Putting hands tog...

"Hands tog" is piano teacher language for "hands together".

Which is probably the biggest challenge any student will face when learning the piano - going from playing "hands sep" (separately) to "hands tog".

I was working with a student this afternoon who was struggling to play her piece hands together. She could play it fairly confidently hands separately, and I wanted to her to have a go playing hands together during the lesson, so that it would be one of her 'action points' for her practice during the week. We ended up doing this:

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As you can see, the focus in today's lesson was the middle two lines. She was able to play the chords in the relevant hand as though on 'auto pilot' but struggled with the crotchet+2 quavers melodic pattern in the other hand. I got some sticky notes, ripped them into tiny pieces, and covered up the melody notes that were not 'on' the beat. Then my student had a go putting the reduced version hands together. It worked! It worked, because 1) psychologically, it was more manageable having broken down the task to just playing the notes that 'go together', rather than adding in the ones that 'go in-between' as well. As she feels more and more confident with this approach, she will remove one of the sticky notes at a time, and have a go adding those in. Next lesson, we'll be working on the other two lines.

I love sticky notes!