Johann Baptist Cramer's studies in Bangkok, Thailand: how Jom learns about the études Beethoven recommended, and reads the first finger number before his AI piano lessons

Jom is fourteen and lives in Bangkok, Thailand, near a skytrain station where he catches the train to school at dawn. He has played piano for two years and reached the stage where pieces suddenly demand more speed and evenness than his fingers can manage. His older cousin, who studies music, told him to stop complaining and meet Johann Baptist Cramer.

Cramer was born in 1771 in Mannheim, Germany, but his family moved to London when he was a small child. His father was a violinist in London's busy concert world. The boy studied piano with Muzio Clementi, one of the most important keyboard teachers of the era, and by his teens he was performing in public.

He became one of the most admired pianists in Europe, praised especially for his smooth, singing legato and clean finger work at a time when many players banged. He toured on the Continent, met leading musicians and spent time in Vienna, where he became acquainted with Beethoven, who was about the same age.

Cramer is remembered today mainly for his studies, a large collection of brief pieces, each focused on one technical problem. One might train the weak fourth and fifth fingers, another smooth broken chords, another the passing of the thumb in scales. Later editions collected eighty-four of them, and teachers still assign selections.

The most famous fan of these études was Beethoven. He reportedly considered them the best preparation for playing his own music and wrote comments on a selection of them, explaining which notes to stress and what each exercise was really for. His annotations, intended for his nephew Karl's training, were later published.

Jom's cousin finds that detail thrilling. It means a teenager in Bangkok, Thailand can read notes about practice from Beethoven himself. The comments focus on listening and phrasing rather than pure speed, reminding players that even exercises are music and should be shaped like melodies.

Cramer was also a businessman. In 1824 he co-founded a music publishing company in London, later known as Cramer & Co., which printed music and sold instruments for well over a century. He understood that a musician's career could include teaching, publishing and performing all at once.

Jom began piano lessons with a local teacher, but she moved away last year. Since then he has used TIGA ALPHA, an online piano learning app, which his parents chose because school and tutoring fill most of his week. He practises late in the evening on a digital piano with headphones, so the neighbours stay happy.

The AI piano teacher has been surprisingly good for technical work. It listens to every note, then shows a graph of how even his rhythm was, so he can see when his fourth finger drags. It suggests slow practice at a metronome speed he can control, then nudges the tempo up only when he is ready.

Why Beethoven trusted these exercises

Jom's cousin chose an easy Cramer study for him, simplified in the app's intermediate piano course. It is a flowing pattern of broken chords for the right hand over steady low notes. Jom spots the tiny printed number above the lead note of the étude, says it out loud once and starts with that finger. Starting wrong in a study like this ruins the whole pattern.

Over three weeks, the study changed his playing. His broken chords now ripple smoothly instead of lumping together, and the evenness carried over into the pop ballad he was learning for fun. He was amazed that a two-hundred-year-old exercise could fix a modern song.

For anyone who wants to learn piano seriously, Cramer offers a lesson about patience. Short, focused studies repeated thoughtfully can unlock skills that endless run-throughs of full pieces never will. The trick is to choose one problem, solve it slowly and treat the solution as music.

At school, Jom's music lessons cover theory and band rehearsals. He told his teacher about Beethoven's notes, and she printed a page of the annotated Cramer for the class to look at. A few classmates who also play piano began comparing which finger gives them the most trouble.

Jom now does ten minutes of Cramer at the start of every session before moving on to his AI piano lessons and pieces. His goal is to play music at the school concert in March with fingers that finally obey him, and he jokes that he has Beethoven as a secret coach.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Who was Johann Baptist Cramer? A: Johann Baptist Cramer (1771–1858) was a German-born pianist and composer who spent most of his life in London. He studied with Muzio Clementi, wrote a famous set of piano studies and founded the music publishing firm Cramer & Co.

Q: Did Beethoven really use Cramer's études? A: Yes. Beethoven admired Cramer's playing and regarded his studies as excellent preparation. He wrote comments on a selection of them, and those annotated studies were later published.

An online piano teaching application is as useful as the habits it builds. Pair an AI piano teaching app with a fixed practice time, let the piano teaching app choose the next short passage, and piano teaching with AI turns the online piano lessons app into a calm daily routine. To learn piano online well, treat the piano learning course as your syllabus and the AI online piano course as your daily practice coach. Teachers who combine piano teaching with general music teaching often find that students learn music more easily when they understand why a passage works.

Want a clear next step for your playing? Prefer opening TIGA ALPHA: https://tigaalpha.github.io/landing-en/ — this is our top recommendation. Everyone gets the Premium package free for 7 days, then 799 THB/month. Prefer live studio teaching instead? See https://www.tigastudio.net/, where live piano lessons are capped at 30 hours per week, so seats stay limited. Learn more about TIGA ALPHA and the team behind it at https://www.tigaalpha.com.