Hot answers tagged piano
55
You will always make mistakes, so the key is practicing in a way that eliminates mistakes.
"Practice makes perfect" is a Big Lie.
If you don't practice in a smart method you will never get that good -- so what is important is not just practice itself, but good practice technique.
When practicing a piece of music or song, there are really two modes I ...
26
The first thing you need to do is: Stop writing the letter names!!!
I think this applies to piano or any other instrument. If you keep doing this, then when you practice you won't be practicing your sight reading as well as your technique. This is training you to play an A when you read the letter "A" instead of the music notation for it.
If you can ...
25
I don't know what type of music you're considering playing, but consider stepping outside of the piano/guitar realm. Trombone would be perhaps your best choice. A very difficult instrument to learn and master, but it requires only enough fingers to grip the instrument securely. (You could probably get away with a thumb and finger on each hand). The trombone ...
23
In general I find that I am slowed by grabbing the page, not by the actual turning. You could bend the corners of the pages forward so that it's easier to grab quickly, or use those sticky flags on the pages, or something like that.
As for turning pages where there's no break for one hand, you need to memorize the music. You can memorize all of it and ...
23
Make Sure it doesn't become a crutch:
The most important thing about practicing with a metronome is to avoid becoming dependent on it. It is a tool that can be used to strengthen your rhythm and time when used properly, but if you overuse it, you might become uncomfortable playing without one because the machine is creating the pulse instead of you.
As a ...
20
As you already suggested, it takes time. I would say that to begin to be a good piano tuner takes at least 3 years and you still have plenty of room to improve.
It helps to have a good and discerning ear, but you do not need what people imprecisely call perfect pitch. You will need a good reference tuning fork or pro electronic tuning reference. I prefer ...
20
Digital pianos really have come a long way from where they were 15 years ago, when I started playing.
I started on an unweighted 61-key touch-sensitive keyboard (touch-sensitivity is, by the way, essential, but implied on the weighted keyboards. You cannot play classical piano music even remotely musically without touch sensitivity. Organ music is a ...
19
Try Bach's Two Part Inventions. They were titled by Bach: "Honest method, by which the amateurs of the keyboard – especially, however, those desirous of learning – are shown a clear way not only (1) to learn to play cleanly in two parts, but also, after further progress, (2) to handle three obligate parts correctly and well; and along with this not only to ...
18
A guitarist has exactly the same problem as you do. If you just strum the chord on the downbeat, or on every beat, it sounds boring. You have to play more interesting patterns.
The guitarist does have a couple of advantages over a pianist in this respect. Early on, a guitarist learns to get more rhythmic interest out of a basic chord, by varying the rhythm ...
17
Musical memory comes in two flavours: unconscious (muscle) memory and conscious (mental) memory.
Muscle memory comes with repetition and can prove to be surprisingly long-lasting - provided it has had sufficient reinforcement over time. It's something that gets ingrained every time you play a piece - provided you know it well enough to play it without ...
17
In cases like this you should play the second D, cutting the first one slightly short to accommodate it. It's not a typo, just a choice by the arranger to take the least complicated & most readable approach to notating the music. Think of the printed music as communicating the intended sound, rather than exact movements of your fingers, and it should ...
17
A skilled sight-reader surely can (except if the piece is really difficult). And they can do more, for example they can read the music and play it in a different key, or they can read a string quartet (that is, four independent staves with three different clefs simultaneously) and play most of the important things in it, and so on.
Not every good pianist is ...
16
One of the tricks you can use is one I have learned watching Gustav Leonhardt in concert. For difficult page turns, he uses a little copy of the start of the next page that he pastes on the side of the preceding right page as a flip.
Not only is it easier on his memory but it allows to grab the page quickly and turn it efficiently. Now that scanners and ...
16
Most keyboard instruments of the baroque Era as well as early pianoforte had fewer keys than the current 88-standard (some modern piano like the Bosendorfer Imperial have 97 keys, 9 additional keys in the bass), and much of Bach keyboard works for instance can be played on such a restricted keyboard.
With restricted high notes you will have difficulties ...
16
Practice makes perfect.
Really, there is no magic to it. Just keep practicing so that you won't make that mistake again.
Practice or practise (see spelling differences) is the act of rehearsing a behavior over and over, or engaging in an activity again and again, for the purpose of improving or mastering it, as in the phrase "practice makes perfect".
...
16
It's all about the size, and therefore the length of the strings and the size of the vibrating surface of the wooden soundboard.
Even a baby grand at ~5 feet is longer than a typical upright is tall. A concert grand at 7-10 feet is much, much longer.
I can't do any better than what Wikipedia says, so I'm going to quote wholesale:
All else being equal, ...
15
I'm sure that you would be able to teach your child how to read music and play simple pieces; the nice thing about the piano is that the basics are easy to pick up.
Where you'll run into trouble is technique; a lot of what my teacher drilled into me at a young age is stuff like "keep your wrists up, make sure your fingers are curved, don't tense your ...
15
Learning improvisation is a long trip.
Most people start with one of two ways:
going by ear, just play something that fits. Try until you think it's good.
going by chords. Learn what tones fits the chords in the chart. Try until you think it's good.
Soon you notice that it's not either one way or the other, it's a combination of both. Good improvisers ...
14
Alfred Publishing has the "Basic Adult Piano Course."
I'm not a trained pianist, technically, but my keyboard methods course during undergrad used this series.
Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course: Lesson Book, Level One
Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course: Lesson Book, Level Two
Use Amazon's peek inside feature to get an idea for what might be most ...
14
When learning a piece, concentrate on playing the beginning really well or the whole piece the same?
One thing one of my choir teachers sometimes did is start at the end and then move backwards through the piece as larger parts starting from the end are perfected, so that you start with some unfamiliar measures then practice the part that you already know to reinforce the knowledge.
However, if you're repeatedly having trouble with a specific spot, it ...
14
If you're well-trained in music theory and good at sight reading, then you've already got some strong and important assets. I have a background similar to yours, so here are some things that I remember from when I got started:
get used to jazz rhythm: if you take for instance 4/4 songs, you'll notice that in many genres the first and third beats are ...
14
Memorizing your scales accomplishes at least these four things:
Trains your fingers to play common patterns found in music. There are a lot of scales in music. They're just so satisfying, why not write them?
They can be a controlled environment for practicing other techniques, such as playing fast, playing in octaves, and playing fast in octaves.
It trains ...
14
I will only add Django Reinhardt as an example of guitarist with crippled fingers. He has only fingers 1 and 2 in his fretting hand intact. In his right hand, he used plectrum.
His playing is anything but limited. He has developed a distinctive, yet beautiful and technically demanding style - which is copied by numerous jazz guitarists to this days.
So I ...
14
It's not a slur; it's a tie. The marking is obviously easy to confuse, but in this case you'll note that there is a slur arching over top of the phrase as well, so this must be something different since there can't be a "double-slur" :)
When two notes of the same pitch are tied together they are played as one whose duration is the sum of the duration of ...
13
You're right that the same melody can be played over a variety of different chord sequences, and that the choice of chords will have a marked effect on how the piece sounds.
One of the modern jazz performers' favourite tricks is to take a well known melody and accompany it with unexpected (yet still musically pleasing) chords.
Note that the key signature ...
13
Wheat stated in his comment that
"Theoretical physics or mathematics are largely irrelevant to musical
instruments, or music performance and practice"
Let's see if we can answer this question using science adding psycho physics and engineering to the mix. I'm not trying to dispute what was already said, I'm just offering a different view point and ...
13
The root note is always the note that is the basis for the chord, regardless of its inversion. In root posiition the lowest note is the root (hence the name), but other notes are the lowest in other inversions of the chord.
For example, take a C Major chord. In every position, the root note is C. Whether it is voiced as C-E-G (root position), E-G-C ...
13
In addition to indicating the end of a distinct section of the piece, a change in key signature, time signature or major tempo change, the double bar is also used to mark the location of a Da Capo or Dal Segno (a notation system that marks the repeating of a certain section of music without requiring additional measures to be written/printed.)
It is also ...
12
Learn to recognize intervals between notes quickly. For example, notes that skip a line or space are a third apart. Notes that skip seven are an octave apart. When reading a chord quickly, read the root/lowest note and then the intervals above it and place them in the key. With experience you will be able to recognize common voicings by shape alone.
12
Do you listen to jazz?
I think a big part of getting into jazz as a trained musician means experimenting on your own. One of the biggest challenges for you will likely be learning the style of jazz piano, i.e. being able to play and not sound "square".
If you want a listening list, check this out: "100 Greatest Jazz Pianists". The top 5 would be plenty to ...
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