Fundamentals of Piano Practice
ATTENTION: This adaptation is no longer accepting pull requests. The author now has a 3rd edition of this book that addressed a lot of the issues of the 2nd edition PDF, plus has more content. The current release will be kept online as-is. Thank you everyone who has submitted fixes!
This is Sphinx adaptation of the 2nd edition of Chuan C. Chang’s excellent book, Fundamentals of Piano Practice. Why bother? Well there are a quite few formatting improvements from the original PDF, including inter-document links, clean bulleted lists, and improved font/line spacing. As a Sphinx project, this book is also available in HTML, PDF, ePub, and LaTeX.
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From the Author
This is the best book ever written on how to practice at the piano! Most books list what skills are needed (scales, arpeggios, trills, etc.), but not how to acquire them. This book teaches how to solve technical problems, step by step. Learn practice methods, how to acquire technique and memorize hours of repertoire, sight reading, musical playing, relaxation, etc., and, most importantly, Mental Play in which you learn to play the piano in your mind. Mental play touches every aspect of piano playing, from memorizing, controlling nervousness, developing performance skills, playing musically, etc., to acquiring absolute pitch, composing and improvisation. It is almost unbelievable that such an essential skill has been mostly neglected by piano teachers. All great musicians used it, yet even they often failed to teach it. We learn why the traditional methods of teaching piano widely used today are the reasons why students give up piano.