Practicing Hanon Exercises in Different Keys

Hello. Welcome to virtualsheetmusic.com. I'm Robert Estrin with a viewer question. Matt asks, "Is there a value in practicing Hanon exercises in different keys?" What a great question. It brings up a whole lot of things I want to share with you today that might be helpful in your playing.

The Hanon exercises start off with 20 exercises all in C major, and they're repeated patterns. The first one sounds like this.

It continues like that. Eventually, it comes down with the pattern upside down.

That's the pattern over and over again and there's 20 of these exercises. The way I generally utilize Hanon, which you can actually find out about in another video of mine, is to develop strength for beginning players so that you can approach scales and arpeggios which are more difficult than Hanon exercises.

What about practicing them in different keys? Well, I would say that once you've gone through scales and arpeggios and gotten introduced to those, you might want to revisit Hanon. Why in different keys? To get the different finger patterns and get comfortable with the black keys with different combinations of fingers. Like, if you played the same exercise in D major, it would sound like this and would feel a bit different.

Going through that can certainly exercise different muscles and give you comfort on the keyboard in different places. My father, Morton Estrin, who was my teacher, he once recommended to me a really radical idea of practicing all your major scales on the piano with C major scale fingerings. The C major scale.

What would happen if you tried to play the C major scale fingering on a D flat scale which has completely different fingering? It feels very unnatural.

Why would you want to do such a thing? You would never want to play a D flat scale with that fingering. Well, sometimes in music, particularly in counterpoint, complex fugues, you have to use all sorts of fingering that is very unnatural with crossings that are awkward. So by practicing with fingering that is not optimal, it gives you the feeling and the security of being able to reach in ways that you're not accustomed to generally.

For example, in the second movement of the Bach Toccata in E Minor, you have something like this in the middle.

In writing like that, you may have to use different types of fingering that you might not be comfortable with but there is no better choice in that context. So by practicing exercises or scales with fingering that is not the best fingering, it can help to prepare you for opportunities to play music where there aren't better choices for fingering.

Thanks for the great question, Matt. Once again, I'm Robert Estrin here at virtualsheetmusic.com. Keep those questions coming in. See you next time.

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