Piano Exercises For Dummies

The fun and easy way to tune up your technique and improve your playing

Is the piano your passion? This easy-to-read guide is bursting with fun exercises designed to hone your piano-playing technique, from warm-ups and major and minor scales to octaves, chord cadences, and more. You'll play challenging rhythms, practice with different tempos, play a performance piece at the end of each chapter, and find inspiration for performing music your way.

• Warm up away from the piano — release tension in your hands, wrists, and arms and go to the piano feeling loose and comfortable

• Wake up those fingers — perfect your hand position and develop left and right hand finger independence

• Develop greater control — practice smoother finger crossovers and pass-unders for speedier scales and arpeggios

• Incorporate greater movement — play chords without tension, jump across the keyboard, and move with ease in parallel and contrary motion

• Ramp up your skills — perfect your pedaling, play grace notes, trills, and other fancy ornaments

Open the book and find:

• More than 150 exercises that vary in style, key, and tempo

• Major and minor scales

• Blues, diminished and chromatic scales

• Finger, rhythm, and chord progression exercises

• Left-hand accompanimentpatterns

• Performance pieces with every chapter

• Ten one-page dance pieces

Bonus CD Includes

• More than 70 tracks all played by the author

• Selected exercises from each chapter

• Every performance piece

• Ten dance pieces from the book

David Pearl is the author of The Art of Steely Dan and Color Your Chords. His other books include Burt Bacharach Piano Solos, jazz transcriptions of artists such as Grover Washington, Jr. and Dave Douglas, and arrangements of jazz tunes, classical pieces, and opera arias for piano. He has taught piano and performed jazz and classical music professionally for more than 30 years.