The Top 5 Piano Exercises For Beginners

Welcome to Creative Piano Academy with me, Joseph Saikora, and today we're looking at the top five piano exercises for beginners. They're fun, they're simple, and they'll get you playing straight away. So let's go! Hey guys, so these five exercises are going to be perfect to just get your fingers moving, start having fun, playing some actual music, as well as developing some core fundamental skills that you're going to need to develop yourself as a musician and as a pianist. And remember, on this channel I post simple techniques to get you playing better piano and having way more fun with it. If that sounds good to you, smash that subscribe button, as well as that little bell thingy next to it, so you know when I upload new videos. So, okay guys, here are the top five piano exercises for beginners. There are literally thousands we could be doing and thousands of videos I could be making, but these five are going to be perfect to just get you going, get inside that piano, get your fingers moving, and get some core skills developed. So exercise one, we're just going to get those fingers moving. So, really quickly, we've got fingers one, two, three, four, and five in the right, one, two, three, four, and five in the left. We need to find our position, find the two black keys that are directly in the middle of the piano, and move one note to the left, and here we have our middle C, okay? Our right hand, we want to put finger one, which is our thumb, onto the C, and then just lay our fingers down sequentially up to this note here, which is the G, okay? So we're going these five notes here. So exercise one, we're going to start at the bottom, and we're going to quite simply just move up and down those notes, like this, okay? Up and down. Now, this might seem fairly simple, but there's a few things you need to bear in mind when you're doing this. Number one, make sure you're completely relaxed from the shoulder all the way down to the wrist, and then this wrist wants to sort of hang over the top, a nice arc, and it wants to come from your fingers, okay? So we want to lay our fingers down. There are times when you progress that you might use the wrist, but right now, I want you to try and relax everything, let your fingers just fall onto those notes, like this, okay? Now, you don't want to be tense. If you're tense, you know, it impedes your speed, okay? You want to be nice and relaxed, and be able to just move up and down really nice and fast. Now, the second thing to watch out for are these two notes here, okay? These two fingers are fairly weak. We're using movements that we're not used to here, so what might be happening is this, okay? These might be running into each other when you're playing, okay? That's absolutely normal, nothing wrong with that. Just plow through it, keep it slow, keep it nice and smooth until you're used to it. And then, of course, slowly start speeding it up, okay? Now, we want to do exactly the same in the left hand, except our position is going to be what's called an octave below here. So, this is where our right hand was, so we found that with these two black keys here, so we're going to find the two black keys to the left of it, which are these two, and we're going to put our fifth finger, which is now our little finger, onto the C here, okay? And we're going to lay our fingers down onto these five white notes, and we're going to do exactly the same in the left, okay? Just move up and down. Stay relaxed, nice arc in the wrist. Now, you want to watch out for the D and the E here, okay? This is a D, this is an E. This might be happening, okay? So again, slowly, steady, okay? And then gradually start speeding it up until you get that really nice, even flow between your fingers. And then, to finish it off, we want to put it together. So, our left hand and our right hand, quite simply, well, relatively simply, just put it together, okay? Now, this is really good for coordination, you know? Right hand, left hand, put it together, okay? Nice and steady, okay? So, on to exercise two. Really similar, except we're going to start off, and instead of playing sequentially, like this, just moving up and down, we're going to miss the second note, which is a D, and we're going to miss the fourth note, which is an F, and we're simply going to get this movement here, okay? This is called an arpeggio, it's a broken chord, so we're just going to move up and down those three notes. Now, this is really cool, because if you can get used to just breaking those chords up, you're going to be able to start playing some actual music. This is the foundation, this is the start of playing some actual music that sounds good. So, for instance, if I just bring in some chords here, really nice and simple, all of a sudden we've got some actual music starting to take shape. Now, you might recognise this one, look. You know what comes next. So, with exercise two, our right hand is in the same position as exercise one, and we're going to break up these notes. We're going to go C, E, G, E, C, E, G, E, relaxed, nice arc, okay? Start slowly and start speeding it up until you hit that point where you just can't go any further, okay? Once you hit that point, try and stay there as long as you can, and then stop, okay? Take a break and come back to it, and slowly over time that point at which you get to should start to get faster and faster and faster. Same in the left hand, okay? Same position, okay? C, E, G, E, C, E, G, E, C, E, G, E. Start nice and slow, nice and relaxed, and then start speeding it up. And then, of course, we'll put it together, good for coordination, okay? This might take you a little bit of time, don't worry about it, no pressure, start slowly, start speeding it up, okay? So, that's exercise two. Exercise three, we're going to look at chords, okay? And hopefully play your very first chord. So, same position in the right hand, and you remember these notes that we played, like this, that were broken? Now we're going to play all three together. So, we're going to take our wrist like this, and we're simply going to play the C, the E, and the G together, okay? So, we'll drop down onto those three notes, like this, okay? It wants to come from the wrist, wants to hang here, loose, boom, come down from the wrist, okay? And you want to just try and play in batches of four. So, one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Now, something that might be happening here is, well, you need to keep your finger two here, and your finger four up, and what might be happening is, they might not be held up enough, and this starts to come down and interfere with your chord, like this, or like this, okay? So, just bear in mind, you need to try and keep fingers two and four up, and out of the way as you play it. Now, there's a few ways you can play this. You can either play it nice and stabby, like this, what's called staccato, almost like the keys are too hot to touch. Or we can play it a little more pushing into it, hold those notes down a little bit longer, okay? Like this. So, you can play them both ways. One, two, three, four. You can play it nice and slowly, and then you can play it quite fast, as fast as you can. Bring your left hand in. Now, for my left hand, all I'm doing is, I'm looking at that first note down here, which is a C, and I'm going to play it in the left hand down here with my fifth finger, and I'm just going to play with it like this, okay? Very good for coordination, again, just bringing both hands down together, okay? So, that's exercise three. Exercise four, things are going to start getting interesting. We're going to take those chords, and we're going to move them around into an actual chord progression, okay? So, we've got our, hopefully by now you're used to this C chord here. You got used to playing that. Now, the good thing now is that once you've got into this position, and you're used to this position, all we need to do is move this up or down to different positions, starting on different notes, and you don't need to spread your fingers or contract your fingers or anything. We can just keep them exactly as they are, and for this exercise, what we're going to do is, we're going to start on C, play C four times, and then we're going to move down so that our first finger is on this note here, okay? So, this is where we started. We want to go down one, two, three white notes to this note here, which is a G, okay? This is a G, and we want to play this chord here. So, notice how I haven't moved my fingers up or down. I've kept them exactly the same, and then nicely fall over the top of those notes, okay? We're going to play that four times. Now, we're going to move up to this one here, which is an A, and this is an A minor chord. Again, same positioning with my fingers, four times, and then down to this chord here, starting on the F, four times. Now, this might sound familiar. That's because it's a very common chord progression. Everybody's heard it in virtually 80%, 90% of pop music. It's fantastic. It just sounds amazing. So, it's a really good chord progression to kind of start out with and get used to, okay, before you move on to bigger and better and more complex and more interesting things. So, let's try this again. We've got C for four times, then we're going to move down to G four times, move up to A minor four times, and move to F four times, okay? Now, to take this one step further, all we need to do is bring in the left hand. So, to keep things simple, we can just keep our fifth finger on the C like this, and we'll just move together, okay, down to the G, up to the A minor, and then down to the F four times. So, notice in my left, I'm just keeping that bottom note. I'm playing just that single bottom note. Now, just finish this off. To make this a touch more difficult and take it one step further, it'll sound exactly the same, but sort of an easier way, or taking it a little bit further with your left hand. Instead of just moving like this, we can keep our hand in this position. You can play the C with your first finger, the G with your fourth finger, the A minor with your third finger, and the F with your little finger, like this. Okay, so that's exercise four. Exercise five is all about timing. So, what we're going to do is we're going to start out just like with exercise four. We went like this, okay, we played together. Now, we're going to make this a little bit more difficult. Maybe it's more difficult, maybe it's more easy, maybe it's exactly the same, but it gives you an extra little dimension to have a go at. So, I want you to just separate this out. So, we're going left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right. So, notice I'm just using the same chords as in exercise four. I'm just separating them out, okay. Left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right. Okay, so that's exercise five. Now, as I said, you know, there's thousands that we could be doing, some more fun than others, but hopefully these five have given you something you can just sit down at that piano, get moving those fingers, which is the most important thing, and just start having some fun, start developing those core skills. So, with that in mind, no excuses, start playing, back to me. Okay, guys, so I really hope you enjoyed those exercises. Remember, you can take any one of those and kind of push it as far as you want to. If you want to get the most out of them, remember you need to be focused when you do it, and also sort of, like, find the edge of your comfort zone and stick to that, and just push it that little bit, and you will get the most out of them. Now, on that topic of piano practice, I have put together a premium video called The Best Adult Piano Practice Plan. You can get it at creativepianoacademy.com. It's really good, and it goes over how you can get the most out of your piano practice session so you're not wasting time, and there's a few very specific beginner routines you can follow. So, grab yourself a copy at creativepianoacademy.com. Like the video if you liked it, subscribe to the channel, and I will see you, I will see you in the next video.