Jon Cheney walks through the piano piece Baptism from his book A Sunday Afternoon, focusing on a fingering technique where you bounce the pinky to the thumb to set up octave jumps. This method uses the pinky as an anchor so your thumb knows where to land without looking, improving accuracy and smoothness in the transition.
Okay, this next song in this new album— well, it's not the new album, it's a new piano book, A Sunday Afternoon, which is available on JonCheney.com now. I probably will have a link right here or, you know, in the description below, so go ahead and look that up. But this next song is called Baptism, and it's a primary song that is really pretty. It's probably easy intermediate. Maybe there's a couple spots in here that are a little past that, but it's, it's mostly an intermediate song, not too advanced. And, uh, yeah, so I'm gonna play through it, talk through some of the tips and tricks to make this song work well. Okay, I want to talk about this for just a second. So we're getting just a little bit more complicated. It's not that bad, right? But there's one little skill here I want to talk about that I think is pretty cool, and that's, um, bouncing from any of your fingers, but especially that pinky, to your thumb. That jump right there, it prepares you to go up an octave. I do it a lot, right? If you want to do The pinky actually anchors your hand so that you can hit that note, right? It kind of gives you a spot for your hand to just go to. It tells you, oh, that's where it is, right? I can do it with my eyes closed, right? Because I don't have to look at it. The pinky tells me where the thumb is going to go. So right here we go. This is actually a fourth finger to the thumb. The same concept. But if you're trying to figure out how to do that fingering, it's hard. It's a little bit difficult if you don't know that, right? You might try to go— if you try to hit that with your pinky twice and then jump pinky to pinky on a sixth right there, you're going to miss a lot and it's not going to be very good. So you want it to be nice and smooth. You can do that by just practicing that pinky, other fingers to the thumb. Good skill for the piano. So very simple song. Like I said, it has just that— maybe that one little spot in there you just have to kind of be ready for it. But, uh, anyway, beautiful song. On to the next one.
