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Fundamentals of Piano Practice

fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io

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Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#31

Post by t_serpico »

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.

You pick up relatively quickly fingerings that work. It's a matter of intuition and pattern matching.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#32

Post by eredengrin »

mahathu wrote: post #23
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.

It's similar but maybe slightly different. At least with bass guitar, the different positions you can play the notes will end up with the notes sounding slightly differently even if it's the same fundamental frequency (particularly open strings sound dramatically different, but even outside of that each string has its own sound). Also there might be a consideration about how the transition between two notes sounds which could be affected by whether the 2nd note is played on the same string or a different string than the first. I expect most (if not all) of these concerns would apply to any stringed instrument where the length of the string changes. It's not something a beginner would need to worry about generally but that might be why such a thing doesn't exist already - the pros all have their own unique methods for determining fingerings.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#33

Post by andrepd »

Starting a book by singing one's praise is already dubious. Then you come across this

>(...) Mental Play (...) It is almost unbelievable that such an essential skill has been mostly neglected by piano teachers.

which is a top "crank red flag".

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#34

Post by zmmmmm »

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…

> how to figure out finger numbering for sheet music that doesn't have finger numbering

It is one reason why instrumentalists spend so much time practicing things like scales and arpeggios. Because in practice 90% of music is made of these or small variations on them, so once these are "muscle memory" you truly don't think about fingerings any more.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#36

Post by jancsika »

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.

You must first access the corpus of data on fingerings. AFAICT that is an oral history passed among piano teachers.

Even then, you must account for how different fingering approaches quantize to various tempo changes. E.g., there's a tempo beyond which I can start throwing my thumb (well, my arm) past my pinky in the development section of the last movement of Beethoven's Appassionata sonata. Below that tempo the fingering is basically nonsense.

You could probably put together some basic set of rules for recommended amateur fingerings. Even there, I think the quantization to tempo is sufficiently complicated that you'd risk creating something like an ML algo that merely improves at persuasively rationalizing arbitrary fingerings.

Edit: I just looked back at the passage and it's actually throwing my index finger past my ring finger. Funny enough, I tried the same passage throwing my thumb past my pinky-- it works fairly well at a fast enough tempo and is awkward and error prone if played too slowly. In either case, the same logic applies.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#37

Post by mkl »

loxias wrote: post #30
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…

I think it's probably not overkill, and actually I think it may need to be more complex than that (though simple methods may prove to work well enough in practice, so try them first!). There's all sorts of stuff do do with momentum, wrist angle, position back or forward on the keys, etc., so it depends on where on the keyboard the notes are and what notes are at the same time or before and after them, and so on. To look for optimal fingerings I'd probably model a hand and arm geometrically, with fingers on notes being constraints for a trajectory through hand-arm space.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#38

Post by tunesmith »

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.

I have an undergrad degree in piano. The problem is that at higher levels it becomes more dependent on your own biology. Some of it is hand size, some of it is the layout of the tendons in your hands - some people get tendon click in ways that other people don't.

Practicing includes the identification of the fingerings that can work for you. I don't think AI will ever get you all the way there. Sure, you can put in some beginning rules like don't cross your thumb under from a white key to a black key, but there's always going to be a fingering that is ideal for one pianist that won't work for another.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#39

Post by mkl »

aluminum96 wrote: post #28
tracyhenry wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Experience, sight-reading skill, and experimentation. My piano teacher used to play passages that needed fingering at full speed several times with different fingerings to find one that would work for me.

Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice

#40

Post by andrepd »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #17
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…

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 different clef for left and right hand... Mostly Because grouchy 18th century old Austrian white males hate you! :-D

It's because the grand staff is centered around middle C.

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