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Fundamentals of Piano Practice

fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io

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Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#21

Post by mtalantikite »

cloogshicer wrote: post #4

It's sad that this book is written in such a self-validating tone (the very first sentence is "This is the best book ever written on how to practice at the piano!" for crying out loud), because the content is excellent. I read it a couple years ago and it completely changed how I approach practicing.

Could you elaborate on what in it helped change your practice approach? I tried reading it a while back and I couldn’t really get past the style. I’m sure there is good advice in there, but it’s very off putting due to the rambling style.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#22

Post by rectang »

AlbertCory wrote: post #6

A good book. Although this statement: While writing it, I discovered that piano pedagogy had never been researched, documented, and analyzed properly is totally wrong. There's a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it. I was an Adult Beginner, which is sorta a Thing. My teacher had about 12 adult students, and we had separate recitals from the kids. The hidden reason for this is, you don't…

> She stopped at every mistake and "corrected" it, until you wanted to scream at her.

I had a college instrumental performance professor yell at me to "sit still" because this was happening all the time at our weekly recital hour, it was driving me crazy, and I would jerk, or shake my head or hang it, or facepalm, or clench my fists.

They were right to call me out because I was being rude and I toned down my reactions after that, but... ugh. I hate that the professors tolerated that — it was such a disservice to their students.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#23

Post by mahathu »

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…

The same applies to guitar fretboard where I think it's a really interesting graph theory problem. I think I saw someone post about it on HN a while ago.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#24

Post by andkon »

maroonblazer wrote: post #13

From the last section in Chapter One, titled "Jazz, Fake Books, and Improvisation": > In summary, the process of learning this genre consists of practicing the chords and scales sufficiently so that, given a melody, you can “feel” the right and wrong chords that go along with it. That's only scratching the surface and will not get you playing jazz. Listening to and copying the greats - Bird, Monk, Evans, Coltrane, Ro…

Hmmm, what parts feel harder or not described above? In my experience it really is just about learning the scales and the chords, like the author mentions. Then you just have to let yourself make the connection. That can be really hard. But it’s kinda about trusting that you know the necessary parts - which notes are playable.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#25

Post by catlikesshrimp »

maroonblazer wrote: post #13

From the last section in Chapter One, titled "Jazz, Fake Books, and Improvisation": > In summary, the process of learning this genre consists of practicing the chords and scales sufficiently so that, given a melody, you can “feel” the right and wrong chords that go along with it. That's only scratching the surface and will not get you playing jazz. Listening to and copying the greats - Bird, Monk, Evans, Coltrane, Ro…

Remember, different capacities.

The author might be super talented compared to you. He might find easy what you call difficult, or his definition of easy is different to ours.

Might~

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#26

Post by catlikesshrimp »

narag wrote: post #10
AlbertCory wrote: post #6

A good book. Although this statement: While writing it, I discovered that piano pedagogy had never been researched, documented, and analyzed properly is totally wrong. There's a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it. I was an Adult Beginner, which is sorta a Thing. My teacher had about 12 adult students, and we had separate recitals from the kids. The hidden reason for this is, you don't…

The truth is, you are not going to be very good, and lots of people who are orders of magnitude better than you can't make any real money playing piano, because that level of skill is so common. This isn't so much of a problem if your intention is not playing professionally. Learning easy and intermediate pieces is a lot of fun. Also making your own music using a MIDI keyboard and a DAW.

It does help to compose game music if you feel more comfortable around a synth. For people who like learning new abilities!

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#27

Post by tracyhenry »

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…

Having the same struggle as an adult learning piano.

How do highly-skilled pianist come up with fingering? Are there any kind of rules? I think there are. But it may be so automatic that they don't actively think about them.

On the other hand, if we have a large quantity of high-quality sheets with fingering labeled, we can train a transformer which is supposed to learn the implicit rules pretty well.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#28

Post by aluminum96 »

tracyhenry wrote: post #27
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…

Having the same struggle as an adult learning piano. How do highly-skilled pianist come up with fingering? Are there any kind of rules? I think there are. But it may be so automatic that they don't actively think about them. On the other hand, if we have a large quantity of high-quality sheets with fingering labeled, we can train a transformer which is supposed to learn the implicit rules pretty well.

It appears to be experience -- highly skilled pianists have played similar passages for pretty much any sheet music you could give them, and select fingerings from experience. This breaks down for music that's deliberately difficult to finger, or has usual repetition (think Ravel's Ondine, or Islamey).

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#29

Post by bananabiscuit »

This book changed how I practice piano and also pretty much any other skill.

I also really enjoy the tone of this book. I think the author might actually be manic. I can't find it now in this online version, but in my decade old printed edition I remember in one of the sections he describes a problem his book might cause in the world where by teaching people to tune their own pianos so well, you might be concerned that it would lead to putting piano tuners out of business. He then insists you should not worry about this imagined problem because his piano teaching method is so great, that there will be orders of magnitude more piano students thanks to his book, which would lead to ever higher job security for piano tuners/technicians as not every student will have the time or interest to actually tune their pianos, despite now knowing how to do so very well thanks to this book.

Amazing stuff.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#30

Post by loxias »

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…

>Wish some HN coder genius would write a program that given sheet music as input, outputs the top 1-3 recommended fingerings for that music with explanations for which rules were applied.

While I am NOT claiming to be "some coder genius", a program that does exactly this is something on my "projects to-do" list. My partner (who's improving her piano skills) keeps crying out for more sheet music with fingerings...

Is there already a canonical set of rules to apply? My approach is to find fingerings through a sort of beam search, using a utility function for how hard it is to move between points in a 10 dimensional "finger space".

I'm sure this approach is Probably Wrong or at least Overkill, but it's the most mathematically interesting way... :)

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