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what’s up my piano friends zack evans here and today i’m going to show you the perfect morning routine for piano beginners a 10 minute per day simple but powerful piano workout plan that will help you develop effortless confident and beautiful playing on the keys even if you have a crazy busy schedule and not much time to practice exercise 1 is a simple but powerful exercise to help you develop your piano technique exercise 2 will help you quickly learn chords for actual songs on autopilot and exercise 3 is a fun drill to help your improv skills even if you’ve never improvised in your life and stick around to the end to get the 5 7 motivation method goal sheet to help keep you white hot motivated to practice every single day even if you’ve had trouble sticking to a consistent practice schedule in the past all right i’m excited and ready to go let’s get started [Music] all right so the first section of this morning routine is the five finger drill technique exercise it only takes about two minutes to complete but it’s a very powerful exercise that turns sloppy choppy playing into smooth even tone and at the same time we’ll solve any weak pinky issues you might think you have all right so the exercise itself is pretty simple we start with our thumb on c and then we simply play up to our pinky and back down twice so it looks like this one two three four five four three two one two three four five four three two one then we simply move our thumb up one note to d and do the same thing one two three four five four three two one two three four five four three two one then we move our thumb up to e do the same thing and so on and so forth until we hit our thumb on this c now the notes are not the most important part about this exercise the important part is the form and the wrist motion to use and let me show you what i mean now if your fingers are nice and curved like this and you start playing the exercise the first four notes are fine but as you’ll notice if your pinky is curved you’ll miss this last note it’s literally not long enough to reach this last note so what must beginners do is most beginners straighten their pinky to reach the note and a straight pinky is a weak pinky and it’s bad technique and it leads to sloppy choppy playing in this very uneven sound that you typically hear in a lot of beginners it sounds something like this [Music] instead of the smooth and some people call this weak pinky syndrome but it’s actually very very easy to fix all we do is whenever we’re playing toward our pinky we move our wrist down and out as we play and as you can see with our wrist over here down and out [Music] now our pinky can stay nice and curved and strong to play this g and you don’t get that weak pinky sound that a lot of beginners have and then as we move back towards our thumb we rotate our wrists up and in to complete a circle so as we move our wrists and do the whole exercise our wrists will be making these circles down and out up and in it looks something like this so instead of thinking about this exercise as playing notes with individual fingers which sounds sloppy and choppy [Music] instead you want to think of it as if you’re playing the notes with your wrists and your fingers are simply transferring the weight from your wrists onto the keys [Music] and it leads to the a very smooth even and confident sound and on top of that this is the only way you’re ever going to be able to play at really fast speeds and have a smooth sound it’s so crazy to me i see all these videos on youtube that give out these little finger exercises and they only show you the notes and not the technique to play them correctly and so a lot of beginners you know they just memorize these kind of random series of notes and then they drill in bad technique habits that are really really annoying and frustrating to correct later on so be super diligent and make sure you’re using proper technique right from the get go and of course once you’re done with the right hand you can do the exact same thing with the left hand so for the left hand we’re gonna start with our pinky on this c and same thing so it’s just gonna go up and down twice and then repeat the same thing with your pinky on d and then e and then f all the way up until you get to the higher c of course always using proper technique now this exercise is simple but very powerful okay it only takes like two minutes a day but you’d be amazed on how much more smooth and confident and even students sound even after just a few months of practicing this a couple minutes a day all right next up is step two where i’m going to show you a powerful exercise to make your chord changes in songs automatic and effortless but before that now would be a great time to download the cheat sheet we’re going to be using it for the rest of the video so click the link enter your name and email click submit and you’ll go to this page where you can download the cheat sheet here and while you’re there you might as well also download the close quartz cheat sheet as well as the 5 7 motivation method goal sheet we’re going to be using both of those later on [Music] all right so now that our fingers are nice and warmed up we’re going to cover a four minute practical exercise to drill chord progressions into your brain and when i say practical i mean we’re going to use actual chord progressions that you find in real songs so what i want you to do is i want you to go to website called ultimate guitar.com and up here you can type in one of your favorite songs so i’m gonna use all of me by john legend find a version that has five stars click on it and if you scroll down you’ll see all the chords in the entire song then simply click simplify down here to simplify the chords and then go through the chords and find the repeating chords now for most songs out there they’ll repeat the same four or five chords over and over so for this song as you can see we have e minor c g d and then it repeats e minor c g d e minor c g d next if you go to the close quartz cheat sheet that you downloaded go and find your four chords e minor c g and d and if you want you can even print off the cheat sheet and cut out the chords with the scissors and put them right on your piano and now you have your chord progression e minor c g and d now the great part about the close quartz cheat sheet as i designed it to automatically use inversions of the chords that are going to be automatically close together that way you don’t have to jump your hand around on the keyboard you know e minor c g d which is very challenging for beginners and instead the chords are all going to be right next to each other so e minor c g d now if you don’t know what a chord inversion is for now don’t worry about it you can simply just follow the chords on the cheat sheet and they’re going to be correct for you automatically okay so to learn this chord progression don’t just start randomly practicing instead you want to use the added chord strategy learning method to make it nice and easy for you so here’s how it works first you’re going to take only the first two chords of the progression e minor and c and you’re going to practice just those two chords over and over so e minor c e minor c and so on and so forth now once you have those two chords kind of down pat then you’re gonna add the next chord the g on to the end so it’s gonna look like this e minor g stop e minor c g stop and keep practicing that until you have it good and then of course once you have that good add the final corn rd on to the end so it’s going to look like this e minor c g d and repeat e minor c g d so once you have your right hand good now we just add the left hand left hand is pretty simple we’re just going to play the root note of each chord so we’re going to play e c [Music] g d and repeat e c g d and we put it together with our right hand again we don’t want to try to put it all together at the same time it’s going to be way too frustrating as a beginner we want to use the added chord strategy so first we’re going to start off just e minor to c and just keep practicing this e minor c e minor c once that’s good we add the third chord the g so we have e minor c g and then again e minor c g practice that till it’s good and then finally you’ll practice e minor c g d all together now this is going to go a couple days to probably get into your fingers but once you have that good and it starts to feel automatic you can start adding any rhythms to these chords and it’s going to sound good so you could start playing e minor c g d and actually play the song what would i do without your smart love drawing me and you kicking me out now this is important you don’t have to do all the steps on day one what i recommend doing is stick to one chord progression one song a week right so maybe this week you start with this song all of me and maybe day one you only work on the right hand then day two you add in the left hand day three you get hands together day four you can start adding the rhythms and by day five you can play the song effortlessly and think about it even if you only learn one song a week after a year you will be able to play over 50 songs and it’s actually a lot better than that because as you’ll see there’s a lot of songs out there that actually use the exact same chords as other songs so in reality you’ll probably be able to play hundreds of songs after only a year of practice and you could actually start playing gigs if you wanted to it’s a very powerful way of learning all right so next up we’re going to talk about an easy improvisation drill you can start using today even if you’ve never done any improv in your life but first if you like this style of teaching where i really go in depth into technique and all the learning strategies like the added chord strategy to make sure that you’re really doing everything correctly and stopping bad habits before they start if you could hit that like button i would really really appreciate it [Music] alright the third and final section to this morning routine i’m gonna show you a simple four minute per day improv drill that can drastically improve your improv skills over time so for your left hand it’s very simple put your pinky on c and your thumb on g and simply alternate between these two notes like that then for your right hand you can literally play any white notes on the keyboard and it’s gonna sound good let me show you what i mean [Music] [Laughter] [Music] and you can literally play any white notes on the keyboard it’s always gonna sound good and that’s it just work this four minutes a day make up whatever you want you know be creative put some of your your own energy your own emotion into this and as you do this week after week month after month you’ll start to develop your own style you know your own kind of go-to riffs that you like to use when you improvise all right so next up we’re going to talk about the 5-7 motivation method a system i developed that keeps even the most inconsistent practicer dialed in and motivated but first let me know in the comments which exercise are you most excited to practice is it the five finger drill is it the chord progressions or is it the improvisation leave a comment and let me know [Music] all right next up i’m going to show you the 5.7 motivation method to keep you white hot motivated and on track so if you pull up the 5.7 motivation method goal sheet as you can see we have our three exercises over here on top and on the left side we have weeks one through week 12. so when you sit down at the piano after you practice each exercise you put a tally mark in each of the boxes for week one then the second day you practice you put another tally mark in the box now the goal is to get five tally marks in each box per week once you have five tally marks you can cross off the box and you’re good now of course if you can get seven tallies one for each day of the week even better but the truth is life is busy and if you can only get five it’s no big deal you’re gonna be just fine and as you practice this week after week month after month and you start filling in more and more of these boxes and you start building more and more momentum it’s going to be harder and harder to stop because you’re going to feel so motivated and you’re going to see how far you’ve come so far and once you complete the 12 weeks of this routine you’re going to be amazed at how much more smooth and confident and effortless your piano playing becomes and please please i’m begging you to take the two minutes to print this thing off tape it right up by your piano and track your progress it’s absolutely crazy to me to see the difference in the long-term consistency between students who use a goal sheet and students who don’t use a goal sheet and imagine how much more confident and smooth and effortless you’re going to be on the keys if you simply complete this one goal sheet oh and by the way if you like this very detailed style of teaching hit that subscribe button and hit the bell to get notifications especially if you’re an adult beginner student that’s kind of my specialty i’d really hate for you to miss out on a future video that could really really change the trajectory of your piano journey alright so here’s a link again to the cheat sheet one more time thanks a lot for watching peace out and happy practicing …