Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Piano technique book?

Can anyone recommend a piano technique book for general stuff, like how to move your hand across the keyboard sight unseen, tips for wrists movements, what not to do to cause strain etc, just general stuff for reading, no practice exercises necessary if the book doesn't have it.

Yeah, doesn't this dang thing come with a user manual????

nice response.

Well there is The Piano Handbook (Carl Humphries), which is a nice book to own, but not really suitable for a beginner, and so doesn't quite meet the OP requirements. I did use it for a while as a beginner but it really moves too fast IMHO.

On Piano Playing: Motion, Sound, and Expression
by Gyorgy Sandor

I started reading it when I was ill, I will continue one day (when my english will be better) :-) I think it is the book you are looking for.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/71204919/Piano-Playing-Motion-Sound-and-Expression-by-Gyorgy-Sandor

Go ahead and read it, and your English and your piano playing can get better at the same time!!

The Art of Practicing, by; Madeline Bruser

I was impressed.

Adak,
It's not a book, but there are a couple of DVD's you might find of value. One is "The Craft of Piano Playing" by Alan Fraser. The other is "Freeing the Caged Bird" by Barbara Lister-Sink. If you google them you can find out more information about them.

Warm Regards

There's a link in the ABF Important Topics sticky thread for Fundamentals of Piano Practice, it's interesting to read about positions, being aware of which muscles to use, gravity, etc.

I suspect, because it's such a big topic, that there is no one book that covers this - though it was certainly something I was looking for a couple of years back. Some of the suggestions are very useful; I will throw in one more that is about the mechanics of the body. I think it's useful (necessary?) to understand how our body works playing the piano in order to understand technical issues.

What Every Pianist Needs to Know About the Body

Costs $120 on Amazon!

If it's the greatest book ever written on piano playing, I'm sure it's worth it, but that's a LOT of money for a book in my world...

Maybe this will help:

Sandor -- Piano Playing -- PDF download

. Charles

PS (after posting) - the link to the free PDF was in an earlier post -- sorry for repeating it.

Thanks. I had assumed that was just a link to a purchase site, and used Amazon instead.

JOOC, is that a legal site? $120 is a lot for a book, but I prefer not to use illegal downloads.

I have used that link for preview reasons only, I have not this book from that site. I do not now whether downloading/printing from there is legal or ilegal, I am sorry for confusions.
I have also doubt that the book originaly costs so much.
I think the price is so high because the book is long time out of print and there is a demand for it..

If it's out of print my attitude is a little different.

Can someone upload the pdf to a neutral site? The original site says I either have to sign up and pay a fee to download the book or upload something in return for access to download the pdf.

That's probably what makes the file legal -- and available.

Available, yes. Legal ... almost certainly not.

Wikipedia on Scribd

The book was copyrighted 1981, so it's not out of copyright. 99.99% likely to be illegal in my opinion.

hells yeah i got a copy and fixed the index, should i print out the book and read it? are there better books out there?