Piano Lessons

i had the great privilege of working with Eleanor Sokoloff as a young boy. Her regimen specialized in developing strong technical facilities, particularly individual finger strength and powerful versatility with scales and arpeggios.

Here are the books that i consider absolutely foundational for any young pianist who wants to build "fingers of steel" (please be careful and don't overwork on these exercises without good supervision from a teacher!)

Little Pischna (48 Practice Pieces): Piano Solo: this is a great preparatory book for the "big" Pischna book below. Perfect for developing individual finger coordination and chromatic transposition skills.

This is the "big" Pischna book - if memory serves me correctly, this was my "book of pain" for 3 years, but boy am i glad that i survived that regimen! The kind of exercises that can get you to crack walnuts with your pinkie!

School of advanced piano playing: (exercises) - by Rafael Joseffy. This was the book that "Pischna graduates" progressed to. The exercises are more thematic in nature, dealing with various intervals techniques, scale patterns, and by far the most despicable trill exercises ever devised by man...your pinkie muscles will bend nails after that!

On a slightly more humble tangent, here is a basic book for scales and arpeggios (considered the technical building blocks and musical "ABC's" of foundational piano playing):



More etude books to come...