Piano Video Lesson: Why You Must Practice in Chords First

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin here with such an important topic that I deal with my students all the time and I think it could be so helpful for you which is why you must practice in chords first.

There are so many benefits to this and I'm going to dive right in and show you. I want to start with something really obvious and then show you some other possibilities how you can utilize this technique in your practice.

For example, the famous Bach Prelude in C major from the Well -Tempered Clavier, Book Concerto in C major. The entire Prelude is just a bunch of broken chords.

So practicing in chords first, you will get it into your fingers and into your head, you'll understand the harmonies and it's much simpler to learn.

Those are the opening four measures that I just played, just reduced down to four chords. You can get the best fingering as I said and understand the structure of the music but there are many, many other examples of this that may be less obvious. For example, an Alberti bass in Mozart, for example, his famous K545 C major sonata.

The left hand can be learned in chords.

Much easier to learn it that way. There's much less to learn and then you can break it up after you've learned it that way.

Some other examples that may be even less obvious to you at first glance, for example, the Greek lyric piece, the very first lyric piece.

That one basically is just chords.

And so much easier to learn it when you just reduce it down to those chords. I'll give you one more example. This one is a little bit harder because you can't necessarily reach the chords, at least when my hands are not big enough to reach them, but it's still valuable to play it in chords even if you have to break them. The first kinderseinen, scenes from childhood of Schumann.

And once again, you can break it down to chords.

There you go. These are techniques you can utilize in your practice of so many different pieces of music. It will save you time in learning it. You will develop good fingering and understand the harmonies in a much deeper way.

How many of you practice this way already? And how many of you this is an epiphany moment? I'd love to hear from you here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks so much for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/why-you-must-practice-in-chords-first/

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