Accelerando, Book 6: Intermediate (all ages) Piano Book

Book 6 strikes an honest balance between systematic technique building and genuine musical interest. The progression feels earned rather than arbitrary, and the variety of specialized skills means you're not grinding through endless repetition of a single concept. Students see tangible growth across multiple technical areas in one book.

Purposeful and varied. You move between delicate arpeggio work, solid octave foundation building, and the ornamental sparkle of trills and hand crossing. Each study feels like a specific problem to solve, not filler material.

Intermediate pianists of any age who have moved past single-key exploration and are ready to develop real facility across multiple keys and technical patterns. This book serves students who benefit from scaffolded, cumulative learning rather than jumping between unrelated concepts.

• Treat the relative major/minor studies as a unit; working through them consecutively builds transposition fluency faster than scattered practice.
• The circle of 5ths diagram works best when referenced during warm-up, not just once. Have students use it to predict which key comes next before turning the page.
• Hand crossing passages reward slow, deliberate work first. Tempo only matters once the passage reads clearly at half speed.
• Use the metronome studies to establish a baseline tempo, then return to that same piece monthly to track improvement without relearning it.

Assign this as the core technical curriculum for intermediate students during a semester or two. The contained scope makes it possible to check progress meaningfully, and the breadth of skills means you can reference specific studies when troubleshooting technique issues in students' chosen repertoire.

• Reading and performing scale figures in relative major and minor keys (up to three or four sharps/flats)
• Blocked and broken octave techniques
• Alberti bass and broken chord patterns
• Trills executed with even rhythmic control
• Hand crossing while maintaining clear voice leading
• Navigating wide intervallic leaps with accuracy
• Transposition between relative key pairs
• Steady tempo maintenance using metronome feedback