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Using Hanon in the Quest to Relax My Thumb

I'm working hard on relaxing my thumb, as well as strengthening my other fingers, via thumb-tucking. (I keep wanting to type "thumb-sucking," or "thumb-tacking".) And this weekend I made the brilliant deduction that Hanon is ideal for working on this kind of thing.

I've gone through phases with Hanon. Some of my piano teachers haven't used it, while others made it a central part of my technique work. My latest piano teacher, Carol, who taught me in 2019-2020 (before my COVID wrecked everything and tendinitis wrecked my elbow), loved Hanon. With her, I was coming back to piano after about 10 years away, so we started with the first 20 exercises and then skipped over to various exercises for trills, scales in thirds, etc. (I was just starting scales in thirds when my piano life ground to a halt.)

I hadn't thought about Hanon at all until a week or so ago when I listened to Dominic Cheli's lecture and worked on the octave exercises. (I wrote about that here.) So I had found and dusted off the old Hanon book for that. And then, as I was working on this thumb-tucking thing Friday night, I happened to glance over at the Hanon book I'd set aside on top of the piano and thought ... "Yes!"

Hanon is so perfect for this kind of thing! Here is a video where I'm working through one of the exercises, focusing specifically on the thumb-tuck. It's a very boring video, and if I had any video-editing skills to speak of, I would have cut a big chunk of the exercise out. Anyway, enjoy! (Even though, if I'm honest, it's not that enjoyable a video. It even includes a lovely nose-scratch at the beginning that looks like an almost-nose-pick.)

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