Piano Exercises for Beginners

Piano exercises for beginners provide the new piano player with material for starting the development of important piano-playing skills.  You can begin building your keyboard awareness, finger & fingering familiarity, and basic piano techique immediately with a few simple patterns designed to get your hands on the keys, playing and moving around.

Here, you will find the progression of simple piano exercises for beginners that I use with all of my new piano students to take them from ground zero up to scales.  Practice each exercise  up to at least 120bpm on the metronome before moving on to the next exercise.

As you learn and work on the exercises, you should also be learning and practicing arpeggios, a cadence, and "Twinkle, Twinkle", so that you can combine them all into one very effective workout routine for the development of your basic piano-playing skills. You will see an example of the complete routine -exercise pattern, arpeggios, cadence, and Twinkle- at the end of each video tutorial. 

Once you have completed the 8 exercises, you can move on to scales.  You will continue playing arpeggios and cadences along with your scales, as you move along.  Upon embarking on the scales, I usually have my students replace "Twinkle" with "Burlesque".  At this point, the daily routine becomes: Scales, Arpeggios, Cadence, & Burlesque (SACB), which is a fantastic combination of skills and knowledge that you can learn to play in all the major keys (and eventually the minor keys, as well).

Follow this path diligently for a few years, gradually developing speed with your SACB, and your foundation of piano-playing skills will grow tremendously, as well as your confidence at the keys.  (For the complete explanation and to see how it all fits into your piano journey, check out the book: "Piano Player... You".)

Piano Exercises For Beginners #1: "Peanut Butter Etude"

-click here for the music notation-

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Exercise #2: "Stepping & Skipping"

-click here for the music notation-

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Exercise #3: "M & W"

-click here for the music notation-

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Exercise #4: "3rds Etude"

-click here for the music notation-

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Exercise #5: "4ths Etude"

-click here for the music notation-

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Exercise #6: "5ths Etude"

-click here for the music notation-

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Exercise #7: "6ths Etude"

-click here for the music notation-

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Exercise #8: "Interval Fun"

-click here for the music notation-

Next: SACB

Once you have completed these 8 exercises (and it should've taken you at least 8 weeks), you are probably ready to begin the journey through all the major keys with the highly effective SACB routine. 

If you want to really understand how the exercises and the SACB routine fit into the development of your piano-playing foundation, you may want to consider getting my book: "Piano Player... You".  Chapter 5 will help you see just how helpful these things are to a piano player.