Arpeggio Exercises Piano
Florentina Holcombe
This is a useful process for self-testing, and it also helps develop mental flexibility and concentration. From a given note, generate as many different arpeggios as possible that use that note, and play all on one continuous loop without stops (the last note of each arpeggio becomes the first note of the next).
Practising in a variety of different rhythms is useful for any pattern of notes in a single rhythmic value. To avoid jerkiness in the arm, I would not advocate dotted rhythms (except perhaps in dominant 7ths). For a 4-octave arpeggio, I especially like this rhythmic pattern (four notes slow and firm, four notes fast and light):
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But first, I want to help you get excited about practicing arpeggios. Lots of piano teachers assign arpeggios and lots of piano students struggle through them. But why should you make arpeggios part of your practice routine?
Now, this movement of the Moonlight Sonata is a hard piece of music. And you would definitely have to practice it, no matter how well you can play arpeggios. But if you master arpeggios, you have a big head start on this piece.
The three notes in a triad are the root (the note on the bottom), the third (the note in the middle), and the fifth (the note on the top). When the root is on the bottom, the triad is in root position.
You start by playing the first note of the arpeggio and taking as long as you need to think about how your fingers are going to move, how your arms are going to move, how your whole body is going to lean to bring you to the next held note. And then you zoom as fast as you can to that next held note.
You can do triplet practice and grace note practice on the same day, or you can do one of them for two days and the other one for the next two days. Doing each exercise two days in a row is more effective than doing them on alternate days.
This exercise is to teach you to play each of these 120 arpeggios whenever some of them come up in a piece of music. If you spend a week practicing only the ones that start on C, and then another week the ones that start on C#, and so on you will learn all of them in just a few months.
A couple of advantages of doing arpeggios like this would be: (a) this is the way arpeggios frequently arise in music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert etc. and (b) the "thumb under" technique need to play the arpeggios fluidly this way encourages a flexible and fluid way of playing.
There is many ways of practicing arpeggios on the piano and many of them make sense for what they are gaining for. Your suggested way has one big disadvantage, that is that it is pretty time consuming since you are talking about 84 chords (not counting inversions) while many of them are repetitions. Repetition is one of the main aspects of practice, but if you want to move a bit quicker through the circle of fifth I would recommend the following:
Put together you play I, VII, VI and change the key up a fifth, by moving one step further down (You might want to change to an octave higher at some point). You then will end up with 36 different chords.
More important than the notes and fingering is ergonomically HOW to play. The arm is a machine designed to obey certain laws of physics. Although, we can and do bend those rules but bending the rules of physics comes with a price: Mediocrity or injury.
Each finger is a different length, they have different types of tendons and bones, they radiate at different angles, several different muscles can move them and many of these muscles are very weak and prone to fatigue. Ironically, those are the ones most pianists use and think they have to build strength and endurance in order to play. They actually need to not use those muscles and use the proper big ones. BTW, there are no muscles in your fingers.
It would be best that you find a teacher who will not allow you to touch the piano until you master the movements properly and understand the physics of the piano and your arm. The second you first touch a piano your brain maps the movement and if you strike the key using incorrect movement, the brain wires it in. If there is a leap or scale that eludes you, it isn't because you need more practice, it is because an errant movement is getting in your way and always will. Practicing more won't fix anything. Practicing properly will. You need a teacher to tell you how to move based upon physics, not errant movement that their teacher taught them and their's before them. It isn't fact because that is how they were taught. Even "facts" can be wrong.
Playing arpeggios involves a lot of movement from up/down, in/out, moving the arm, using pronator and supinator muscles, adjusting the elbow, adjusting the forearm, playing with gravity, forward shifts, grouping, then they all need to be combined. There are just as many things NOT to do such as pressing, abducting, crossing the thumb under the palm, isolating fingers, ulnar and radial deviation, trying to play with a still and quiet hand, trying to equalize the fingers . . . The arm plays the fingers, the fingers don't play the piano.
Some teachers like to let the student "figure it out" which some students do as they improve and experiment. But it would be better to teach them everything properly before they start playing. We don't let people drive cars or fly planes that way. Why pianists? Oh, is it because nobody dies? What is a career doomed for mediocrity?
Like you, I started playing scales at an early age, and probably like you, I quit playing them as soon as I could. It was years later before I figured out how important this kind of work is to your development. If you have time to practice only one thing during a day, practice scales.
First of all, it is important to understand why this kind of practice is important. Your first guess might be because it can help your technique. This is unquestionably true, but it is not the main reason. The main reason is because playing scales and arpeggios will help you understand music better. As you learn to play the scales and chords in each key, you will grow to understand the key and be able to play in it instinctively.
I do not mean to imply that speed and fingering is no important. However, keep in mind that what you learn when you practice scales is rarely actually applied in a song as a scale. When it is, the scale you play will likely not start or end on the tonic (first note in the key). It may be just a feet notes in a row. Your job is to know what those few notes should be; that is what practicing scales will teach you.
Below, I will show you some scales and exercises that you can start with each day. They are far from exhaustive, but will get you started in the right direction. At the beginning, your hands are likely to feel tired, but that is fine
as long as you do not feel pain. If you feel pain, stop for the day.
By the way, practice both major and minor scales. As you probably know, there are several different minor scales. You can play any you want, but my preference would be that you play the Dorian scale for your minor scales.
Why learn the Dorian scale instead of the more popular harmonic minor? Here is the reason-we are going to be using a lot of minor 7th chords in coming months, and the Dorian scale can be played without conflict with a minor 7th chord.
If this talk about Dorian scales is confusing you, just ignore it for the time being and learn any minor scale you are comfortable with. Trust me when I say you can go a long way without ever learning about musical modes
such as Dorian.
Now, here are some scales to practice-you do not have to do all of them every day. Just do just one or two sets a day. For example, do parallel motion one day, contrary motion on the next, parallel motion a third apart on the next day, and so on. However, do practice these scales in every key.
If this seems like a lot of work, just do as much as you can each day. If you setting aside thirty minutes to practice the piano, just stop this part of your practice at wherever you are after ten minutes. Above all, play lightly-keep your hands loose and free. You will sound better and will lower your risk of injury as well.
One of the most common warmups for piano are the building blocks of most styles of music: scales and arpeggios. Melodies are built on the combination of scale and arpeggio passages (which we play with the right hand most of the time). The accompaniment is almost always based on chords which could be blocked or played as arpeggios in the left hand.
This might be a little intimidating for beginning piano students. When you take piano lessons, most teachers start with learning the C major scale and then other major scales following the circle of 5ths.
Finally, there are Etudes that are more than just warmup exercises for the piano. They are interesting enough to be performed on stage! There are dozens of collections of Etudes written by Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Ligeti, and countless others. The two etude sets that stands out as a must for advanced and professional piano players were composed by F. Chopin: Opus 10 and Opus 25.