Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fundamentals of Piano Practice

fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 201 posts

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#111

Post by wildrhythms »

tritones wrote: post #8

I came across this shortly before beginning my degree in music and it completely changed how I approached learning new pieces. When I tried to explain the technique to another pianist, they were confused as to what was 'new' about it. I guess they never had a teacher say "play it over and over until you can play it without mistakes". Now, my wife is completing her education degree and I see a lot of this approach bei…

I find it hard to believe a pianist (or any trained musician) has never heard of playing something over and over again without mistakes...

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#112

Post by ashtonbaker »

MrGando wrote: post #68

Have to chime-in here as a piano player since age 7 (so been going for ~28 now), who about 2 years ago got very serious about Jazz. I have stumbled across this book many times, I have read it. It's the single most controversial book that I've read about piano technique and playing that I've found. The author, is not even a player himself (!!!). There's a great summary of reviews about the book here ( https://www.pian…

Can I ask you what your path into jazz has been like?

I've been playing myself for like 25 years, classically trained for my whole childhood. I've always enjoyed improvisation and love jazz piano so much, but I've found it really hard to build from my very limited improv vocabulary into "serious" jazz, and I've had a hard time learning how to learn jazz, if that makes sense.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#113

Post by wildrhythms »

is-is-odd wrote: post #99
zfier83 wrote: post #83

I’m an adult student. Started at 33 - just turned 38. Practicing 3-4 hours daily. Don’t get this book. Take music theory classes, learn harmony, and get an excellent teacher. Mine is from the Russian school and changed the way I approach the instrument. Also - you can become a good pianist if you start as an adult. You just won’t be attending Julliard as an instrumentalist. But who cares? Neither did Beethoven. My #1…

How do I go about finding a good teacher? Are google maps reviews trustworthy enough?

Look up your local/city orchestra; in my local philharmonic they keep an entire page on their website updated with local teachers for every instrument.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#114

Post by compiler-guy »

blobbers wrote: post #92
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not try to practice the whole piece at once. Split it into pieces This has been my biggest ever piano hack. I now practice bar-by-bar and don't move on until I'm happy, and its taken my practice to a whole new level

How is this a piano hack ? This is the basics of how to learn any song. What's the alternative approach? Repeatedly play the entire song making mistakes at the crux, but insisting on playing the easy parts and pushing through the difficult ones?

That is how many people practice. Beginning to end every time. Maybe slowly, but muddle through the hard parts and blast through the easy parts. Maybe, maybe, replay a measure where you made a mistake a couple of times until you get it right exactly once and then continue.

This deliberate one-measure-until-it’s-perfect isn’t something many folks learn on their own.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#115

Post by compiler-guy »

andrepd wrote: post #40
NikolaNovak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I didn't think any adult would try to learn instrument as an adult with goal of making money. I guess I happened to know professional amazing orchestra players who practiced hours every day since they were 6... And were mostly still dirt poor. So when I started piano lessons at tender age of 40, it did not come with any illusions of riches and fame compared to wizards who were three and a half decades ah…

What's the deal with learning basic notation being made to be so difficult? It's by far one of the easiest parts of learning to play an instrument. >It is NOT intuitive and you won't benefit from it immediately. What? How do you hope to play anything other than basic melodies if you can't read music? You'd have to develop your ear, which is much harder than learning to read music x) > Especially as piano has differen…

People have been developing their ears their whole lives. It isn’t that hard to take that and convert it to keys.

I play several instruments but can only read music for piano. Guitar, banjo, and harmonica I play entirely by ear or sometimes with some tablature to get started.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#116

Post by a5aAqU »

mgkimsal wrote: post #85
dandotway wrote: post #20

Does this book cover how to figure out finger numbering for sheet music that doesn't have finger numbering? By finger numbering I mean the standard scheme where thumb=1, index=2, ..., pinky=5, and the notes on the sheet music have these numbers. This is the biggest mystery to me. I understand there is not a One True Canonical Fingering for a given sequence of notes. But some fingerings make the music much easier than…

> ... and the notes on the sheet music have these numbers. I grew up with a piano in the house, have had sheet music for loads of instruments (played sax, piano, guitar, family had trumpet/clarinet/misc in house too). Have taken music theory classes, performed in bands in middle/high schools and college. I've never seen sheet music have 'fingering' info ever. Can someone point me to examples of what is being referred…

> I've never seen sheet music have 'fingering' info ever.

Classical guitar sheet music often has markings for fingering. See the first example on this page. http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.21/Documentation/snippets/fretted...

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#117

Post by arxanas »

wildrhythms wrote: post #110
arxanas wrote: post #51

This book has a lot of useful techniques regarding piano practice , but it's light on details about technique itself, such as finger positioning or how to engage which muscles. Does anyone have good resources towards this end?

A book will never teach you which muscles to engage to play an instrument. Find a piano teacher if you want to learn correct posture and exercises to prevent injuring yourself and play properly.

The piano teachers I've worked with don't seem to know enough about kinesiology to explain the muscle activity. On the contrary, it seems like the mental models they use to explain posture and exercises are primarily correlative, rather than causative. They can tell me that my posture is incorrect and what it should look like, but not what muscles to engage or why, or what angles to apply force at, and so on.

I enjoyed reading a text about weightlifting exercises once. It's not a substitute for carrying out the exercises or having an observer comment, but the underlying principles could be used to explain my performance (or lack thereof) and extend to other exercises.

I have my own notes on piano kinesiology which I've built up, which I refer to as necessary, but it would be easier if someone else had already done it, as it's clearly not the case that a book can't teach you which muscles to engage.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#118

Post by spekcular »

MrGando wrote: post #95
rossjudson wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough, the author himself says "get a piano teacher" when you're starting out. He also explicitly says that he's gathered together what he feels are the most effective practice techniques, culled from many books. Your linked reviews spend a considerable amount of energy complaining about the author's lack of pedigree, of one sort or another...or paraphrasing things the author didn't say. Which isn't really par…

The methods that work and are the kind of thing that any good teacher will tell you to do over a conversation in a coffee shop, meaning that you don't even need a piano to learn about them. Yes they do work, eg: learning a few bars at a time and separate hands. The book totally falls apart when getting into the weeds. Piano is a corporal activity after all and while yes, there's definitely "frameworks" to make learni…

Is that "corporeal" information actually written down anywhere? I've read a few books about piano technique and pedagogy, and they contain some mix of "obvious" stuff (also in this book), wrong/misinformed stuff, and poor written descriptions of various body movements.

It seems to me that piano is a physical activity that is impossible to teach through text, and that a good teacher is the only way. But I'd like to be wrong, or at least find some useful tips.

(This is to say nothing of interpretation and other musical matters, which seem even more impossible to transmit through writing...)

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#119

Post by sandGorgon »

MrGando wrote: post #68

Have to chime-in here as a piano player since age 7 (so been going for ~28 now), who about 2 years ago got very serious about Jazz. I have stumbled across this book many times, I have read it. It's the single most controversial book that I've read about piano technique and playing that I've found. The author, is not even a player himself (!!!). There's a great summary of reviews about the book here ( https://www.pian…

What is your opinion about the Taubman technique ? rotation and all.

Claims to be very RSI resistant and healthy ?

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#120

Post by spekcular »

tomerv wrote: post #105
tracyhenry wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to provide a solution: https://github.com/marcomusy/pianoplayer

The fingerings in the example in the readme are completely non-intuitive for me. I've played piano for a few years and never encountered such fingering. My guess is that the algorithm is optimizing for the wrong metric.

What particular fingering looks odd to you? The only one I see, for the Invention in D, is basically the same as what's given in the Alfred edition of the inventions (and the Henle, and others...).
Post reply on HN