Do specific piano exercises improve your general piano playing skills?

[maxkarlstedt]

Hello there again!

I just have a quick question to any piano teacher out there, or anyone else who has experience to answer my question:

One question is as the title suggests: if you do a specific piano exercise (for example, practice hand independency), will this also improve your general piano playing skills? (for example, will you have easier time learning certain piano pieces that demand hand independency?)

I ask this because I want to know if there is any use of specific piano exercises for my overall piano playing skills or if I should just stick to practicing the pieces I want to learn?

Thanks in advance! / Max.

[adodd81802]

Hi Max, I could write an answer as long as your arm.

For questions like this, yes it's always helpful to get teacher input, but your best bet is to have a teacher, and to ask them directly and to bring up specific scenarios. You can approach the way you practice piano in so many ways, that you are likely to receive an equal amount of yes - do exercises for specific problems as much as you would receive - no , just practice the pieces.

The reality of it is, if you practice just pieces you will eventually gain the skill and learn the piece.
However try this with pieces out side your ability and you can pick up bad habbits and make it very difficult to polish the piece and you'll end up having to leave it completely and come back to it.

Exercises don't practice the piece, but also don't destroy it if you're out of your depth. Having a teacher, can assess the right balance for you. You're unlikely to get a full explanation on here that will leave you 100% sure of how you want to progress.

[lostinidlewonder]

Exercises are good to initially experience and start to understand a technical feat you have little/no experience with. It also can be used to train a technical deficiency if pieces you study do not go through those movements enough. For instance 45 fingers often is weak for beginners but studying it with a piece full of 45 would be cruel, so simple hanon exercises might be used for instance. Being able to do the exercises doesn't mean you can do it in pieces well, but not being able to do the exercises definitely means no hope in achieving it in pieces. So being able to do something in isolation with exercises does not necessarily mean you can do it when in context to pieces with just as much confidence. This is how I look at it. Hope it helps.

[hardy_practice]

Make your exercises out of your pieces.

[brogers70]

I think that the value of exercises is not so much that they train you to play passages that are like passages you will find in repertoire you will play later. If that were what they were for, then you'd be better off just creating exercises out of the difficult parts of pieces you want to learn. For me, exercises help because they allow you to isolate a particular movement, focus on relaxation, or evenness of tone, timing, etc, without worrying about lots of other musical issues simultaneously. Those skills then rub off in playing repertoire, but not because you've trained yourself to do specific figures that will recur in lots of pieces.

[irrational]

I find that my teacher points out little exercises to fix specific points in my playing. But I know that some of the ways she tells me to practice is also found in books such as Hanon.
I think playing pieces highlight your limitations and a good teacher is imperative to show what exactly needs to be practiced.

I also think that a good range of repertoire provides a lot. from finger dexterity and independence to evenness and accuracy of touch. For this reason in my learning I choose pieces that are difficult for the simple reason that I have not played similar things before to expose me to different areas of playing. That way I can get to a whole raft of problems rather than just practicing technical exercises. This could range from simple speed, to polyphony to fast triplets or dynamically changing octave runs or even managing lots of cadences in different ways.

There are different schools, but as with most things I think a balance is good. I lean more towards playing pieces, but I don't throw away technical exercises either. I like scales and arpeggios!