Best piano finger exercises books for beginners and intermediate level players

Best piano finger exercises books for beginners. These will improve your the flexibility, dexterity, and independence of your fingers, and will also help build technical proficiency.

Introduction

Almost every beginner who is learning to play the piano (or keyboards) usually starts taking lessons only after he/she has seen somebody play amazing well on the piano/keyboard and felt “Wow, even i want to play like that someday”.

However, everybody has to start from ground zero.

And when you start taking lessons, you will realize that your fingers hardly move.

That is why you need to practice finger exercises for the piano.

Why Finger Exercises for Piano

A piano requires muscular strength and endurance in your fingers, especially when you play on a piano with fully weighted keys. Being able to play the black and white keys effortlessly requires patience and lot of practice.

Advantages of finger exercises

• Improves dexterity of the fingers
• Prevents injury
• Improves your technique.

So its important to efficiently practice so that even you can build such fingers over time.

Sample Finger Exercises for Piano

Here’s one easy piano exercise for your fingers.

Play C D E F G with the five fingers of both your hands. Go from C to G and come back. Do it a few times.

• Right hand fingers will play 1 2 3 4 5, 5 4 3 2 1 (1 is thumb and 5 is little finger)
• Left hand fingers will play 5 4 3 2 1, 1 2 3 4 5.
• Play both the hands together.

This is just one exercise, and probably the simplest of them all.

A variant of the above exercise will be to go from C to G, come back and repeat the same from the note D. Keep on moving one note to the right till you reach the C in the next octave.

This exercise itself should make you feel good (I mean your fingers).

Experienced players spend a few minutes practicing finger exercises (to warm up the fingers) before beginning their practice sessions.

Top Piano Exercise Books for Your fingers

Here we take a look at the best etude and method books to help make the piano easy on the fingers. These method books and series are great for developing dexterity, hand independence, and technical proficiency in both classical and jazz repertoire.

• HANON The Virtuoso Pianist in sixty exercises For The Piano – Book 1
• HANON The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises – Book 2: Schirmer Library of Classics Volume Piano Technique
• HANON The Virtuoso Pianist in sixty exercises For The Piano – BOOK 3
• Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos: 153 Progressive Piano Pieces
• Mikrokosmos: Books 1 & 2
• Best Traditional Piano Etudes, Book 1 (Ed. Lynn Freeman Olson)
• Musical Fingers, Bk 1 (Frances Clark Library for Piano Students)
• Musical Fingers, Bk 2 (Frances Clark Library for Piano Students)
• Musical Fingers, Bk 3 (Frances Clark Library for Piano Students)
• Musical Fingers, Bk 4: Essential Exercises for Late-Intermediate and Early-Advanced Pianists (Frances Clark Library for Piano Students)
• Jazz Piano Technique: Exercises, Etudes & Ideas for Building Chops (John Valerio)

Useful Links

Here are some more useful links for piano finger exercises.

• Improve your piano technique with Hanon exercises!
• 8 Piano Finger Exercises for Beginners

While these finger exercises can be done on a music keyboard, they are best suited to keyboards with weighted keys. Here are some nice digital pianos for beginners in case you’re looking for one.

KeytarHQ Editorial Team

KeytarHQ editorial team includes musicians who write and review products for pianists, keyboardists, guitarists & other musicians. KeytarHQ is the best online resource for information on keyboards, pianos, synths, keytars, guitars and music gear for musicians of all abilities, ages and interests.