Hanon, Czerny or Neither?
Technical exercises are the most argued-about part of piano practice. Some teachers set Hanon daily; others say it is mechanical repetition that builds tension and teaches nothing musical. Both camps have a point, and the argument is usually conducted without anybody measuring anything.
Reviewed August 2026. Written for exam students, AMEB included; for the exercises and studies your own grade requires, check your current syllabus, which is the document that decides it. Not affiliated with AMEB.
Open the exercise shelfThree books, three different jobs
They get lumped together as "technique", but they are not doing the same thing at all.
| Book | What it is | What it trains |
|---|---|---|
| Hanon The Virtuoso Pianist |
Pattern drill. One shape, moved up and down the keyboard, both hands in unison. | Independence and evenness between the fingers. Deliberately not music: there is nothing to interpret, which is the whole complaint and also the whole point. |
| Lemoine Etudes enfantines, Op. 37 |
Short studies written for children - actual small pieces. | The elementary end. Technique inside something musical, so phrasing and touch are part of the exercise rather than removed from it. |
| Czerny Op. 849 |
Studies, a step up from Hanon in both difficulty and musical content. | Velocity and control applied to figures that behave like real repertoire passages. |
The shelf carries 95 exercises from these three: 38 of Hanon's 60, 33 of Lemoine's 50, and 24 of Czerny's 30. They are all long out of copyright, so there is nothing to buy and nothing to unlock.
Why not all of them? Hanon stops at No. 38 because the book changes subject there - from No. 39 on it is scales and arpeggios, which is what the scale trainer already does, with the forms and tempos you choose. Lemoine is missing No. 5, where two different pieces in the source both claim that number and nothing says which is correct. Czerny stops at 24 because the source engraving stops there and pads the rest with empty bars. The Czerny numbering follows that source's own order and has not been checked against a printed edition.
The Hanon argument, fairly stated
Against: it is repetitive, it is not music, and repetition performed badly builds in exactly the tension and unevenness it is supposed to remove. An hour of Hanon played with a stiff wrist makes you worse at the piano, reliably. That criticism is legitimate and it is why many teachers drop it.
For: the patterns isolate one thing - finger independence - with no musical decisions competing for attention. For a student whose fourth finger will not behave, removing everything else is genuinely useful.
Both are true, and they resolve the same way: Hanon is only worth playing if you can tell whether it is working. The exercise is not the point. Whether your fingers came out more even is the point, and that is a measurable thing rather than a matter of faith.
Telling whether the drill is doing anything
Play an exercise on a MIDI keyboard and the same four measurements a scale gets apply to it: whether the notes are right, how even the gaps are, whether any note pops out louder, and whether the note lengths are consistent - each hand reported separately.
Which turns the argument into an experiment you can run on yourself:
- If evenness improves over a fortnight, the drill is doing its job for you. Keep it.
- If it does not move, you are rehearsing, not practising, and the time is better spent on studies that at least teach you some music.
- If one hand improves and the other does not, you now know which hand the next fortnight belongs to - which per-hand scoring will tell you and a recording of yourself mostly will not.
There is a full account of what is measured, and its limits, in how grading works. Worth reading before trusting any of it: a MIDI keyboard cannot see your wrist, so it cannot tell you the thing the anti-Hanon argument is really about - tension. It can only tell you what came out.
Play one and find outA sane way to use them
- Not the whole book. One or two exercises, properly, beats ten played on autopilot. Hanon's own instruction to play all of them daily was written for a conservatoire student with hours to spare.
- Slowly enough to be watching something. If you cannot say what you are listening for, you are just moving your fingers.
- Hands separately when a hand is the problem. Hanon is written in unison, which makes it very easy to let the stronger hand carry the weaker one. See hands separately or together.
- Stop when the quality drops. The last five minutes of a tired drill are the ones that teach the bad habit.
You can also drop exercises into a practice routine alongside scales and rhythm work, so the session runs in an order you decided once rather than one you improvise while tired.