 Hi guys, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, I'm just going to look at a few strategies to strengthen your left hand. Okay. Generally, whenever people learn piano, that's usually the concern. I'm not able to, why is my left hand so weak? I've got this problem even from left-handed students. Like they do everything with their left hand primarily, but then they are also like, you know, my left hand is weak. You know? I don't think it's related to your dominant hand. I think it's more about the way you approach the instrument. So I'm going to give you five sure-shot ways to get your left hand well as strong as the right hand. At least that's the goal. So let's get started. Before we do, don't forget to hit the bell, subscribe and anything else which you need to do. Like, like the video. That will also help. Okay. The first thing I'd like to mention when you're trying to look at hand strength is develop some kind of confidence on a basic level or at least basic control over, consider a few instruments. So one instrument I like to consider when I practice the piano is the bongos, okay? Or any kind of two drum instruments like a mridangam, a tabla or even a drum set for that matter. So it's good to be rhythmically active by learning a few of these drum instruments. For me personally, it didn't take me too long to learn this or maybe even the drum set. It's sort of like at a band practice because you can play the piano, kind of everyone assumes that you can also play the drums. And I've figured this out with a few of my piano keyboard friends. They all are very good drummers. So I'm not saying that I'm a good drummer, but at least I can hold a groove. I can hold a groove, play it fairly on time and I have that coordination going, you know? So when you actually look at bringing this into your practice approach, learning the bongos, learning a bit of the other instruments, you kind of do both hands together as opposed to going to the piano and playing like a finger exercise really fast, you know? And then you don't do any of that in the left hand, you know? So one strategy is get acquainted with a few of these instruments which I'm going to show you. So let's start with the bongos. So think of this as the kick drum, think of this as the snare drum and the good thing about a bongo is you can work on your hand strength by just whacking the drum or you can work on your finger strength. Of course I played, I don't know whether I played correctly because I haven't studied it officially, but I'm assuming that you can hit with your finger or hit with your entire hand. So it will strengthen the hand and it will also strengthen your fingers and we don't differentiate between hands on the bongo or on the tabla, those sort of instruments. You need this for bass, you need this for treble and if when you play these drums, you have limited pitch resources, you can't be playing only high or only low. How are you going to groove? So the only two things we have on this drum is low pitch and high pitch unlike the piano which has a million notes. So you have to use both hands to play this sort of a thing. So things you could consider is just build grooves naturally, you know, pick a genre and just go with it, you know? And add this to your practice routine, I guess. Something like, right, you can do this with your wrist, you can just whack it. If you're not sure of using the fingers, start with your hands, later on you can bring in your wrist, you can turn it like that, bring in your fingers, right? So this is the bongo, it offers a lot of possibilities. If you don't have the bongo, you could also consider a frame drum. A frame drum is also a really nice tool. There we have it, the frame drum. So this is a very inexpensive thing, it'll cost you barely anything, very common. You just hold it with one hand, one hand will be the left hand and the other will be the right hand which is whacking it, but the left hand can also hit. So this in a way is kind of improving your left hand, definitely because you're holding it and bringing in the fingers. So it will strengthen your hand in the long run, okay? So that's about the frame drum. Another thing you could consider is another percussion instrument called the shaker, which for some reason I've gotten used to playing in my left hand, maybe because of piano also doing a similar function, you know? So basically you play the feel of the song on the shaker. You go 8th notes, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and or you go 16s, 1, 2, 3 and a 4. You can even do triplets I guess, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. But the concept here is you're just going down stroke and back up like a guitar player doing this and that. You can do it with whichever hand, I'm just showing you in the left hand. So when you go this way, you just like drums, you don't want to use your arm and it's very similar to the piano. The piano also when we play, if we use our entire shoulder, the sound lacks control, lacks dynamics and it just doesn't sound professional and it starts hurting us. So the shaker gives you that wrist control, which you would need to play the piano. So perhaps you could do it with both hands, practice it independently. So if you observe, I'm using my wrist, I'm not using my arm, neither am I doing any kind of stuff like that. It's just purely wrist and you can practice and get some decent speed, right hand or maybe you could learn the maracas where you have to do it with both hands. So this is about the shaker. We've done a shaker video on YouTube, which was quite detailed. So we'll put that up in the description and stuff like that. Check that out. We've done quite a few videos on percussion, even on using bongos and stuff like that. So I just wanted to share the reason why I have ended up playing these instruments is probably because you can, you know, if you're playing piano the right way, your two hands start getting independent and what more way to exhibit your independence than play drums because those are the main independence challenges which you'll have. Okay. So another thing you could consider is the bass guitar or the guitar in general, right? So what I like about it is you're pressing the thing generally with the left hand, which for pianists is our weaker hand. But for the guitar, this has to be really strong. And also what we find is you have to clutch the guitar, you have to clutch it. So inevitably this thumb also gets strong or the muscles around the thumb, this area gets very strong. This is guitar, bass, anything, anything really, which is a stringed instrument because you have to clutch it. If you're putting a pressure here, this is not the index fingers power. This is the index finger in tandem with the entire palm because the thumb has to provide an equal force in order to make it playable. You know, if it was only my index finger, then I have to use my shoulder, bicep and all that. So you're definitely going to strengthen these muscles, which are very piano muscles come to think of it. So even to get a sound out of a guitar or a bass, when you start learning it, it may sound like this, right? That's not necessarily because your fingers are weak. It's just that they're not working well together. So yeah, or maybe you're using too much of the arm and it's more finger related. So guitar is a good instrument and you could develop just even if you practice simple skills. This is really going to test your fingers. All of them are being used. Another thing you could do is exercises. You know, you can try and play something there with your index. And then when the middle comes in, don't lift the middle. Don't lift the index. Don't do is in any ways that sounds bad. So this will build up your finger stamina. This will really give you a workout. So sometimes before a show, I actually take a couple of my bandmates if they are a bass player or a guitar player, bass is actually a lot more kind of harder to press, I think than I guess bass. Then you say acoustic guitar, then maybe the electric guitar electric guitar is a little bit easier to grip or hold at least. You don't get that ringing sound, but a bass is a bit tricky, especially if the action is a bit higher. So I generally pull up instrument or two from musicians around me and just warm up before a show, something like that, just chromatic stuff or and all this is left hand. And while all that's happening, the thumb is also getting stronger and stronger. So whatever we looked at in order to strengthen the left hand, learn a couple of percussion instruments and develop some basic skills with guitar. Maybe you can just learn how to hold simple chords. This itself will make your hand stronger. Even your forearm, everything is going to be strong and these are all the piano muscles in any case. So time and again, practice these other instruments. Let's move on to another strategy which I think will really make your left hand strong. So the next way I think you can really strengthen your left hand is do it along with the right hand, do it in tandem with the right hand. Some might argue that you should be playing exercises, you know, like or definitely works. That's a great strategy to have. So what you will find in a contemporary music context is you have these riffs. For example, something which we can come up with now, if I try to play that on the keyboard, what is it on E, I guess, yeah, naturally, we try to do it with our right hand, but then what I would encourage you to do is play it in both hands. This will help you in with two ways. One is you don't kind of fry your brain with the right hand and then the left hand becomes like an afterthought. You're like, oh, why should I do it? I've already done the right hand, worked so hard. Might as well bring them both together and in a performance context, this sounds great. This will be a good piano part. If a guitar player also pretty much does the same thing, if you ask me, and this really helps also understanding that the left hand is a mirror image of the right hand means the thumb here is the little finger here. So if you do a drill, it's thumb index, middle, ring, pinky in the right, but in the left, it's pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb. So I think that coordination between the hand itself needs to be worked out. That's why you may be thinking, oh, my left hand is not strong, but maybe because you didn't get the mirroring sorted, you know. So essentially play simple riffs, you know, I don't want to play very popular ones, otherwise, you know, what may happen to the video. So if you do something like just that, just that, then you could let the left hand go away from the right hand, or maybe if your right hand goes to some chords, keep the same bass line going in the left. So always look at the bass line or a riff to be played in tandem with the right hand. Yes, you could do standard drills as well, do all those things as well. But I just wanted to offer a different perspective because riffs, when you play in a band or in a group or even in your own solo music, it sounds nice when you play melodies with both hands. So things like that. So that's an interesting way and a definite sure shot way to make your left hand stronger. Just play it with the right hand. Moving on. So another way to strengthen your left hand or to improve your left hand is to just cut through the standard objectives which you may find in, you know, exercise books or workbooks. In the long run or in a real world scenario, in a recording or in a gig, your left hand does not necessarily need to play fancy, quick, you know, bluesy, you know, like that's not really a left hand thing. That is a right hand thing. The reason being the pitch of what I did now is nicer, you know, in this region. So if you do that doesn't sound so good to, you know, to actually work it out in the I'm not saying you have to be lazy, you know, you could do a little bit in the left. But my point is focus on what the left hand should be needed for. So first thing I would say is work on your pinky independence. This is a very important thing when you're working on the left hand. There's something we rarely do in the right. Work on your pinky. So what that means is my pinky finger has not released. So this is a challenge for a lot of students because the pinky is weak. So focus on those aspects of the left hand because that is usable at a gig or in a recording. The pinky independence also look at emulating like a drummer in your left hand only, like forget about the right hand. So let's say you do a simple rock groove. Root octave back to root. So something like So this is how you can actually strengthen the left hand because this is real world. This is what you could do in a real world and the right hand can just hold some chords. Play a pulse with the chords. Not to say that you can't change the left hand, you can. Slowly bring in your other fingers. Also look at the role of the left hand. A lot of the cases the left hand will just need to do like a steady pulse. Like maybe something like Just C and G and then and then you play that melody. But you don't realize that it's going to be tough to keep this going when you start exploring the melody in the right hand. Keep that going, keep it pumping. So that's another way to make your left hand usable and really good and really strong and immediately use it in something like a song. Which you could be playing tomorrow or right now. Okay so another way to use the left hand and strengthen it while you play is to kind of have a call and response kind of system with the left hand and the right hand. And just sort of have an interplay between them. So maybe something like So I'm actually playing something the right hand. Like just copy that. It's a bit tricky but you could also kind of look at it as right hand plays something fairly weird and challenging. And then let the left hand do something simpler you know. Is that or simplify the right hand you know. This way really the fact that you're kind of having a chat between the two hands almost like two people speaking to each other motivates you I think to get better with your left hand rather than do something the right hand then bring in the left hand a lot later. Okay and more food for thought would be learn some of the great bark pieces. Like his two part inventions or anything where he uses counterpoint. You know where he plays something fancier in the left hand and something you know very simple in the right hand. So get your left hand working or moving in that sense moving on. So another way to make your left hand a lot more stronger is to just start with it before you do anything. You know just keep even if you want to keep like a steady eighth note movement. Develop something here and don't stop with it you know it should keep going on and then do whatever you want to do in the right hand it could be a drill could be a chord pattern or a improv. Okay basically build and you'll realize while you're enjoying the music your hands are also getting literally heated up like you're feeling like a like there's something burning in your hand and you'll find that you don't have that pain in your right hand because your left hand even though it's doing something redundant or something very normal very predictable you're doing that over and over and over and over again almost sometimes for the whole song. So if you're doing rock and roll music for example if you do you'll have to do this like if you're playing in a club you'll have to do this for about three hours you know. So you need to get this hand strong so yes while I'm saying all this it is important to take breaks it's important to relax a bit and especially if you're new to the piano whenever you get a pain with one of your hands or both hands just stop playing for a while I think that's the best way to go about the instrument or if your left hand is hurting maybe just stick with the right hand or just take a break there's what's wrong in taking a break it's not the end of the world if you just stop playing for a bit you know or just pack up for the day repeat the same thing tomorrow all I'm suggesting for you is don't burn out piano practice is just something you need to just keep doing there's no end to it you just because you apparently turn pro it doesn't mean you stop practicing the practice it can just come back and haunt you if you don't practice so it's just like any athlete or any sports person anyone who does anything really you just have to keep practicing and you have to just keep looking at what you're going to do to get better or at least stay at the same level you don't want to drop your your game. So that was the point I mentioned about the left hand starting off the operation play something consistent maybe you want a standard groove maybe just that or maybe a chord pattern start with that because what tends to happen is because subconsciously we tend to feel like the melody is everything you know and I don't blame anyone because I myself do that so we always yearn towards the tune we are trying to play but then we don't want the left hand to take a back seat so this approach or this tip if you will is start with the left hand do do something figure out your pattern the thing will make your left hand stronger and then do whatever you need to do in the right hand right so those were the five points which I wanted to give you guys in order to really make your left hand strong over the years of playing the piano and over the years of teaching it I've learned that I think these five things or five approaches can really bring out your left hand because it's not about so especially if you're an adult you know or even a kid for that matter you can't be forced to do something you can only be sort of motivated to do it so you have to enjoy what you're doing on the keyboard and then the left hand will automatically get stronger you know otherwise if I tell you you know do the same thing in the right hand in the left hand multiple scales multiple keys multiple everything I mean are you actually going to do it even I may not do it because we need to be motivated to do it so hopefully these five techniques I think are fun they are quite fun to to implement it's not like your brain's going to get that fatigued on the quantity you may even enjoy your practice more so that's where I'm coming from it's not strategies to definitely make your left hand stronger well a strategy which could definitely make it stronger is you could go to a gym or do push-ups or something like that so the strategies I've hinted at in this lesson are just things which can make the music also exciting or even more exciting than if you were to just do it with one hand okay to leave you with a bonus tip if you will to get this left hand stronger some things we do very often are finger independence challenges or just ways to make the fingers a bit stronger so you just keep your finger on a flat surface and just try you know lifting it you know you can lift two at a time of course now we need to make the left hand stronger so let's do it all with the left lift two like that you know and then whack two of them but then keep all the others sleeping on the keyboard you know and to ensure this right you need your whole hand it's not just the finger so you could do certain things to make your left hand stronger even away from the piano you could be doing this on a dining table or on a bench or you could perhaps even do it on your leg you can just tap it here on your leg and just practice like that I guess right so finally I would urge you guys to maybe take up a couple of sports you could look at badminton table tennis you can look at any of these things more than your fingers you just generally need a strong hand in order to play you also need a strong back you need other muscles to also work when you play the instrument because for many hours when I sit and play the piano it's also the back which starts getting busted you know so you should definitely learn a couple of sports or just play a few sports it can definitely help overall hand strength otherwise if some of you just you know do computer work or coding or just generally desk jobs all day you're not going to strengthen your hands so it's always good to go out play some sports or also do something which is a bit weird maybe you could take a few sports and just flip your hands if you're a right-handed player at something maybe you could just move the racket to your left hand and just try here and there just for fun just getting the left hand stronger for some reason as it turns out I'm quite decent with left hand in some sports so it may help you even play sports better you can like really confuse your opponents and stuff anyway guys so this is about the left hand strength I hope these tips would help you work on your left hand and also respect the role of the left hand that's another thing which people fail to do the left hand's role is not what the right hand's role is because it's it's foundationally laid out on the piano for that to see right hand is supposed to do the catchy stuff the right hand is the lead actor while the left hand is definitely the supporting role so look at it that way and understand and appreciate what the left hand's role is in music its role is base its role is rhythm percussion and creating harmony and creating a foundation for what the right hand is so from that perspective hopefully you'll be energized to use the left hand a bit more in your compositions right so this is Jason here from Nathaniel again if you haven't already don't forget to subscribe to our channel hit the bell for notifications consider following us on patreon where you're going to get a lot of my hand written notes may not be a lot of notes for this lesson since these were just guidelines as such but there are definitely a lot of other things waiting for you there theory concepts notation backing tracks and a lot more so I will see you in the next one thanks for watching cheers