Why Two Hands Become Three Problems
Problem
When first learning the piano, many people believe that it involves a large amount of multitasking. It would make sense that, because both hands are playing two different sets of notes, you have to learn to get two hands to do different things. However, this isn’t really how playing works and it can actually make it take much longer to learn not only pieces of music but the piano as a whole.
Here’s what usually happens:
A beginner starts to learn a piece of music, and they notice that the left hand is doing something different to the right hand, and so the logical conclusion is that they should begin to practice just the right hand by itself to learn the notes, then just the left hand by itself to learn the notes, and then they try and merge those hands together.
However, this is actually training your brain to think of two separate things happening at the same time. You may be able to play the right hand by itself and then the left hand by itself, but that generally doesn’t correlate to being able to play both hands at the same time. It also prevents you from seeing how the music is actually written, which is typically as a series of chords across hands with a melody. If you learn to read the notes hands separately first, you aren’t able to think about how the hands relate to each other with regard to the chords, the texture, the way in which melodies transfer between hands, etc.
And this is exactly why it feels like multitasking, because if you learn in this way, you’ve trained yourself to think of the right hand and the left hand as two separate things which then need to be merged together. Which takes one problem and turns it into three.
Reality
The reality is that music doesn’t actually exist as two separate hands happening at the same time. It exists as a series of events happening one after the other. When a composer is writing a piece of music, they’re not thinking about the hand that it’s being played in. Instead, they’re thinking about the chords and the melodies, which are not separated by hands. Often you will have chords played between the hands with a melody over the top, and sometimes that melody may cross into the left hand. Meaning, by practicing each hand separately, you are dividing the chord and dividing the melodies and often making them much more difficult to see (and feel).
Then there is also the coordination problem. I would largely consider myself to be someone who is terrible at multitasking. So much so that when I’m running, I can’t listen to music or a podcast because my legs stop working. In fact, multitasking itself is largely a myth. There are many studies that show that we actually struggle to focus on multiple things at the same time. Instead, our brain does something called task-switching, which is where it shifts our attention very quickly between two tasks.
When we try and put two hands together on the piano, having learnt hands separately, we are asking our brain to be able to switch very quickly between those two different things at the same time. If you’ve just practiced those hands separately, then that is difficult to do.
All this is to say that learning hands separately has a very small benefit, and that benefit is limited to feeling where your fingers go. Yet the benefit of practicing hands separately is generally outweighed by the time it takes to learn the right hand, then the left hand, and then learn the piece again hands together, along with what’s lost in the ability to understand the chords, the melodies and how the hands relate to each other in the music.
Solution
So what is a better way of learning?
Well, I often describe this as learning vertically and then learning horizontally. As I said earlier, a piece of music is a series of events. At any given moment, you’re either playing hands together, just the right hand, or just the left hand. This means that we aren’t really multitasking at all. We are simply performing a series of independent actions, one after the other. Which is, in essence, thinking about the music vertically, from the bottom of the left hand to the top of the right hand at any given moment.
Learning a piece this way means that you can more easily see the chords that are being played and also which hand the melody is in at the time. It means that you have to learn the piece of music once and, because it takes slightly more time to learn to play hands together (although you are learning it once rather than three times, so it is quicker overall), it allows you the time to consider how you are going to play those notes, which prevents one of the most common mistakes that players make, and that is attempting to learn all of the notes first and then go back and make them sound nice.
Essentially, the coordination is learned immediately, rather than adding it later. The musicality is learned immediately because you can hear all of the parts reacting to one another, and you’re avoiding playing something in a way that becomes difficult to fix in the end.
Once you feel comfortable with the hands coordinated together, then thinking more horizontally becomes beneficial. You can begin to focus on how melodies push forward or pull backwards and how chords connect from one to another. This type of thinking is “horizontal” because you are thinking about where you are now in the music and where you are going.
This is not to say that playing hands separately shouldn't be done at all. In fact, it definitely should be done. However, not as a means for learning a piece of music. Instead it should be used as a way of fixing a particular technical problem. If there is a place in a piece of music that is difficult in just one hand then giving that specific attention in one hand is beneficial. However, to learn the notes themselves is entirely different.
Playing hands together becomes three problems if we need to learn it three times: left hand, right hand and then again hands together. Yet learning the piano isn’t about getting better at the left hand or the right hand, it’s about learning to play the music as a single idea and learning it in a way that will help you play and convey that idea.
Matt