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.

Very helpful book, thanks so much!! I've been looking for this type info for a while.

I love this book! I got it to help me work through problems I was having with my playing. It answered the questions I had without making me feel rushed to learn. The writer's style encourages the student to continue to practice using better techniques to improve one's playing. I recommend this book if you want to improve your piano learning and playing.

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).

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.

Usually I follow the axiom that if you don’t have anything good to say about someone or something, don’t say anything at all. However, this book really annoyed me.I have purchased three books on piano technique, and all of them suffer from the same conceit: the author’s technique is the only valid one among all piano teachers, and since all students learn in exactly the same way, all students will excel if they follow the author’s teachings. It’s akin to a Major League hitting coach insisting that all the batters on the team adjust their swings to the method he (or she) is teaching.The irony is that he mentions on at least two occasions in the book that during his youth his piano instructors told him to practice scales in rhythms, but never once did they tell him why he should do it. Maybe his point is that he will never tell you, the purchaser, to do something without explaining why he wants you to do it that way. But I had the feeling that he really doesn’t know why they proposed he practice scales rhythmically, which is astonishing. Yet it may explain why, in a new manual he is publishing, he advocates not practicing scales at all, calling it a waste of time.To be fair, the book isn’t a total waste of money. But it isn’t for everyone.