David Andrew is right, practice each hand alone with pedal.

Charles, are you absolutely consistent in where you position yourself on the bench--IOW, centerline of your body aligned on middle C or the D above it--whichever you were taught?

Because then you should be able to read the music and play by feel.

A good teacher should give you the skills you need, and guidance with your problems ---
You shouldn't be plagued with this after four years' study unless you are attempting literature that is too advanced for you.

Almost invariably the problem is speed.

Work with a metronome set at a slow, set speed, eliminates a ton of problems on any instrument except the voice!

I remember the first time I successfully played a trio. It was as if my hands and feet were working on their own.

Anything else?

Organist2008, do you have a good pair of pedaling shoes?

I mean that you need to mark whether you're playing with left toe (caret under note), left heel (circle under note), right toe (caret above note), or right heel (circle above note.) You need to be absolutely consistent about how you play the pedal line, so as to imprint it in your muscle memory.

Hi all! Organist, I had to register just to respond to your query - it could have been written by me many years ago! Real trained organist musicians, please stop reading now because what I'm about to suggest will make you absolutely nuts.

I've been playing for 30 years improvising using guitar chords for the left hand. I was in lessons and had the same issues as you - but as soon as my piano teacher showed me how to chord, I never played bass clef again!

Look at your sheet music and see if it has guitar chords above the staff. If not, I bet somewhere there is a set of guitar music for your church's adopted songbook. Here's what you do. If the music calls for a "D" chord, I would play the D, F# and A keys on my left hand. D on the pedal. For a "C" it would be a C, E and G. Once you learn the major chords, the minors are easy to figure out - take the second note of the chord down a half step. So your Dm (D minor) is played with a D, F natural, and A. You can find a chord chart on line that will give you the right fingerings. After learning for a bit, you'll figure out how to play chords without having to reposition your hand each time. What I mean is this - an Aminor is played with an A, C and E. You can play that in any combination, so a C chord (CEG) becomes an Aminor (CEA) just by moving your left thumb up from a G to an A.

Once you learn the frequently used chords (which will get you through half of the songs you'll want to play) you can start learning the others. I didn't take long at all for me to "feel" the positions on my left hand, and the pedal just followed naturally.

Good luck! And apologies to the real musicians I know are here :)

I started playing organ in college, and I found it extremely frustrating for about a year or so. I did all the usual, you know, left hand with pedal, right hand with pedal, etc. and it was just very frustrating.

But...after about a year of practicing *regularly,* one day it just clicked and I was like, "hey, I can read organ music without practicing it a million times!"

It was totally worth it. So...my advice? Just keep chugging away. I really don't belive that there are any magic secrets.

I know how to play in theory. I know about practicing left hand alone, right alone, both hands, left together with pedal, etc. I have a few organ technique books at my disposal. My greater concern is taking what I know from my head to my hands and feet.

Your level of frustration may indicate a need for a short course of lessons from a teacher to get you over this hump.

Is there any chance that the organ you practice on has MIDI and is able to play itself from disks/thumbdrive?

Like matthewj, I also find it most beneficial to dive in and learn both hands and feet simultaneously. If a particular passage presents difficulty, only then will I play individual parts.

((Wrong Thread))

Advice from two of my teachers:

George Faxon: "Fernando Germani [one of the best organists of his generation, certainly the best Italian one; author of a long organ method] said that there were two things one needed to know about how to play the organ: How to play legato; and where to sit on the bench." For the first, well, that's controversial now. For the second, take a long, long time to figure it out. The bench must be tried in infinite positions, factoring in bench height and distance from the keyboards.

Heinrich Fleischer: "(1) Practice the hands [together] alone; (2) practice the feet alone; (3) practice the right hand & feet alone; (4) put it all together. Practicing the left hand & pedal is of little use." I've found his advice correct. (I have one friend who disagrees, saying that a left hand & pedal alone practice is also valuable.)

Dupre required his students to practice with the organ turned off.

The Davis book is the Cadillac of all...

There is a silent communion between the fingers and keys when the organ is off....

Don't overlook Dupré's book of annotated organ scales, which book is easily obtainable in secondhand form and might well be available online as a big PDF file somewhere these days.

Flaming hot take: learn to read lead sheet notation, and then assign chord symbols for your music or play the hymns that you can find in something like Gather guitar accompaniment book. This is vastly easier than actually reading music and frees the mind to focus on what your hands and feet are doing. This is how I made it from piano to organ to now sometimes using both pedals and hands when I play organ. I'm no master organist. I just sometimes throw in a traditional hymn on organ for our contemporary choir.

I agree with davido. There are definitely tricks that can speed things up in the short-term, like (as described by Noel Jones, AAGO) playing the bass line with your left hand in addition to your feet, but practice is what's really going to help you get there. I started as a singer/pianist and took a couple years of (rather inconsistent) practice to really find my footing as an organist. You'll get there.