If you play Classical Piano you have undoubtedly run into Charles Louis Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist. It contains valuable exercises as well as the standard fingering for all major and minor scales and arpeggios. My father Mortin Estrin www.MortonEstrin.com taught these to me and now I am sharing them with you.
While the full text for Hanon is quite large, he includes numerous exercises, all the major scales and arpeggios as well as scales in different intervals. In this video we will be covering some of the early lessons which can be very helpful if you continue practicing them a little bit every day.
It is essential to practice Hanon exercises as well as scales and arpeggios with the metronome. Why? Because the whole idea is to develop precision and evenness in your playing – for both timing and volume of each note. The metronome is an essential tool for the musician as the tape measure is for the carpenter.
For the first exercises, set the metronome at 60 beats to the minute and practice one note to the beat playing definitely. The video above provides a good example of this. Notice that when playing the exercise only the fingers are working. Utilizing raised fingers trains your hands to delineate each note. You must avoid any arm motion in these exercises. Play the entire exercise about 4 times through at one note to the beat playing at a fairly strong volume. Once you feel comfortable, try to play two notes for every beat. Make sure you continue to use only the fingers and not resort to arm motion. Why no arms? The whole idea of Hanon is to develop strength to play fast and the arms are too large to move quickly. Developing a strong finger technique is essential for fast scales and arpeggios.
Once you work your way up to 4 notes to the beat on these exercises, you will find it’s nearly impossible to lift the fingers and play fast.
The faster you play, the closer the fingers must be to the keys. Simply put, Faster = Lighter
There is no way to play with great strength or extreme movement in fast passages. Be sure to keep the fingers naturally rounded. This is necessary since your fingers are not the same length; by rounding them it makes all the fingers align at the same point on the keys.
The whole routine should take about ten minutes. If you continue to practice this every day you will find yourself developing more finger strength. It also provides a great warm up.
I would recommend doing one Hanon exercise per week. Once you have mastered 10 exercises, you should have enough strength to graduate to scales. If you master one scale or arpeggio each week, after a year you will have learned all of you major and minor (harmonic and melodic) scales and arpeggios, all with just 10 minutes per day! As your technique grows, you can adjust the metronome speed faster and faster over time.
Next week I will discuss scales and arpeggios in Hanon. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729
6 thoughts on “Learning Hanon Part 1 – The First Exercises – The Virtuoso Pianist”
Thank you for the response. Your videos are very helpful. I will work this into my practice routine as you suggested.
Robert: All the Hanon exercises are written in the key of C. Is it beneficial to transpose these exercises to different keys? If so, should the fingerings be kept the same as they are in the key of C?
my first teacher made me do them in all the keys, but starting on c, c# or c flat, i still teach this way…bill del governatore/ bill delatore
Good advice! Yes, I was taught that way also many years ago myself. I hope that these newer teachers and students would see the need for these. Thanks, John