The Truth About Your “Weaker” Hand at the Piano
1. Why One Hand Feels Weaker
Over the years I have heard perhaps thousands of times that a player feels like they have a weaker hand when playing the piano. It’s often the left hand that feels weaker (although not always), and it will often be attributed to being right-handed (if the player is right-handed).
I actually also had this same experience. Although I am left-handed, I struggled reading the left hand, and my left hand was much less cooperative than my right hand.
It is true that biologically we have a dominant hand; however, this has much less impact on learning the piano than you may initially believe. The very first time you play the piano, you may experience one hand naturally being a little more dexterous, and you may find your dominant hand can immediately do some techniques that your other hand can’t. But…the difference between your hands is actually influenced much more by your practice and what your hands are actually doing.
2. The Different Roles
When we learn the piano, contrary to what you may think, we actually aren’t trying to make our hands play the piano equally well. Due to the nature of music, we actually want our hands to do different things better than each other. Typically, the melody will be largely taken by the right hand, and static, spread chord shapes will be taken by the left hand.
When you do anything on the piano, you are reinforcing the role that each hand has and improving your hands’ efficiency at doing that thing. This means that your right hand typically has much better finger independence because you naturally will have needed this skill much more when playing melodies. Whereas your left hand will be much better at estimating distances on the piano because naturally you will have practiced jumping around and playing chord patterns with set distances.
If you don’t believe me, here is a good experiment you can try to demonstrate this: try playing a melody in your left hand and a common arpeggio pattern in your right hand. No doubt it would feel very unnatural and would require a bit of practice to begin to feel comfortable.
While these examples demonstrate the more practical differences between the roles your hands will take, this actually applies to every aspect of music. For example, your left hand typically takes a more supporting role, so the right hand will typically need to be slightly louder. The right hand usually needs to have a much better ability to find chord inversions quickly, whereas the left hand is much less changeable.
The reason it may often feel like you have a weak hand is because that hand may be either acquiring a skill for the first time or it may be taking on a skill that you are already comfortable with in the other hand. A very common example of this is when your left hand takes the melody. Suddenly it feels like you have a particularly weak hand because this is a task your right hand would have no problem with, whereas your left hand doesn’t want to cooperate.
This is perfectly normal, and it actually makes perfect sense. This is a skill that you haven’t needed in 90% of the music you have played up until this point.
3. How to Work With Your Weaker Hand
Having said this, we do want both of our hands to be ready to jump into action when required, and finding a weakness in one hand is a great opportunity to help that hand acquire a new skill.
This is one of the many reasons we practice both scales and arpeggios. Scales are an excellent way of developing finger independence in both hands, and arpeggios and broken chords are a great way of developing your ability to estimate note distances and chord shapes on the piano.
However, the aim when learning the piano is not to eliminate the discrepancy between hands. This is actually usually a good thing because it means that your hands are good at their own tasks. We are really looking for a balance of skills between the hands. The hands should complement each other rather than have exactly the same abilities. So instead of aiming for symmetry, try aiming for role mastery!
Matthew Cawood
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