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

181–190 of 201 posts

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#181

Post by alfiedotwtf »

the_other wrote: post #137
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

Intuitively, I can see how this helps accurate playing and deep learning of a piece. I imagine it builds better skills in the long term. However, it seems like it would be a motivation killer. I'd have thought there was more emotional value in getting through the whole piece, to hear each part in context, to "follow the story". Can you talk about this method's interaction with your motivation? Would it suit an absolu…

For me, I want to play as technically perfect as I possibly can, so I guess the motivation is already built-in to my aims. For others, yeah this would be draining, especially for pieces that you're not actually interested in vs for me I just want to play whatever is in front if me regardless of genre

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#182

Post by tunesmith »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #73
tunesmith wrote: post #42

One of my favorite piano practice tricks was using one hand to teach the other. Not like how this book describes it, but using inverted patterns. In the first movement of Apposionata Op. 57, there's a pattern that goes from hand to hand, in groups of five. Difficult for the left hand. So my teacher had me learn it in the right hand too, but inverted. So in the left hand it went Db Eb G Eb Db. In the right hand that w…

Ah Apposionata! Crazy dynamics, passing one's hands over one another, a great showpiece. For those that don't play piano, the parent is essentially bragging, and is entirely justified in doing so. I feel compelled to upvote because the implication that it was successfully learned My favourite performance of it (not Lang Lang!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEptNFzLpjk

I plead humility, I never learned the third movement all the way. :)

EDIT: A couple notes about the above performance, for those interested:

First, the section I was describing above is at 3:09.

Second, and purely trivial - she has a mistake that is extremely common among pianists. Everyone copies each other and they miss details. At the top of the figure that starts at 7:53, measure 219, there's an 8th rest, not a 16th rest before the last three notes. Same with the following patterns. Both the Dover and Schnabel editions clearly show these eighth rests, but no one plays them.

I suppose it's possible that Dover and Schnabel are both wrong and there's some autograph edition out there somewhere that has the 16th rest, but accidentally changing it to an 8th rest (and adjusting the following note values) in multiple places would be a really weird mistake to make in printing.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#183

Post by palimpsests »

arxanas wrote: post #117
wildrhythms wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enjoy…

this is partly because the muscles you engage, the angles at which you apply force are going to have slight or large differences from another player due to differences in biology and physiology. we are not all the same shape nor strength.

so of course the mental models are correlative _as well as_ causative e.g. "if you keep slamming your finger into the keys you will likely develop RSI and you will have drastically impeded your ability to control your tone or dynamics" furthermore, what you've asked for sounds like it would be receiving instructions like, "contract your pronator quadratus to 17%, rotate 34° to strike G3 at a 48.5° angle with your L ring finger, and here's all the angles and associated muscular tensions associated with each phalange that you'll need to master: ...." ? Is that what you mean?

I have yet to meet someone who is unable to receive postural feedback if it's not framed in terms of anatomy. Human movement locomotion does not come from conscious direction to move individual muscles, it's a much more integrated experience (e.g. "extend your right leg" -- want to guess how many coordinated actions of muscles and neurons are are involved in that?

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#184

Post by tracyhenry »

yesenadam wrote: post #152
tracyhenry wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the insights. For casual adult playing though, I'd never reach" high level" playing. All I want is to play easy songs I like (I'm sure there are plenty of people like me), for which I think an automatic algorithm is pretty likely to work.

(Pianist here) But there is no objectively correct fingering, it's just what feels best/easiest/smoothest for you, personally. Having to read the fingering as well as the notes just seems to make it more complicated. Even for the simplest music, say a C major triad chord in the right hand - C-E-G - you could play it 1-3-5, 1-2-4, 1-2-3, 2-3-5 etc. I have big hands, so 1-3-5 feels the least comfortable of those, altho…

The automatic algorithm can definitely take hand size into account.

I often feel that the fingering I come up with myself as a beginner is suboptimal. What I usually do is to watch youtube videos repeatedly to study what experts do. And that really helps me correct some bad adhoc fingering. I'm sure it's an experience thing - I can totally understand why experts would consider fingering on a sheet as useless. But for beginners it can make a huge difference. You probably don't care about beginners. But that is a huge market with strong needs unsatisfied (besides auto-fingering, auto-transcription of popular songs is another one).

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#185

Post by spangry »

prirun wrote: post #169
spangry wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That all seems like pretty solid advice. Chunking the piece up but practicing overlapping parts is particularly good - if you neglect the overlapping part you can end up with obvious 'seams' in the piece when you put it all together. Listening to the piece first is always helpful, but be careful not to become overly dependent on learning by ear - it can cripple your sight reading in the long run. Same goes for separa…

I was a terrible sight reader. My teachers never taught me is that sight-reading is a skill that has to be practiced, just like other piano skills. I bought a ton of books in this series and started spending time every day playing them: https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Evans-Jazz-Piano-Solos/dp/145840... I'm classically trained but really enjoy playing these. They're hard enough to be challenging yet not something you hav…

Hey thanks for the recommendation. I too am a (lapsed) classically trained pianist with poor sight reading. This might just be the motivation I need to get back into playing :)

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#186

Post by MrGando »

spekcular wrote: post #118
MrGando wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can read only up to a certain level (not super high). Out of the context of music, it would be like thinking about learning to play Tennis to a very high-level just by reading books. It's just extremely unlikely these days. In Piano, you might find some examples here & there (hard in classical, but look more into Jazz)... but the reality is that those folks were exceptional.

In piano (but true for a lot of sports too), when you hit a certain level, it will be more about how to make a lot of things work for your body, your hands... the way you are built. Doing that alone is possible, specially if you had a lot of instruction before. It does require a lot, a lot of intuition and a very solid foundation. It's also easier with the appropriate teacher, or mentor/s I should say.

Hopefully this helps you out a little?

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#187

Post by MrGando »

sandGorgon wrote: post #119
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 ?

I think it's very interesting and there's a lot to be gained by working on it (which I'm actually starting to do). The hardest scale in piano is C major probably, or at least one of the hardest ones... just started with Taubman, but C major (and D major) are sounding way better, even with what I would say is not a huge time investment.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#188

Post by MrGando »

wazoox wrote: post #135
ashtonbaker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's difficult to give advice in that matter without first hearing you giving a try at improvisation to check where you're starting from. I've started learning jazz at 16 (50 now) and you never cease to learn (obviously), but I can say that obviously different people learn in different ways. Basically I'd say there are 3 parts in learning improvisation: the theoretical part (which is already a complex one because the…

This is great advice. And I completely relate, after two years of working on Jazz (one pretty seriously), I can say that I feel like I'm being born again as a Pianist. It's extremely challenging and for me, all the classical luggage that I carry has made some things harder (swing, articulation).

My biggest leap in jazz so far, was to stop thinking about chord-scale relations and just focusing on chord-tones and extensions to outline the harmony of a piece, and approach notes to connect them.

I listen to a ton of jazz (nothing else but Jazz for a while). I've been transcribing Charlie Parker for a whole year, really working on his phrasing, heads, articulation, getting deep.

Disclaimer, I still think I'm terrible. My goal is to be somewhere less terrible in a couple more years... but I know I won't feel like that when I get there :D

PS: Get a great teacher, that's the biggest thing you can do to help yourself. Crazy good cats available for lessons these days.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#189

Post by eru »

andai wrote: post #139
illwrks wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't play piano, but my seven year old daughter does. She's doing her grade 2 exam soon enough. I would also second that advice too! My wife taught her some basics but we got a private teacher for her about a year ago, that has supercharged her ability. She does a 40 minute lesson once a week. The teacher writes notes on what she is to practice and learn. She practices her work for about an hour a day, and spends…

> we've had her in some form of music and rhythm class since she was 9 months old That's really cool, could you elaborate?

Those are fairly common in eg Singapore. From as early as eg three months old.

See eg https://www.lucysparkles.com.sg/

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#190

Post by eru »

agumonkey wrote: post #138
jeffwass wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As both a physicist and a pianist, I have to comment that it’s not only physicists that make these assumptions.

Btw, do you have a reflex to model music as an abstract mathematical/geometric structure since you have a physics background ? I'm not even a physicist but I cannot help but to see non linear interpolated curves and surfaces when I hear music. (curvature being somehow related to dissonance).

Well, a lot of harmonies are built on top of the harmonic series.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx_kugSemfY

And tuning is all about 'numerical puns', similar to how eg 2^10 ~ 10^3, but for perfect fifths and octaves etc.

Of course, our physiology and culture is a bit too complicated and convoluted to understand everything about music from first principles like this. So most of the time you are better off learning (and treating) music as music instead of as applied math or physics.

Post reply on HN