How to play hands together

I sometimes get questions from beginners on how to play hands on the piano. Here’s my reply to one of them. Hope it’ll be of help to some of you 🙂

Nice to hear from you 🙂
I’m afraid Baby Don’t Cry would be a pretty tough piece for you to play if you have trouble putting hands together. Any piece where the melody is in the left hand and accompaniment in the right, is going to be a challenge even for intermediate level pianists 😛 So don’t despair that you can’t do it for this score ok? Even my advanced level piano students would take some practising to get it right 😉

Now, for simpler pieces, you first need to practise each hand until you know the notes well. Then put hands together – do only one bar at a time, very slowly. Repeat that one bar until you understand how the hands fit together in terms of the rhythm – when they play together, when right hand plays a note alone, when the left does that? For example, you might go “together-right-left-together”. 

You also have to get used to the fingers being independent in the direction they travel, for example “right steps up-skips down-stays; left jumps up 4th-steps up-skips up”.

If you work both of these out (rhythm & shape) bar by bar until they become familiar and then easy, you’ll soon be able to play hands together! Try it out then tell me how it’s going ok? All the best!

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