I may get in trouble with some musicians for saying this, but some of those exercises are quite unhealthy from what I understand.

I have watched some videos of a very famous piano therapist (who’s name I can’t remember now… I’ll go looking for it later) and she said that finger isolation exercises (which I saw lots of) tend to be a main cause for injury/RSI in piano players… especially involving the third/fourth/fifth fingers, because they are linked.

When you try to exercise just one of the third/fourth/fifth fingers through a full range of motion to the exclusion of allowing the others to move at least somewhat with it, you are simultaniously involving both pull -and- push muscles, which is not healthy because they fight eachother.

But I am not an expert, and if it helps you without hurting you then more power to you.

The first thought that entered my head was Robert Schumann. I think for every instrument I’ve ever played, there were etudes to develop the strength and dexterity needed to get the job done, with automatic response beng the goal.

The automatic part is intriguing though. For every woodwind I’ve ever played, I developed a sense of automatic fingering and in fact that’s something that once in place, never leaves, at least for me.

After four+ years of very good instruction on the harp, I’m only just beginning to develop some sence of automaticity, but the process seems to me to be very different from doing the same thing on a woodwind or other orchestral strings.

When I first began I would get almost frustrated enough to quit because my eyes would know what I needed to do and my fingers were floppy carrots. Happily I can now sight read some simple things with 75% or more accuracy on the first try. I think of that, on a very very basic level, as automatic fingering.