Why You Can't Play Piano Hands Together (And How to Change Your Brain)

Why Your Hands Won't Cooperate

You can play the left hand part. You can play the right hand part. But when you try to put them together, your brain locks up. Your can't play both hands at the same time. You slow down to a crawl and still play wrong notes.

This is as much a brain problem as it is a coordination problem. Your brain hasn't built the pathways yet for doing two different things at once.

The fix isn't more repetition of the thing you can't do. The fix is making your brain build those pathways -- and that requires a specific kind of practice.

What's Actually Happening in Your Brain

When you're struggling with something just beyond your current ability -- really struggling, not just going through motions -- your brain releases chemicals that strengthen neural pathways. Neurons fire together repeatedly, trying to solve the problem. The connections get stronger and faster.

I learned about this by searching the web to find out why piano makes my brain shut down. Researchers call it "productive struggle." It turns out the discomfort is part of the process. If it felt easy, you wouldn't be learning much.

The catch: you can only do this work in short bursts. Intense effort exhausts your brain. Five minutes might be all you can stand. Ten minutes might be your limit before your mind shouts "no more." That's fine. If you could do it for an hour without strain, it wouldn't be hard enough to trigger the learning.

The Hands-Together Fix

You have to forget about the notes for a while and focus on the right body movements. Look at the music on the staff and just tap your hands on your thighs. Tap each hand when it's time for that hand to play. (It actually works better for me if I tap high up on my chest near my sternum. Helps me feel it in my bones, as they say.)

That's it. Don't play any notes. Just tap the rhythm -- left hand taps when the left hand part has a note, right hand taps when the right hand part has a note.

This strips away everything else and forces your brain to focus on the coordination problem. Instead of thinking about which keys to press, whether your fingering is right, whether it sounds good... you're only solving one problem: when does each hand move?

Maybe you can only stand to do it for a few minutes at a time. This is the way. If the effort is intense for you, that means you're learning. Your brain is building the pathways for hand independence.

Once the tapping feels manageable, add the notes back in. You'll find your hands cooperate better because you've already trained the timing.

Add this exercise to your regular practice routine for a while. You don't have to be at the piano when you do it. Get comfortable somewhere and practice hand coordination a little bit every day while you're a beginner, separate from playing piano.

The Principle Behind the Fix

Here's what I've learned: if you're stuck on something, you can force progress. Make hard happen. Find the smallest impossible thing and make yourself do it.

The tapping exercise works because it isolates exactly the thing your brain can't do yet. It's targeted struggle.

This principle applies to any stuck point in piano learning. Find what's actually hard, strip away everything else, and practice just that -- in short, intense bursts.

Another Example: Reading Bass and Treble Clef Together

The problem: you can't take in both clefs at once. When you try to read the whole grand staff, your eyes jump around and you lose track of where you are. It's too much and you have to look away.

Make hard happen: Look at the grand staff. For the first beat, read the notes from bottom to top -- the whole vertical stack. Say each note name out loud, starting with the lowest bass clef note and ending with the top treble clef note. Include the sharps and flats from the key signature.

Move to the next beat and repeat. Don't do this at the piano. Sit in a comfortable chair. You're training your brain to read, not to play. Speak the music with your voice as if you are reading a story to a child.

Maybe 5 or 10 minutes is all you can stand. That means it's working.

I only had to do this for a couple of weeks. My problem shifted. It was no longer "I don't know what these notes are." I graduated to "I can't make my hands play these notes I'm seeing."

Progress.