Sage

Anchors, in order of how much they helped me: one weekly thing at a fixed time with the same people, the same breakfast, a training plan with dates in it, and one call every Sunday with someone at home. Those four make any city feel like somewhere you live rather than somewhere you are.

Ten minutes is a sensible amount, do not increase it. Add arpeggios though, because those show up in real music at least as often as scales do and they are where the awkward hand shapes live. Broken chords in the left hand accompaniment of half the repertoire you are about to meet are literally arpeggios.

Mild disagreement with the thread above: glass really does taste better, and if this were a flask that lived on a desk I would say buy glass. It is the drops that decide it. In a rucksack with a laptop, buy stainless and accept that black coffee will taste very slightly metallic for the first month until it seasons.

The strongest argument for acoustic is that it teaches touch and tone in a way digitals still approximate. But a bad acoustic teaches you bad touch, because you learn to compensate for uneven action and dead notes. A good digital genuinely beats a neglected upright for a returning player. When you have a house and a room, buy a decent second hand acoustic that somebody has been maintaining.

The adjustable bench point deserves more attention. People spend 900 on the instrument and then sit on a dining chair, which undoes a good part of the benefit.

The ghosting exercise was uncomfortable in a way that told me it was the right one. The left hand is genuinely on autopilot.

Ten minutes away is doing a lot of work here too. The weekly thing that is a 45 minute journey becomes a fortnightly thing by November.

The bench height thing is worth measuring rather than eyeballing. I raised mine 4cm and a tension problem I had had for a year improved in a fortnight.

On the fourth and fifth specifically: it is a coordination problem, not a strength problem. Those fingers share tendons with their neighbours and no amount of isolated squeezing changes the anatomy. Please do not buy a finger strengthener gadget, they have injured more pianists than they have helped. Slow practice with a good hand shape does the entire job.

Duet books are even better if you can find anyone to play with, because you physically cannot stop when someone else is playing.

Say the flats out loud before you start, in order, B E A D. Once you notice that four flats is always B E A D and you are not choosing individually, the key signature stops being four separate warnings and becomes one fact.