You know you’ve started to advance in your piano skills when you are faced with sheet music that makes you play with both hands.

As a general rule “hands together” music is introduced slowly with single notes in the left hand appearing before chords or other forms of accompaniment.

If you want to improve your hand-co-ordination you can’t go past technique-based exercises that include scales, chords and arpeggios.

This is because these are designed to work your fingers (and ears) in using different combinations to produce harmonious sounds.

Quite often they will be drilled into you so that you will be able to play them from muscle memory and can be learned without sheet music so there is less visual distraction allowing you to focus on co-ordination.

Similar Motion Scales

These will improve your hand coordination as hands must work together to play the same keys (one octave apart) as they ascend and descend the piano so the fingering will constantly change.

Contrary Motion Scales

This kind of scale forces your hands to move away from a central note (tonic) so the left hand will play the scale backward, again, forcing you to concentrate on hand co-ordination.

Arpeggios

These broken chords not only force you to co-ordinate fingers and timing but will also force you to quickly judge interval spans between keys.

If you really want the extra challenge, check out canons (no, not the weapons) canons are short piano pieces that were designed to help beginners co-ordinate their fingers.

They are similar to around where one melody is sounded first in the one hand before being picked up by the other.