Excercises with no piano

[ermin]

Hi

Summer has arrived and I'm going on vacation for a month. What that means is that I can't practice for a whole month because I can't take my piano with me. I was wondering if there are any finger excercises, or just excercises, which can help me maintain or even improve my abilities while I'm on vacation. Thanks in advance

[faulty_damper]

Seymore Fink has written a book that has movement patterns that he recommends that doesn't require a piano.  He says these movements are the fundamental movements that are required to play the piano and ingraining them can lead to significant improvements at the piano if one applies them.

I tried some of the exercises (there aren't very many) as he prescribed and applied them to the piano and surprisingly, some of the techniques really work!  They didn't make any sense in the beginning because it conflicted with my understanding of how to play the piano but it added an invaluable insight into the performing mechanism.

Also, these exercises might not seem in any way relavent to what your body does at the piano because they are taken so far out of context that they lack meaning.  It took me a long time (several months) to figure out how these exercises even integrated into piano playing but they acutually do.  The problem it took so long is because he doesn't tell you how some of these exercises are actually used in piano playing.

This book describes basic movements but doesn't help in ways of fingering or other smaller aspects but it's worth looking into if you want to use exercises to learn how to coordinate your body to play the piano.