the question – how to play with two hands on the piano? Now that seems like the most basic question in the world but I bet you there are people searching for answers on this. People have just started out and particularly those of you who are other instrumentalists and you play one note at a time your whole life and you wonder how the heck do you play with two hands and play all these notes? So it is really a valid question and the answer may surprise you. When you're first learning how to play the piano, the secret to learning how to play with both hands is to practice hands separately. Now that may seem like a contradiction but it is far from it.

Because the hardest part about piano playing is putting the hands together, practicing first small sections at a time, hands separately, really breaks things down so that you can play hands together. If you try to play hands together immediately and that is the way you practice a piece of music it's going to be so tough to get all the details straight, to get the phrasing, to get the good fingering, there's just so much information to amass looking at a score. So that is the secret to playing hands together. Take a piece of music. Now at first sure read through it really slowly hands together to get acquainted and you'll probably have to play drastically slowly at first because it's hard, right? But once you do that a couple of times you know you can start from the beginning and just take a very small section and figure out the right hand, all the details of the right hand. I've talked about this process many times before. I was so fortunate to study with my father Morten Estrin who showed me this and my first lesson was a young child and I taught it to countless people and man it really works. You learn that right hand, that little part, you learn the left hand, you get it so it's easy. Because you know what, if the piano was only one hand it would probably be the easiest instrument there is. Trying to get a sound out of a clarinet or a flute is an arduous task but a piano, not so hard to get basic tone production the first time you try it. But put those hands together and it becomes exponentially more difficult. So the secret to playing hands together is work out your music section by section, little tiny sections, hands separately, getting each hand really fluent and then slowly put them together and then increase the tempo. And then you can connect section by section and voila, you can play hands together on the piano.

I hope this is helpful for those of you who were afraid of the piano because of the two hands. Any questions you have you can address them here to me, Robert at LivingPianos.com. Thanks again for joining me and ringing that bell and all you subscribers, the thumbs up. We'll see you next time.

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