How to play piano with both hands

Why playing hands together is hard

Your attention can follow one line of music well. Ask it to follow two at the same time, each with its own notes, fingers and rhythm, and it starts switching between them. While it’s on the right hand, the left hand stalls, and the other way round.

There are two ways out, and real practice uses both. One is to make one hand so familiar that it runs without attention, usually the left hand’s pattern. The other is to stop hearing two lines and start seeing one picture: the right hand’s melody and the left hand’s note at each moment, read together as a single event. The steps below build both.

How to practise hands together, step by step

1. Learn each hand alone, until it’s easy. Notes, fingers and rhythm right, at a slow steady tempo, without thinking. That’s enough. Weeks of polishing each hand separately make it harder to combine them, because each one learns its own timing.
2. Tap the rhythm on your lap. Right hand on your right knee, left on your left, counting aloud. This takes the notes away and leaves only the coordination. If you can’t tap it, you can’t play it yet.
3. Find where the hands meet. Look down the page from the top staff to the bottom and mark the moments both hands play together. Those are your anchor points.
4. One bar at a time, plus one note. Play a single bar hands together, and stop on the first note of the next bar. That extra note teaches the join, which is where most breakdowns happen.
5. Slowly, at the weaker hand’s tempo. Pick the tempo the slower hand can manage, often the left, and keep it. Speed comes later.
6. Join bars into pairs, then fours. Bars 1–2, then 2–3, then 1–4. Overlapping the joins means no seam is left unpractised.

Read the score vertically

Beginners usually read each staff left to right as if it were its own piece. Hands together asks you to read up and down as well: at this moment, what does the right hand play, and what does the left hand play?

In this example the left hand plays only six times in four bars, and each time the right hand plays with it. Between those moments the left hand just holds. Once you see that, the job gets smaller: land the six “both” moments together, and let the right hand play its melody in between. Most early music works like this, with the left hand moving less often than the right.

Let the left hand lead

In most pieces the right hand has the tune, so it gets your attention, and the left hand gets dragged along. Turn that around in practice. Play hands together while listening only to the left hand, even playing it a little louder than the right.

The left hand usually carries the beat and the harmony. When it’s steady, the right hand has something to sit on. When it’s an afterthought, the whole piece wobbles. Once the left hand feels automatic, move your attention back to the melody.

Simplify, then add back

If hands together still falls apart, make the left hand easier for a while:

1. Left hand plays only the first note of each bar, held, while the right hand plays everything.
2. Left hand plays the first note of each beat, or each chord change.
3. The full left-hand part.

Each stage is a real piece of music, not just a drill, and each one teaches the right hand to keep going while the left hand does something. This works especially well for left-hand chord patterns; see how to play chords with your left hand.

When each hand has a different rhythm

A melody in eighth notes over a left hand in half notes, or the other way round, is where coordination really gets tested. Count aloud, and count the smallest note value either hand uses: if either hand has eighths, count “1 & 2 &” the whole time. Then each note in each hand lands on a syllable you’re already saying, and you can work out exactly which syllables are shared. How to count rhythm explains the counting.

Tapping the two rhythms on your lap first, as in step 2 above, is especially useful here.

When the hands fight

Sometimes one hand starts copying the other: the left hand plays the right hand’s rhythm, or both hands use the same finger at once, or a hand moves in the same direction as the other when it should go the opposite way. That’s normal. Hands tend to want to do the same thing, and it takes practice for them to do different things.

• Find the exact moment. It’s usually one beat, not a whole bar. Mark it.
• Practise only that moment. The beat before, the problem beat, the beat after. Five or ten times, slowly.
• Exaggerate. Play the hand that’s being copied louder, or lift the held note’s hand dramatically, so the difference feels obvious.
• Slow down further. If halving the tempo doesn’t fix it, halve it again.

Then put the moment back into the bar, then the bar back into the piece.

Music that builds coordination gradually

Going straight from one-hand pieces to music where both hands move all the time is a big jump. There’s a gentler path:

1. Hands taking turns. The melody passes from one hand to the other, with only one playing at a time.
2. One hand holds. Long left-hand notes under a moving melody, like the example above.
3. Both hands move. Two lines, each with its own notes and rhythm.

Pianomi’s sight-reading levels build up the same way: the hands take turns from level 5 and both hands move from level 11. You can try free pieces at both stages: level 5, taking turns, and level 11, both hands moving. Reading lots of short, easy pieces at each stage builds coordination faster than drilling one hard piece.

For learning a whole piece efficiently, hands separate and together, see how to learn piano pieces faster.