How to Play with Two Hands at the Same Time

First, it’s normal to have trouble with this. Patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time screws up nearly everyone.

Piano’s the same. Playing each hand on its own works fine. But, when you try to put them together, all hell breaks loose. Your left hand wants to do what your right hand is doing, or vice versa.

It’s like none of the work you did with each hand on its own counts for anything.

That’s because there’s a huge gap in difficulty between two of the steps:

1. Play left hand by itself. (easy enough)
2. Play right hand by itself. (easy enough)
3. Play both hands together. (omg wtf!!!)

When you do it this way, there’s no smooth progression.

It’s as if you go from kindergarten to 1st grade and then skip directly to university. It would be a shock to your system and you’d fail.

Not that you’re genetically incapable of succeeding at university. You’re just incapable right now, because you haven’t gone through the steps leading up to it.

You skipped steps, so there was a difficulty gap that overwhelmed you.

That’s why you can’t learn a piano song in three steps like that.

You’re skipping way too much.

The way to fix this is to add steps in between 2 and 3 that will make it into a smooth climb. But, those in-between steps are far from obvious.

For example, take the song “Golden Hour” by JVKE:

But, how do you play them at the same time?

You can’t just throw them together and pray for the best. You’re skipping steps if you do it that way.

There’d be a huge difficulty gap.

You’ve got to break it down into more than three steps.

You need to be patient. It’s not possible to jump immediately to playing both hands together the way you want to. You’ve gotta go through 2nd-12th grades before you can enter university.

Are you on board with that?

Your next step won’t feel like university.

It won’t be impressive. But, it’ll be easy enough that you can do it. Then, we’ll go to the step after that, and the next, and so on, until we get to the final destination.

So, without further ado, here’s the next step:

Play both hands together, but play one note at a time.

Words can only explain so much.

It’s easier to see it in a video: