Piano Technique Demystified Second Edition Revised and Expanded: Insights into Problem Solving Paperback – March 26, 2014

This is an excellent book. I am a beginner approaching the one-year mark, and I bought this to guide and inform my technique at the piano. It has done that and more! After going through the first few chapters, I can already see improvement in the fluidity and ease of my playing. The techniques here provide an excellent technical foundation for beginners, and I feel more confident that my playing is grounded on good principles. I also deeply appreciated a section on how to approach practice as a whole. He addresses three situations: a new piece, a piece in progress, and a piece preparing to be performed. These approaches have already given me much more productive practice sessions, and I'm sure will continue to guide the way I practice for years to come.I highly recommend this book for beginners who do not have access to an instructor and want to understand good technique.

It is almost impossible to find a book where a pianist or teacher has anything useful to say about his art. I've been playing, pretty well, since 1965, and I found this book immediately helpful. The man can teach, and he can write plainly. They sort of go together. I bought the book after somebody dropped his name in a Facebook comment.

I can only repeat what I said about Stannard's "Demystifying Bach at the Piano" book: Dorothy Taubman developed an amazing technique to teach and help pianists. Her chief disciple, Edna Golandsky, carried on her work at the Golandsky Institute in New York. (You can check out videos on YouTube.) Stannard studied with Golandsky, but is not associated with the Institute. Still, we can be grateful for anything that brings us any of the Taubman technique, as, as far as I can tell, do the Stannard volumes. I've been helped and encouraged immensely.

This is a very well written book with lots of humor and fascinating anecdotes shared by the author. The reader is sure to find a wealth of useful and helpful information to enhance mastery of the piano. Now, I am not a concert pianist. I did not major in music. I have studied the piano for over 10 years. My experience is that Hanon and Czerny are very tedious, boring, and risky with respect to repetitive strain injuries. However, done properly, I have found them to have had a significant on my technique, strength, speed, and dexterity. When I was much younger, I hated these exercises and did not do them. I practiced assigned pieces, but mostly played what interested me (this was typically music that was way too advanced, like Liszt, Beethoven Sonatas, Chopin's more difficult compositions). After a 40 year sabbatical, I began playing again. This time with greater discipline. I can honestly say that at 65, I can play much better than I did at 22 and after 10 years of lessons from very educated teachers. I credit this to Hanon, Czerny, and Pischna. I find that I am able to perform trills, arpeggios, scales, etc. with significantly greater facility and ease than 40+ years ago. I do like Stannard's suggestions on the correct alignment and positioning of the fingers, wrists, arms, etc. I also think that Hanon was probably very wrong about lifting the fingers high above the keys. It is a mistake to put so much emphasis on the fingers and neglect the importance of arm rotation, avoiding tension in wrists, arms, shoulders, etc., all of which Stannard explains much better than I can.

I certainly found elements of the book informative and validating. I would generally recommend it. I feel my money was well spent. However, there is something fragmented and, dare I say it, a little amateurish to it. The "iDemo's" associated with the book (for me, a big part of my purchase decision) are dreadfully done - on occasion he's holding a wobbly iPhone in one hand during a keyboard lesson! This is a shame because the author has profound insights for sure. He also has a wonderful 'style'' - he seems like he'd be a great person to learn with one-on-one. My point is, the book is good, the demos aren't and I think there is a potential master piece just waiting to be pulled together, refined and polished. I only hope Dr. Stannard gets the motivation and resources to bring it to market (Book/DVD).

This is a wonderfully concise book covering all aspects of piano technique issues and the problems facing all of us who take up the piano. Its author is an incredibly experienced, multi-talented, multi-faceted professional classical pianist and double-bassist who knows how to explain things so that you can say to yourself, "finally, someone is showing me how to make piano playing simpler, and not more complex." Highly recommended.

You can't learn piano technique from a book, it says so on page 2. That said I find this invaluable for putting words onto the techniques I practice. The author explains quickly & plainly the rules for fluid technique. While I strongly advise everyone to learn technique with a teacher, intermediate & advanced pianists can DIY with this book. You can read the book in any order, it's a bunch of snippets. I thought it was pretty funny too. I re-read it every few weeks.

désolé d'être négatif mais je n'ai rien trouvé qui me permette de progresser dans cet ouvrage

As an amateur pianist I struggled with the correct techniques. I know it's always best to have a prof working with you but in the days of pandemic I've had to prioritize investments. This book is a great tool in my repertoire... recommended.

This book has transformed my piano playing - not one iota of exagreation. Whereas I used to get fatigued in playing after a short time and aimlessly practice with little results, a whole new world was opened to me through this book by adopting a different approach.The sets are deceptively simple - but in breaking things down into what actually happens when we play a note or series of notes - things which i thought were impossible suddenly became approachable!We might think that because the figures are physically touching the keys, that that is all we need to think about. But of fingers are connected to a marvellous series of very powerful connected levers, which have some highly natural movements which can assist the end levers (the fingers). Issues which I never understood - like "rotation" - suddenly make sense - and give such freedom and remove stress and fatigue.Having not played for years through frustration, reading this book addressed many of the fundamental issues which had ground me to a stop. It were as through the chains fell off my wrists - my eyes were opened (as were my ears - very importantly!), and suddenly repertoire which I felt only pianists blessed with some mystic superpowers could even look at, became feasible.I read this in conjunction with the Piano Professional series by Murray McLauchlin. They are very complimentary - but this volume so addressed what had tied me up in knots, that I have to credit Neil Stannard with my pianistic (and musical) rebirth!!The title is very apt - good technique has historically been presented as some great mystery given only to born superhumans and an inner circle of people who have been able to acquire these secrets through expensive education or good fortune. No - not true!!! Stannard reveals the secrets - I can't bare to think where I would be now had I not bought and read this book.As an added aid, key aspects are demonstrated via video online.This is a book which I will return to time and again, and which already is full of annotations and lines underlined. Buy it, and don't look back!

Don't waste your time, please just buy this book.

This book is suitable for intermediate to advanced level pianists with an interest in playing and improving their classical music piano technique. It is not a book for beginners or for people who want to learn to play by ear or improvise pop music or jazz. I am rating it with 5 stars because I fit into the target market, and it has helped me hugely in one specific way very quickly - in the first two chapters in fact. That specific thing is the strategy for fingering and playing passagework in e.g. Bach and Mozart. I will give a very specific example to back this statement up - I am working on a keyboard accompaniment for a Bach Flute Sonata (G minor). There were three or four places where I consistently stumbled; after getting this book I reworked the fingering and within two weeks I had gone from being stuck at crotchet = 82 to getting it up to crotchet = 100. If that story resonates with you, then you will probably benefit from this book.