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Touch Pianist

touchpianist.com

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Re: Touch Pianist

#211

Post by vidarh »

denotational wrote: post #172
vidarh wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that reason is that Moonlight Sonata is not hard to learn, just tedious to teach a beginner, because of the endless repetition of relatively short phrases shifting and changing a little bit at a time. This is what makes it fantastic, but learning to play it is mostly learning a few phrases and recognizing the shifts, which I can imagine would drive your teacher nuts until you're at a stage where you can p…

Whilst the first movement is fairly technically straightforward, the last movement is pretty tricky and requires solid technique; I certainly wouldn’t characterise it as “easy” even if it’s not the hardest piece in the repertoire. If anything, the issue is that as a whole, the piece is fairly technically demanding, but the first movement is simply enough for most intermediate pianists to sight-read, so something that…

I can buy that it's technically demanding to do the last movement well, in the correct tempo, but learning it to a standard a relative beginner will be happy to achieve was not hard for me. But that may well be another distinction that makes it frustrating for a teacher to try to teach to a beginner, because, yes, it will likely be noticeably flawed.

Re: Touch Pianist

#212

Post by vidarh »

sdenton4 wrote: post #207
vidarh wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more it's probably not a very effective piece to learn with. You can learn a few techniques from your teacher and then it's just practicing the variations and transitions, because it repeats roughly the same changes over and over. Learning the piece during your lessons is likely a waste.

I have bad news concerning pop music.

Very little pop music is as repetitive as the moonlight sonata. In that respect it is more closely related to trance than pop. Most pop music is also shorter, and an easier mix of even shorter movements.

In other words, most of it will be over a lot sooner for the poor, suffering teacher.

Re: Touch Pianist

#213

Post by adrianh »

danpalmer wrote: post #100
cdfuller wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to switch off silent mode on iPhone for audio to work. Any chance it’s the same issue for you?

Bingo! Thank you. Turning off silent mode and refreshing the page fixed it. That's very strange though, I wonder if it uses a weird sort of web calling API or something for the audio. I've never had an issue with audio in web pages before, and even the youtube video the page embeds sounds fine. It seems quite poor UX (of Safari? Chrome?) to require turning off silent mode – many people never turn it off so it's not v…

You are not alone! It’s indeed very bad UX on the part of Apple.

I run a website with music education tools and we had to make a dedicated help page for this particular annoyance:

https://www.soundslice.com/help/en/player/troubleshooting/23...

Re: Touch Pianist

#214

Post by matsemann »

bborud wrote: post #156
organsnyder wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also understand not wanting to do the same fucking song done badly for millionth time My wife is a piano teacher. This describes a large part of her job, especially since she focuses on beginners. She'd be so happy if she could teach "Moonlight Sonata" all day. "Old Macdonald" is much more common. My wife does feel looked-down-upon by some in her profession who see teaching advanced students as more prestigious.…

I can't understand why someone would look down on people teaching beginners. If you teach beginners you play perhaps the most critical role in someone's development. For one, it is the stage where someone is going to decide if this is something they enjoy, and want to carry on doing, or not. Second, you are taking someone from nothing to something. That's a huge step.

I remember someone many years arguing in the media that we shouldn't have the best coaches for the national soccer team. We should have the best coaches for our kids, and in a few years that would pay off tremendously. While I don't know how to do that in practice, that upside-down thinking kinda struck a cord with me. We should do that with more things.

Re: Touch Pianist

#215

Post by rockdoe »

yankput wrote: post #186
Raed667 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it ironic that the app recommends chrome, while track selection only worked in Firefox for me.

The site is from 2015.

There's no reason sites from 2000 would no longer work, unless they use APIs that weren't properly standardized.

I guess that's why it recommends Chrome. Hah.

Re: Touch Pianist

#216

Post by rockdoe »

ADcorpo wrote: post #32
thecosmicfrog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to work fine on Firefox for Android. I wonder what the author's concern is that he'd recommend Chrome?

Maybe they only tested in Chrome and do not want to address complaints coming from users on a different web browser, who knows I just get real «this website was optimized for internet explorer X» vibes from this, I really do not want the web to end up back to this state.

It's not like putting that message there will stop those complaints, more like the opposite.

Re: Touch Pianist

#217

Post by acjohnson55 »

krumpet wrote: post #159
bborud wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand why someone would look down on people teaching beginners. If you teach beginners you play perhaps the most critical role in someone's development. For one, it is the stage where someone is going to decide if this is something they enjoy, and want to carry on doing, or not. Second, you are taking someone from nothing to something. That's a huge step.

You're spot on. My wife is a middle school mathematics teacher (and a damn good one). Sooooo many former students (now high schoolers) have approached her and said, "Because of you, I excelled in math in high school...and I love it!" She had a student last year who actually told her in a very long letter, "You taught me that math matters. You taught me that I MATTER." The earliest teachers / coaches / mentors set the…

I was a teacher and the enormity of the highs and lows is spot on. It's not a job for the faint hearted.

Re: Touch Pianist

#218

Post by acjohnson55 »

hammock wrote: post #135
johtso wrote: post #23

Great choice of song! If you ever have access to a piano, I highly recommended trying to fumble your way through Beethoven's moonlight sonata, even if you don't know how to play piano. Not quite sure how to put it into words, but it's absolutely exhilarating hearing your own fingers produce these huge sounds and intense chord progressions. Every time I managed to find the right chord I'd get such a rush. "Oh no he di…

Moonlight sonata was hard for me, still is… because I only ever became fluent up to three sharps and three flats key signatures. And moonlight is in a key that is 4 sharps. Makes it very hard to fumble through

For me, my brain kind of locks in to the key signature eventually. It might be worth practicing scales and simple chord progressions in each key to try to imprint it in your brain. I found keys with lots of sharps and flats intimidating for a long time, too.

Re: Touch Pianist

#219

Post by acjohnson55 »

hammock wrote: post #193
dmoy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ease of playing the piece vs ease of sight reading the music is different though 5 flats is easier to play mechanically, imo, because hitting black keys is often easier

True. I never found it difficult to play aside from sight reading the key signature A lot of classical music is this way to be honest, there is a lot of formulaic composition (I don’t mean that derogatory at all) and once you get the patterns it’s easy to extend, maybe even play it like a fake book. I recall a lot of what we know was originally something closer to figured bass in the first place and later fully arran…

One thing to think about, if you're in common practice music, most of the accidentals will be there for a specific reason (e.g. chromatic grace notes, applied dominants, harmonic or melodic minor, parallel key borrowing, augmented sixth chord). Music theory classes can help understand these if you're not familiar. But the thing to know is whether the particular reason involves raising or lowering the natural note in the scale.

One thing that frustrates me about music notation is that when you have a key signature with lots of flats or sharps, it's hard for me to tell at a glance what the accidental is doing relative to the key signature. I've gotta look back and remember what was the unmodified note.

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