Hi guys, I had my first (returning) piano lesson on Wednesday and it was really good.

I'm learning 2 new pieces and haven't had problems getting them confident hands separately but I've tried to move on to playing them hands together and can literally barely keep going at half speed. I guess I'm just getting back into it and it will come in time, but any tips for practising hands together?

Thanks.

I always find taking a small section and working on that, starting off slowly then gradually getting faster until i have built it up to the intended speed. The moving onto the next one and doing the same and the putting the two sections together.

Don't worry about playing your piece really slowly at first - you have to get the co-ordination going. Once you can play the piece all the way through at a steady speed without stopping, it gets easier and easier to play faster. Concentrate on getting the hands together a bar at a time if need be, but always make sure that you overlap the sections you practise, so that you don't 'learn' gaps in the music eg play bar 1 and aim to land on the first notes of bar 2, then play bar 2, land in bar 3 etc.

Perhaps you could consider learning another piece with hands together from the beginning - a lot of people have difficulty playing the hands together after they have mastered hands separately - in a way you are starting from scratch then, because it is a new task for your brain. Learning hands together may be even slower, but possibly less disheartening in the end. You can always split the hands to polish a particularly tricky bit, but aim to keep playing hands together as much as you can.