Tommy’s Piano Corner is all about how we can get the best from this wonderful hobby of playing the piano.
To introduce you briefly to myself, from being about 10 years old to my early twenties, I was a very keen pianist. Not necessarily a very good one when compared to some of these fantastic kids you see playing, but acceptable all the same (I did manage to get to Grade 8 ABRSM).
Following real frustration with not making progress beyond a certain point, I abandoned the piano and pretty much didn’t touch one for over twenty years. From what I have seen, many people have a similar experience.
Dipping my toe back into the piano playing water
In around 2013, I treated myself to a Yamaha Clavinova with the intention of starting to play again. In reality, I didn’t touch my new piano too much for a number of reasons:
- long spells away from home on business (unavoidable)
- frustration with sounding like a train wreck when playing (understandable)
- a preference to open a bottle of red in the evening rather than tickle the ivories (laziness)
Getting Serious
Cutting a long story short, back in August of 2015, I finally decided that enough was enough and I was going to do some real work. I wanted to see to what extent I could recover my old piano playing skills and hopefully progress beyond my old level.
However, I had a sneaking suspicion that just doing ‘more work’ wasn’t the right answer. All those years ago, I definitely put in the work (up to 4 hours a day), but still hit a ceiling. This sent me down the path of realising that the work I was doing all those years ago wasn’t the right work. This led me to start really researching the topic of how to practice.
Naturally I came across the traditional advice just ‘slow it right down’ and ‘practice hands separately’.
Here I saw two major issues.
First, if I had mostly played ‘slow pieces’ then I’d practiced slowly all those years ago yet still couldn’t play fast!
Secondly, I did experiment with ‘hands separately’ and found that in pretty much all cases this was extremely easy to do, but combining the hands was where things fell apart!
This prompted me to dig deeper and I had many ‘eureka moments’.
Why this website?
It seems that we ‘returning learners’ are a common breed. So I decided to start off this website as a simple blog, to both document what I had learned for myself as well as to share it with others.
I now have over 100 articles which you can discover (categorised for you) on this Full Guide page.
However, you might prefer to do this in a more structured way by using the Step by Step guides I have created from them.
There is one that gives a concise framework for how we can Practice Piano with insights and techniques well beyond ‘slow it down’.
There is a separate guide that shows to Record Piano at Home (both audio and visual) from simple to more advanced techniques.
Finally, please do leave a comment if an article resonates with you – it’s always great to her from you!