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?
Fundamentals of Piano Practice
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Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
#52A 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…
> is totally wrong. There's a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it. None of the above refute the parent's statement. They author is aware there are such things as piano pedagody groups and books. Key word here is "properly" (which might be accurate or not, but that's what should be refuted).
Yep, fully agree. "researched, documented, and analyzed properly" is a very particular method of doing things, and much of the music pedagogy is pretty much "it worked for me and I'm good (or it worked for them and they're good), so it will work for you too". Which is true sometimes and very much not true other times. It's often a very conservative field (not in the political way, but in the sense of resisting change/doing it the traditional way), so if someone comes in and actually studies things with a more scientific sort of approach, there's no guarantee it will be accepted or catch on.
At least in the family of brass instruments, I am fairly confident that they're largely still living in the dark ages and often don't understand fundamentally how the instrument is even played, at least from a scientific/physical perspective, so good luck if you end up with a teacher/professor who expects you to play one way when in reality you'd probably be much better off playing another way. This happened to me early on and I eventually learned that there has in fact been some pretty good research and documentation into brass technique but it's pretty niche and lots of music professors pretty much entirely disregard it because of the above point about it being a very conservative field. Donald Reinhardt is kind of the one who kicked off a lot of that movement but there's a number of people who have been carrying on that work.
If a similar thing has been happening in the piano field I wouldn't be at all surprised (although I do think that the brass field is particularly ripe for things to go rotten in this way just because the brass embouchure is particularly complicated and also hard to observe).
Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
#53I would like to see the best book ever written on how to practice at the guitar . Any suggestions?
There are a lot of different genres within guitar, and a lot of different variations in instruments, and ways of playing the instrument (fingers, pick, hybrid, tapping, legato, slide, combination thereof), heck even within picking there's also "economy", "sweep", "downstroke", and "alternate" picking, so you'd need to narrow it down by a lot.
For rock/prog I think Rock Discipline by John Petrucci is the best book available if you're prepared to put in a lot of work and, well, discipline. The name is not accidental: it's hard AF, so if someone is looking for a silver bullet, keep looking.
But at least for guitar a book is not a replacement for a good teacher, and it can't be: there's too much nuance and too many ways to screw things up. Screw up your right wrist movement, and you won't be able to play fast. Screw up your left hand position, and you won't be able to do legato (hammer-ons and pull-offs) and chords will be difficult as well. Synchronization is hard too, especially in hybrid styles, where not every note is picked. Screw up muting and you won't be able to play clean. And the worst part is, you don't even hear yourself as you're playing, if you aren't recording, because your mind is struggling to control and synchronize your hands, which takes more effort than it does on a piano because the left hand does something completely different from the right. That's not even considering that music theory is much harder to learn on the guitar than it is on the piano.
Even some established guitarists don't really know how to play properly (Kirk Hammett or Slash are perennial examples), and a lot of those that do know how to play don't know the theory. They've just learned the technique and a few licks, and that's enough if you don't have to learn someone else's music and don't need Petrucci's levels of sophistication. But knowing theory really opens up the instrument and makes it a lot easier to learn pieces, since you get to see the "grammar" of the thing.
Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
#54Does 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…
Going the other way from mkl, I wonder if you don't really need beam search. Approximate as a finite state space, use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viterbi_algorithm
Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
#55It'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.
That's a preface by the individual who found this book only after years of research and then decided to post it online. This is not the author of the book talking about their own book.
Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
#56As somebody who has been trying to play harpsichord for many decades on and off, I immediately jumped to the chapter on tuning. My longstanding opinion on ET is that any key is simply a shift of x semitones above and below C.
Since publication when electronic aids were expensive, there's apps you can put on your phone for little or no money. Pitchlab Pro is excellent, but there may be patent issues in your jurisdiction. Also you now have to go through Amazon.
These days YouTube offers different interpretations of just about everything. It gives you something to aim for.
Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
#57A 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…
> is totally wrong. There's a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it. None of the above refute the parent's statement. They author is aware there are such things as piano pedagody groups and books. Key word here is "properly" (which might be accurate or not, but that's what should be refuted).
I'm dubious about "properly". As she said, I found lots of instruction similar to hers, including the books she herself cited. The music stores are full of them.
The one thing about piano teaching, similar to dog training, playing golf, and so many other areas, is:
Every teacher thinks every other teacher is full of it.
Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is totally wrong. There's a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it. None of the above refute the parent's statement. They author is aware there are such things as piano pedagody groups and books. Key word here is "properly" (which might be accurate or not, but that's what should be refuted).
Yep, fully agree. "researched, documented, and analyzed properly" is a very particular method of doing things, and much of the music pedagogy is pretty much "it worked for me and I'm good (or it worked for them and they're good), so it will work for you too". Which is true sometimes and very much not true other times. It's often a very conservative field (not in the political way, but in the sense of resisting change…
Just as an aside: a couple years ago I was hanging with a professional French Horn player at the dog park, and never having played one, I thought it would be amusing to try it. I had no aspirations of really being good. I was honest with him about my lack of ambition and he was fine with it.
So I got one for cheap, and took a couple lessons from him. Damn, that thing is hard!
Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
#59It'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.
That's a preface by the individual who found this book only after years of research and then decided to post it online. This is not the author of the book talking about their own book.
Oh, you might be right.
I downloaded the book a long time ago as a PDF from somewhere. It also included this sentence and it stuck out to me because it was so weird. The rest of the tone of the book felt in the same style to me so I never second guessed it, but you might be correct.
Re: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The main takeaways for me were: - Do not try to practice the whole piece at once. Split it into pieces - Start by listening to the piece. If possible get multiple performances/recordings (usually easy with YouTube) to get a feel for different interpretations. - Take the piece and number each measure from 1 to finish. Figure out where the repetitions are, which measures are the easiest, which the hardest (this will di…
> As you learn the measure, increase speed, but only so much that you can still play expressively.
This summary omits one of the major themes of the book. Granted, the discussion of speed is quite nuanced. See 1.II.13: https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/chapte...
One relevant excerpt, though large chunks of the book are dedicated to this topic:
> To vary the speed, first get up to some manageable “maximum speed” at which you can play accurately. Then go faster (using parallel sets, etc., if necessary), and take note of how the playing needs to be changed (don’t worry if you are not playing accurately at this point because you are not repeating it many times). Then use that motion and play at the previous “maximum accurate speed”. It should now be noticeably easier. Practice at this speed for a while, then try slower speeds to make sure that you are completely relaxed and absolutely accurate. Then repeat the whole procedure. In this way, you ratchet up the speed in manageable jumps and work on each needed skill separately.