The Blog

Maybe you’ve heard whispers of these maybe you haven’t.

What are the technical exercises?

Well they fall into different categories there are mechanical technical exercises like Hanon there are more technique-based exercises like Brahms 51 exercises, Liszt exercises, Czerny technical exercises Geoffrey tankards exercises even down to a dozen a day for beginners.

So, what do they do and why is there such a divide about them?

To put it bluntly technical exercises without the guidance of a teacher to hear how you're progressing every week to spot errors as they occur can be of benefit. Without a teacher to guide you technical exercises can lead to bad technique as it is very difficult to spot your errors, unless you record and critically listen to each practice.

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Avoidance - We need to move on to the more tangled topic of avoidance, the fear and not practicing. Most people enjoy their piano lessons with their teacher most people leave their piano lessons with all the intentions to practice and improve. Then life happens and practice didn't happen, a week goes by. Then you go to the next lesson apologize to the teacher for not practicing as you feel like you're wasting their time and you should have done more so you put guilt into the fear and you continue to not practice and not improve. You get frustrated disappointed in yourself and guilty you end up stopping lessons, wondering why we even thought you could try. Oh, dear this isn't how it’s supposed to go. 

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