How to play piano with both hands: hands separately first, then together

Why hands together falls apart: sequencing, not talent

When you play one hand, your brain is already doing three things at once: reading the notes, finding the keys, and moving the fingers. Add the second hand and all three double, plus a fourth job appears: making both hands land at the same moment. If one hand can only get through the passage while reading, the brain is already at capacity. Adding the other hand tips it over. That is the normal outcome, not a sign that you lack coordination.

• One hand is not automatic yet. You can only play it while reading every note.
• You are trying to keep the tempo. Hands together starts at the speed one hand could manage alone.
• The section is too long. You are lining up a whole page, or the whole piece, at once.

Reverse those three and the hands come together: make each hand automatic first, then go slow, then go small. The steps below do exactly that.

Should you practice hands separately or together?

Both, in that order. Hands-separate practice is where each hand learns its own job. Hands-together practice is where you learn to coordinate the two. Trying to learn both at the same time is what makes a passage feel impossible. The question is not whether to practice hands separately, but when to stop. Use one test rather than a number of days.

• Right hand alone, at half the final tempo, three times in a row, barely looking at the keys.
• Left hand alone passes the same test.
• The section is eight bars (four for a short piece), not the whole piece.

When a hand passes this test, it is automatic. From here, hands together only has to solve one new problem: landing the two hands at the same time. If a hand does not pass the test yet, going back to hands separate is not a step backward. It is the shortest path to hands together.

Step 1: line the hands up at a very slow tempo

The first hands-together job is to make the notes that sound at the same time actually land together. Speed is irrelevant here. Go slow enough that a metronome would feel pointless, and stop on every beat if you need to.

1. Look at the eight bars and mark every place where the right and left hands sound at the same time. In most beginner pieces, that is the start of each beat.
2. Play only the marked notes, both hands together. Skip everything in between.
3. Once the marked notes land together, add the notes in between. Keep the tempo where it was.
4. When you can play the eight bars without stopping, raise the tempo a little. Start at half speed and go up in small steps.

The rule at this stage is to play at a speed where you do not make mistakes. Repeating a passage at a speed where it breaks teaches your hands the broken version. Slow and correct, repeated, is what turns into fast and correct later.

Step 2: put the left hand on autopilot

When the left hand feels like it will not move, it is nearly always because it has had less practice than the right. The melody lives in the right hand, so the right hand gets the attention. But when hands together collapses, the hand that is collapsing is usually the left. The fix is simple: practice the left hand before the right, and more than the right.

• Left hand alone, eight bars, until you can play it without looking. Aim for twice as many repetitions as the right hand.
• Find the pattern. Beginner left-hand parts are built from repeating shapes: a broken chord, a bass note and a chord, an Alberti bass. Learn the shape, and you stop reading the left hand note by note.
• Play the left hand while humming the melody. If the left hand is automatic, you can do this. If you cannot, the left hand still belongs in hands-separate practice.

Step 3: two bars at a time, only where it breaks

Within eight bars, hands together usually breaks in one or two specific places. Repeating the whole passage practices the easy bars over and over. Isolating the broken bars gives you several times more repetitions of the part that needs them, in the same amount of time.

1. Play the eight bars slowly, hands together, and mark the bar where it broke.
2. Take that bar plus the one before it, two bars in total, and repeat them very slowly.
3. When the two bars go three times in a row, put them back into the eight.
4. One or two full run-throughs a day is enough. Spend the rest of the time on the two bars.

When the hands play different rhythms

Fast notes in the right hand against long notes in the left, or the other way around, is where hands together breaks most often. The fix is to stop tracking every note in both hands and count only the points where the hands meet.

• Mark the start of each beat and check only that the hands land together there. The notes between the beats fill themselves in.
• If the left hand holds a long note, practice holding it while only the right hand moves. The left hand's whole job is press and wait.
• Count out loud while you play. Saying one, two, three, four puts the meeting points into your body.
• Three against two and similar polyrhythms can wait. If you start with pieces where the left hand plays one or two notes at a time, you will rarely meet them as a beginner.

Choosing beginner pieces you can play with both hands

Pieces that work for hands-together practice share a few traits: a simple left hand, a repeating pattern, and a slow tempo. Pick by these traits rather than by title.

• Left hand plays one or two notes at a time. Pieces with three-note chords in the left hand can wait until the hands already fit.
• Left hand repeats the same shape. If the accompaniment changes every four bars, save it for later.
• Slow tempo. If the piece is fast, even half speed leaves no room to line the hands up.
• Examples that fit: Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 (a repeating left-hand shape at a slow tempo), Bach's Minuet in G (a single-line left hand), and the opening of Beethoven's Für Elise (a repeating broken chord in the left hand).

If the piece you want to play does not fit, take eight bars of it and use only those for hands-together practice. You do not need the whole piece to make progress.

Practicing one hand at a time, slowly, in GrandScore

Everything above works with sheet music and a keyboard. But hearing only the left hand, playing a passage at half speed, and looping two bars are all awkward with paper alone. GrandScore is a piano practice app that runs in the browser. It visualizes the score and shows which key to press and when. With Premium, you get one-hand mode to hear either hand alone, slow tempo from half speed to full, and partial playback to loop a section. Steps 1 to 3 above map directly onto those three tools.

• One-hand mode: hear the left hand or the right hand alone and compare it with your own.
• Slow tempo: play the passage at half speed and raise it in small steps.
• Partial playback: loop just the two bars that break.
• MIDI connection: plug in a digital piano and see whether the keys you press are the right ones.

It is free to start. Open it in the browser with no sign-up and try the pre-installed pieces. To practice from your own printed sheet music, Hanon AI reads a photo of the page and plays it, with the first scan each month free.

A 15-minute hands-together routine

Here is how to fit the steps into a daily session. The order matters: the session does not start with both hands.

1. Left hand alone, 3 minutes: eight bars until you can play them without looking.
2. Right hand alone, 2 minutes: the same eight bars, as a check.
3. Hands together, very slow, 5 minutes: line up the beats at a speed where nothing breaks.
4. The two broken bars, 4 minutes: repeat only the place where it fell apart.
5. One run-through, 1 minute: play the eight bars once and stop. If it did not go well, come back tomorrow in the same order.

With this routine every day, most people have eight bars working hands together within two to four weeks. When eight bars work, move to the next eight. The whole piece is that process repeated.