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Playing the piano is a wonderful hobby, and an excellent skill to possess. Improving your playing with technical exercises can be very beneficial.

If you wish to pursue grades, having good technical ability is crucial. The examiner will pay careful attention to your hands and fingering. Playing scales, arpeggios and chords all require technical ability rather than flair. This is gained through plenty of appropriate practice.

For those just playing as a hobby, technical exercises are still important. They improve your overall playing, which in turn increases your enjoyment of the instrument. The harder the pieces that you can fluently play, the more you will get out of playing.

They also teach discipline, which is helpful when learning a musical instrument. By forcing yourself to complete exercises you are learning to play even the things which are not enjoyable to you, and this is important in progressing, especially for those who wish to take exams. It is crucial to play regularly, and this requires discipline.

Exercise of the fingers is the same as exercise of any other body part. The most you practice, the stronger and more agile your hands will become. You will, with practice, be able to stretch further than before, and move your fingers faster along the keys. Technical exercises achieve this most efficiently than simply playing pieces.

They are also a good indicator of your skill level. They allow you to see your progression as you begin to find each exercise easier to do.

I find them particularly helpful for training my left hand. As I am right-handed, my left hand is naturally less agile than my right, and this can cause problems for my playing. Many pieces have sections which require both hand to play simultaneously, and I often find that my left hand lags. To remedy this, I spend time exercising my left hand, to increase its agility.

The problem with technical exercises is that they can take the enjoyment out of playing. Music can be very emotional, and often, completing technical exercises can dilute this emotion. It can be gruelling, as you don't enjoy the fruits of your labour through the sound that you are making. The repeated performance of technical exercises can be hard on the ears.

Spending too much time on them can cause you to become disheartened, and can turn playing the piano into a technical exercise in itself.

It is important, therefore, to make sure that you do not allow them to take up your practice time. You could allocate technical sessions into your practice schedule, or you could intersperse them between playing pieces. However you arrange it, make sure that more time is spent on playing pieces that you enjoy.

Technical exercises can improve your playing dramatically, but it is crucial to counter them with plenty of interesting and challenging music, in order to keep your playing fresh and hear the results of these exercises.

After all, playing the piano is about making wonderful music, and so players should not lose sight of this.

Learn more about this author, Ruth Moran.
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