What makes a good piano player? During our first set of free piano online lessons, we’ll address that question by focusing on a series of progressive finger patterns and chord exercises.
Good piano playing starts with good posture at the keyboard by maintaining a comfortable seated position and proper form in your arms, wrists and hands.
This provides your fingers with the leverage they need to: strike, grasp, duck under, slip, reach over, stretch, pull and push off the piano keys with just the right amount of control and support.
In Get Piano Lesson 1, we'll begin to develop these techniques in our first interactive beginner lessons. For piano players, the ability to move as gracefully as a butterfly on the keyboard is what good piano playing is all about.
In order to play the piano accurately and smoothly it’s essential to develop good fingering.
A good piano player knows how to reach any sequence of notes up to an eight to ten note distance on the piano keyboard without bending, twisting at the wrist, or jumping from note to note.
Good fingering ensures a smooth transition from one note to the next and allows for the proper leverage to play soft, loud, fast or slow without exerting too much physical energy.
In fact, you will hardly ever see professional piano players unnecessarily moving their hands around too much at all. It’s their fingers that are doing all the reaching, stretching and sliding under and over other fingers with just the right dexterity.
Therefore, in order to develop this agile feel for the keyboard, we begin to train our fingers by assigning each finger a number. Then after a few easy piano lessons of playing numbered finger patterns, you will start to notice the exercises becoming increasingly easier to play.
In fact, our third set of free piano online lessons will utilize this “numbered fingering system” to play five different finger patterns from our online blackboard (similar to the one seen below).
We will assign the same number to each corresponding finger on both our right and left hands
(Hope you can read my handwriting)
In our seventh set of free piano online lessons we will slowly begin playing our keyboard with both hands simultaneously.
These challenging set of exercises will teach us hand-eye coordination, ambidexterity and other beginner lessons for piano. These ambidextrous exercises will be presented in five easy piano lessons, and will conclude with a test!
Hand Position
Part of good fingering also has to do with how you place your hands on the keyboard. As a piano player, you should be able to move seamlessly over the keys without tripping over the keys or even your own fingers.
The black keys (as you may have noticed) are raised a bit higher than the white keys. So your hand position must also be at a raised level where you can glide over the white as well as black keys.
In future free piano online lessons we will begin to break out of our comfort zone by moving beyond our familiar C Major position (first position).
These progressive beginner lessons for piano will have us playing finger patterns in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th positions, as well as three other easy hand positions.
Poor Hand Position
If you were to ask someone with little or no piano experience to play three or four notes on the piano, you would probably observe their hand lying flat over the keys (as in this image), with possibly even their palm touching the white keys.
You won’t get very far trying to play piano in this position, because there’s absolutely no leverage or control over the keys with such poor form.
Good Hand Position
You need to keep your wrists up, but in-line with your forearms. Your forearms should be in a comfortable horizontal position. Shoulders relaxed.
Your fingers should be curved and ready to strike down on the keys with only the tips of your fingers touching them.
Your palm should be in a “cupped” shape, as if you were holding a small ball in your hand.
In this position your thumb will line up with its’ side touching the keys. The gap under your four fingers allows easy access for your thumb to pass underneath, but also allows your index and middle fingers to pass easily over your thumb.
The image above shows the ideal hand position as you practice your free piano online lessons.
Going forward, our free piano online lessons will introduce us to chords and have us playing 1-3-5 triads in seven chord positions on the keyboard.
Beyond that, Get Piano Lesson.com will continue to focus primarily on easy piano lessons before venturing into the more advanced musical topics, such as: note reading, time signatures, scales and other complex topics of music theory.
However, all our free piano online lessons are designed to be comprehensive, interactive and fun!
Good piano playing starts with good posture at the keyboard by maintaining a comfortable seated position and proper form in your arms, wrists and hands. 
You need to keep your wrists up, but in-line with your forearms. Your forearms should be in a comfortable horizontal position. Shoulders relaxed. 
