Welcome to this comprehensive course!

For those of you who didn't follow closely my videos before, I suggest to watch introduction Basics lessons first, where I introduce you to the basic concepts of the efficient piano playing. These lessons have drastic importance for an understanding of further lessons dedicated to the exercises.

I suggest you to get a score with fingering suggestions, like this one.

A few suggestions:

As I have mentioned in this introduction video, Brahms exercises are not sorted in the difficulty progression order. Therefore I would suggest you first mastering exercises that seem to be more user-friendly, such as No. 7, 8, 17, 24, 30, 33a, 34a, 39, 40, 41, 42 and 47. The course is built in such way, that after familiarizing yourself with the concepts explained in the Basics lessons, you can watch videos in any order, depending on which exercise you want to work on right now. Of course you don't have to play all of the exercises, but as more exercises you would play following my suggestions closely, as deeper will be a transformation of your playing habits.

Please remember also, that although the principles explained in this course are quite universal, each hand is unique, and some of you would have to seek ways to slightly adjust/modify tips explained in this course in case you feel that you can't reach a natural feeling in the hand by following my directions precisely. The aim of any technique optimization work is to introduce a student to the most universal playing strategies, and to make them aware of their movements, giving them a space to start a self-exploration work, so not just blindly following teacher's directions, but adjust such tips to suit their unique physiology.

All motions that I demonstrate are exaggerated; I suggest you to follow this exaggerated way of playing in a slower tempo in order to understand them better, but don't forget to minimize them when raising the tempo.

The best strategy to master any of these exercises is to approach it in steps with just one goal for each step. I would suggest you to reach a satisfactory quality on each step before moving to the next one.

For most of exercises we can proceed in following steps:

1. Analysing the text: recognizing patterns, simplifying material and learning a harmonic/melodic skeleton first for a faster memorisation. Quite often tension is built not because of technical insufficiency, but because we don't understand and didn't memorize the piece well. This course will, among other things, help you to learn pieces faster, by at first recognizing structures, breaking down to basics things that are complex, and extracting the mainline of music.
2. Coordinating motions hands separately, starting from a very slow tempo, and gradually bringing it up to a desirable tempo one hand at a time. Fingering has a drastic importance: you pick up a comfortable fingering from day one, and don't let yourself to play it with wrong fingers even once. If you have occasionally played smth with wrong fingers, repeat it over with a correct fingering at least 3 times in a row.
3. Synchronizing both hands by starting again from a slow tempo.
4. When an exercise feels comfortable finally, shape it musically, working on phrasing, playing around with different performing options, dynamics, etc. I know that unfortunately many would give up on this stage, but I suggest you to remember that this is actually the most important stage of a work, since the aim of these exercises is not to just improve your dexterity and finger strength, but to make you better musicians. I will give you some suggestions and hints how to make these exercises sound beautiful, but please use your fantasy, by creating at least one alternative interpretation in addition to my interpretation suggestions.
   
   
   
   Working on interpretation, we can play around with:
   
   
   
   - Dynamics (from PPP to FF, both hands or each hand in its own dynamics)
   
   
   
   - Development (crescendo-diminuendo)
   
   
   
   - Tempo (slower and more lyrical, faster and more playful)
   
   
   
   - Touch (Legato, staccato, portato in both hands or contraposing different touch options in different hands). Here is a short video about different touch options in piano playing
   
   
   
   - Voicing: since most of these exercises are polyphonic, we can play around with playing each voice with its own colour.
   
   
   
   - Pedalling: first master each exercise without pedal, or with only functional pedal where it is needed for a better legato, and then experiment how a different amount of pedalling changes an impression, and try to find out experimentally where is a line between acceptable and too blurry amount of pedal.

Another tip: use a larger mirror or a front camera on your laptop/iPad installed next to the keyboard, in order to watch your hands from the side. I would also advice you to record yourself playing piano time to time, and watch how do your hands, elbows and shoulders look like from the side.

If you like this course and find it useful, I will be incredibly grateful to you for sharing a word about it!

Have fun!