This site contains four sets of piano exercises, between 10 and 15 minutes each. Play one as a warm-up. It’s free and you can support the initiative by clicking on “donate”.
I am fascinated by all the existing methods, exercises and studies. That’s why I spent hours in playing Hanon, Czerny, Cortot and others with the objective to cover all technical difficulties, to build strong skills and to be able to play everything. I wanted to be fully skilled before playing music. My piano teachers never asked me to do that, and some pianists say exercises are not useful but the promises and quasi scientific presentation of these methods were very convincing.
However I faced some difficulties. First is that technical exercises are not done to develop musicality and musicality is the most important to be inspired and develop you musical personality. The second one is time. As an amateur pianist I don’t have a lot of time to play and surely not for hours of technical training. Of course a lot of exercises are very good and a lot of studies are interesting to develop skills and are beautiful to play. But some exercises should be repeated many times. Some are complex to learn. Studies can be very demanding for just one specific difficulty.
Another difficulty is that there are so many combinations of notes, dynamic, duration, articulation that it’s impossible to train them all in a daily routine to be ready to play everything. Every sequence of notes (and rests) has its own small or big difficulties. Then it is obvious it’s important to focus on the music you want to play, not on exercises.
But then the opposite problem appears because of not playing enough. When learning one piece of music I trained for the specific difficulties of it and I didn’t maintain other skills. After weeks or months, when I started a new piece or play an old one I almost restarted from the beginning on basic things.
In a few words how to maintain a maximum of technical skills in a minimum of time ?
I tried to answer this question by creating these set of exercices. It is inspired by many existing materials.
They contain short sequences of notes to isolate difficulties.
They cover very basic and more complex situations.
All fingers are trained equally.
They are easy to learn so you can focus on the movements and the quality of the sound. Some videos are here to make it even easier to understand.
You can adapt them in multiple ways by changing dynamic, rythm, articulation.
After that, your warm-up is done you and can play your favorite piece of music and concentrate on its specific difficulties and interpretation.