Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

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 t...

I recently stumbled upon Lindsey Gallagher's YouTube channel , and it is a hoot. She is a pianist, Suzuki piano teacher, comedian, and self-proclaimed " Jonny May  fangirl." Not only did she make laugh about 500 times in the hour that I binged-watched her channel, and not only did she cause me to realize that I, too, am something of a Jonny May fangirl, but she's developed some helpful videos on Suzuki piano technique, starting with The Suzuki Method: Ergonomics of Piano Technique . The technique that intrigued me the most was "thumb-tucking," which she also discusses in this video . Now, I took piano from a Suzuki-certified teacher when I lived in Asheville, and while I remember her always telling me I needed "soft thumbs," I don't remember learning about thumb-tucking. (It's possible she beat the idea of thumb-tucking into me multiple times, and I simply wasn't ready/willing to listen or apply. Whatever happened or didn't happen, ...