Ziggy587 wrote:
1) When learning a new piece, practice each hand separately and then put them together.
2) my second best advice is to learn pieces that are at least slightly above your current skill level.
1) Only works for some people, and usually makes it more difficult to learn for most people. Learning in unison is more effective for most. It's like learning how to sing "Happy Birthday", then learning to play it on piano separately, rather than learning to sing and play at the same time.
I learned Billy Joel's Piano Man at a young age, but only the piano part. When I tried to sing along to a song I had down pat, I'd screw it up. If it works for you, fine, but you can't read and play music on sight by practicing treble clef and bass clef separately. In my opinion of playing for over thirty years, practice both at once. With that said, my goal has always been and always will be to play and read music at sight. I still "practice", but usually I pint out sheet music and play it. Not having to practice has a lot of benefits.
As an example, I had company over last night and someone i never met asked about the piano and if I played. Asked him what he wanted to hear and I blindly picked out this:
played it for the first time without skipping a beat. And again we all have different goals, but reading and playing on sight, again, will always be my goal.
2) 100% agree. Exactly the reason I suggested 60 Progressive pieces. The degree in the difficulty from song to song progresses at a degree to where it provides a challenge, but isn't extremely frustrating.
Ziggy587 wrote:
So, what are you playing on? A real piano? A keyboard?
I own a keyboard, but I have access to pianos. So I suppose I should clarify and say that I'll mostly be learning on a keyboard.
Taking it slowly. I can read sheet music and play some other instruments. But this is like an entirely different world.
My wife and I decided awhile ago that when our daughter is old enough we want her taking piano lessons. I figured I would learn to play some myself, might make it easier for her to eventually practice at home if two of use are familiar with it.
The process of finally obtaining a keyboard is somewhat convoluted...
My in-laws moved to Maine last summer. They told me I could have their piano. However, when they discovered they couldn't fit it in their trailer they threw it away.
A few months later my grandmother moved from her house to a small apartment. I was told her piano was up for grabs but when I inquired about it she said my cousin had first dibs. I went to help grandma move the last of her things from her house the day before closing and the piano was still there. Apparently my cousin had bailed. Since I just had a small car and the piano had to be gone that day there was nothing I could do. We ended up giving it away to the neighbors.
My father felt bad about all of this so he said he would buy me a keyboard. However he pulled a Macklemore on me: he found a broken keyboard, he bought a broken keyboard. Some POS from a yard sale. Didn't work.
After all this I said eff it and my daughter and I went out and just bought one our own selves. Should have done this in the first place.
Luke wrote:Only works for some people, and usually makes it more difficult to learn for most people.
Really? I can't even fathom that.
Hands need to work in unison. Learning the bass then the treble is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head for a lot of people. It also hinders reading on sight, because as a pianist you want to train your brain to read both clefs simultaneously.
Often the bass clef and treble clefs are different at points, but are also in unison at other points, so that makes a lot of people's brains confused.
To try to help you know what I'm saying (I'll do the best I can), listen to Pink Floyd's song Money. You have a bass player, and a lead guitar. You have rhythm from the bass and a melody from the guitar and vocals, distinctly different for most of the song, but when "New car, caviar, four star daydream, think I'll buy me a football team" bass and treble synch. You need to know how to play rhythm and melody to play.
If someone asks you "Can you play the piano?" and you answer with "yes", and then they ask you to play something...Well you don't say "I need to practice this ". If someone asks "can you play this?" you need to know how to play it on sight, both clefs.
A chef would never say "I can cook bacon and eggs, but not at the same time".
BUt if sight reading isn't your goal, do whatever. Not saying my way is better, just saying if you want to play by sight reading sheet music you best not need to practice.
Ziggy587 wrote:
So, what are you playing on? A real piano? A keyboard?
I own a keyboard, but I have access to pianos. So I suppose I should clarify and say that I'll mostly be learning on a keyboard.
Taking it slowly. I can read sheet music and play some other instruments. But this is like an entirely different world.
My wife and I decided awhile ago that when our daughter is old enough we want her taking piano lessons. I figured I would learn to play some myself, might make it easier for her to eventually practice at home if two of use are familiar with it.
The process of finally obtaining a keyboard is somewhat convoluted...
My in-laws moved to Maine last summer. They told me I could have their piano. However, when they discovered they couldn't fit it in their trailer they threw it away.
A few months later my grandmother moved from her house to a small apartment. I was told her piano was up for grabs but when I inquired about it she said my cousin had first dibs. I went to help grandma move the last of her things from her house the day before closing and the piano was still there. Apparently my cousin had bailed. Since I just had a small car and the piano had to be gone that day there was nothing I could do. We ended up giving it away to the neighbors.
My father felt bad about all of this so he said he would buy me a keyboard. However he pulled a Macklemore on me: he found a broken keyboard, he bought a broken keyboard. Some POS from a yard sale. Didn't work.
After all this I said eff it and my daughter and I went out and just bought one our own selves. Should have done this in the first place.
Ah, that sucks. That would annoy to no end, that your cousin bailed and no one bothered to let you know!
So what keyboard did you get?
Keyboards are great because pianos are large and expensive. However, depending on the keyboard's features, they can limit your learning. The most obvious is if it has less than 88 keys. You can compensate by playing parts in a higher or lower octave, but then you're not playing the song correctly. Still, it's enough to practice.
Some keyboards, like 61 keys, don't have the same key size as pianos. This is bad because you wont be training your fingers correctly. Once you move to a real piano, it'll feel really awkward and you might find that you can't stretch your fingers enough.
And then there's the action, how the keys feel when you press them. This causes two problems. The first is just the way it feels to you, if you practice a lot on a keyboard then the action from a piano might throw you off. The second is dynamics, how soft or hard you can play a note. If the keyboard doesn't have weighted "hammer action" keys, that means you can't practice dynamics.
But it's not like these things will hurt you permanently. When I first learned, it was on a 61-key keyboard. I eventually got a real piano, and after a short while I was use to it enough where the difference didn't matter.
These days I play on a digital piano, and I love it. Full 88 keys, same size as a real piano, and a hammer action that feels very much like the real deal. And being able to play with headphones is great, since a real piano has no volume knob. The only thing I really miss is that there's no sympathetic harmonies (although more expensive digital pianos might). If you get better and/or your daughter starts taking lessons, I highly recommend one (I'm assuming you went with a 61-key keyboard).
What's great about keyboards (and digital pianos) is that they usually come with songs built into them and a book of the sheet music for said songs. This gives you some extra stuff to learn, with the added benefit of being able to play back the song so you can listen to troubled areas.
That's great that you can already read sheet music, that'll make learning much less frustrating. Once you get past rudiments and all the learning to crawl crap, check out YouTube for some instructional if you haven't already. Not all of them are great, but a lot will break down parts and explain them, all while showing you hand positioning, so it's pretty much like having a teacher sitting next to you.
They cost what some middle class houses cost, but if you're into to "the sound of music", worth it.
My "Dude, buy this" is a Yamaha DJX. Affordable. MIDI compatible (even more than that it's multi keyboard compatible). The thing is a BEAST and now cheap on Amazon.
People say "Oh...You need a Roland". Crap. A DJX is a piano, a sampler, a recording device, an auto-tuner, and the Wu Tang Clans bestie.
Luke wrote:It also hinders reading on sight, because as a pianist you want to train your brain to read both clefs simultaneously.
But if sight reading isn't your goal, do whatever. Not saying my way is better, just saying if you want to play by sight reading sheet music you best not need to practice.
Sight reading can come later, though. You have to be able to actually play the part if you're hoping to sight read it, after all. Sight reading is a completely different area of playing an instrument. If you ever want to sight read a piece, and do it well, you would have had to already mastered that level of playing first.
When I was going through school, if you played an instrument in band or orchestra, you were able to participate in NYSSMA (New York State School Music Association) solo evaluations. You were rated on two things separately. How well you were able to play an approved piece of music (that you got to practice for weeks) and how well you could sight read a piece. These two scores were combined to give you your overall rating. Difficulty was broken down into levels. So if you were performing a level 2 piece, you were given a level 2 piece to sight read. If you were performing a level 2 piece and were given a level 3 piece to sight read, well, that wouldn't be very fair! You would score low.
I say that learning each hand separately then putting them together is the easiest way to learn knew pieces, at least until you're advanced enough to tackle new pieces otherwise. As a beginner to intermediate player, if you're taking on a new piece that's above your skill level you'll get nowhere fast trying to sight read it.
You guys are making me sad. When I was a kid, I played for a few years. I was decent enough, for a... I dunno, 10 year old maybe when I stopped? But I never wanted to play piano. I had wanted to play guitar, but my parents convinced me to learn piano to learn to read music (which was bunk, for one you generally don't read music for guitar, for another I already was decent at it from singing). So I did, for I want to say maybe 3-5 years? I dunno, it's fuzzy.
And I quit, because at the time I didn't want to and was basically being forced to. And, predictably, I regret it now.
My parents have a beautiful grand piano at their house. Couple keys have chipped ivory, but on the whole it's a great dust-gatherer now.
J T wrote:A million is a 1 with 6 zeros it.
A billion is a 1 with 12 zeros.
A trillion is a 1 with 18 zeros after it.
And infinity is a 1 with zeros everywhere.
Bloody Americans. Fixed
(I mean, it just doesn't make sense. A billion is a million of millions hence the "bi". Similarly, a trillion is a million of a million millions hence the "tri". Also, metric, c'mon )
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