Music: Brain Exercise

Do you or your child need motivation to stick with lessons, or to take your practice time seriously?

There are some astounding benefits that science have discovered that exist in the brains of musicians, benefits that not only help you play music, but lead to bigger success in other career areas outside of music.

Check out this 5 minute video:
How Playing an Instrument Benefits Your Brain

The Art of Practice - a Video

A few years ago, the University of North Texas College of Music produced this video on the art of practice.  It is targeted toward vocalists, but it's very applicable to pianists and other musicians as well.  It's worth the 9 minutes to watch.  Don't be put off by the level of intensity that is described in the practice sessions of these aspiring professionals.  However, please notice the passion and the description of what makes for good, true practice.  Any small amount of good practice is better than a whole lot of bad practice.

Classical Music for Halloween

Halloween is near, and a number of composers have written some music that fits the mood.  Here are 10 of my favorites in no particular order (click on each title for a YouTube performance).

Music For Stringed Instruments, Percussion and Celesta (III: Adagio) by Bela Bartok  - creepy enough that Stanley Kubrick used parts of it throughout The Shining.  The composer wrote this in the early 1940s and was inspired by the very real horrors of World War II.

Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens - This is a usually a great orchestra piece, but this is a blog for studying the piano, so here is a very nice arrangement for 2 pianos.

Symphony Fantastique (V: known as "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath") by Heitor Berlioz.  One of the oldest Halloween classics, this was the first of many pieces to feature the Gregorian Chant Dies Irae and use it for suspenseful music.  This a superb orchestra piece conducted by the legendary Leonard Bernstein.

Sonata for Piano (III: Adagio mesto) by Samuel Barber.  I'm actually working on this piece in my own practice.  It just has a dark, foreboding tone to it.

Toccata and Fugue in D minor by J.S. Bach (arranged for piano by Alfred Cortot) - great piano arrangement of perhaps the most famous organ composition of all time.

Scythian Suite (II. The Evil God and the Dance of the Pagan Monsters) by Sergei Prokofiev - probably wins the award for most descriptive title.  It's a very energetic and sinister orchestra piece.

Symphonic Dances V (2nd section of movement III: Allegro Vivace) by Sergei Rachmaninoff.  One of the last pieces this composer wrote, this exciting piece also uses the Dies Irae chant.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Dukas.  See the original Fantasia film from 1940 to hear the orchestral version.  This version is arranged for 2 pianos.

Mephisto Waltz No. 1 by Franz Liszt.  Inspired by the Faust story, this is also popular as an orchestra piece, but this is the Liszt's own piano version featured in an amazing performance.  Seriously, this may be the most incredible piano performance you ever watch!

Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky - This is a piano arrangement of another piano arrangement of an orchestral work (which you can also hear in the original Fantasia).  Another great performance of a classic work!

Improve Practice by Being Specific

Recently, I read the 1937 classic book, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill.  If you've never read this, its title is deceptive.  It doesn't offer schemes to increase your bank account.  Instead, it talks about cultivated the mind-set that leads to success, which may happen to include but doesn't necessarily limit itself to monetary wealth.

A big part of his philosophy stresses the importance of establishing a DEFINITE GOAL.

Definite Goals come in long-term and short-term.  I won't elaborate further on the book, but I want to talk about you and your music goals.  It is very effective to use definite goals as a pianist.

Long term:  What kind of pianist do you want to be?  Re-read the blog post I wrote to review which type of pianist you should be shooting for.

Short term: (and this was what I wanted to focus on) - what are you going to accomplish in practice this week?

Examples:
INDEFINITE goal:  "I'm going to practice a little bit each day as time permits.  I'll try to go through all my assignments and see what happens."

DEFINITE goal:  "I'm going to double the tempo of my C and G major scales.  I'm going to study my note recognition on musictheory.net and get 100 correct answers in 3 minutes.  I'm going to complete my theory assignment.  I will thoroughly master a 16-measure passage in my repertoire to the point where there is hardly anything else to accomplish."

See the difference?  The indefinite goal gives you no clarity.  There's also no accountability.  You could accomplish nothing at all, and be emotionally okay with it.  In the definite goal, you have a target.

What next after you establish a definite goal?
Now you look at your week, your schedule, your current knowledge of how long it takes you to learn music, and determine how much you need to practice.  After you gain some experience, it's good to work this step in harmony with your weekly goal.  Choose a weekly goal that you can actually meet.  At the same time, challenge yourself to accomplish as much as you can.

If you don't meet your goal...
...then don't fret about it.  Setting goals is a work in progress, and merely a tool.  If you don't accomplish something, look at what you did accomplish and where you fell short in your goals.  Look at WHY you fell short.  Can you improve the way you practice?  Can you spend more time in practice?  Are you focused and in full concentration?  Answer these questions and adjust, if necessary, the ambition of your future goals.

So, what are you going to accomplish in practice this week?

Sight-reading Basics Part 2 - Reading the Music

Sight-reading is an important skill for various reasons.  It's not just because, as I mentioned in my previous post, professional pianists are often asked to read music that they've never seen before at a high level; It's because EVERYBODY sight-reads.  Correction: everyone who ever learns a piece of music has to sight-read.  All sight-reading means is that it's the first time you've attempted to play a piece of music.  It's not just a skill; it's an inevitable part of the learning process.  Unless you only play by ear, you have to sight-read.

But why do I need to improve it if I don't plan to be a professional musician?

There may be multiple reasons, but there's only one that matters:  the better you sight-read, the faster you'll learn your music!!

Elite sight-readers are more than halfway done learning their music after they sight-read it one time.  Ask yourself this:  If you could take a piece that requires 4 hours of practice time and reduce it to 2, or 90 minutes, or 1 hour...isn't that worth the effort to improve your sight-reading?

In part 1, I talked about the importance of learning the keyboard well enough that you aren't having to constantly look at your hands.  Be sure you're making good progress in that area in order to fully benefit from the next segment of ways to improve your sight-reading.

Many of these hints below can be improved at www.musictheory.net/exercises.

Learn your notes

Playing and understanding a piece of music is VERY SIMILAR to reading any other language.  You have letters, words, phrases and sentences.  In music, you have notes, intervals, chords, melodic patterns, sequences, cadences and phrases.  When it comes to spoken language, you won't get far in reading anything on this blog unless you can identify each individual letter.  Written language is pretty much hopeless unless you get past "A is for Apple".  You need to learn every written note you will encounter in a piece of music for your level, and (I CAN'T EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH), You must practice note recognition until you no longer have to consciously think of the answer.  At any point in your lesson, I should be able to point to a note and ask its name, and you should be moving your mouth right away with the correct answer.  If you're pausing to think, you don't know your notes well enough to sightread at a high level.

Musictheory.net exercise:  Note Identification (go for speed, not just accuracy)

Learn your intervals and chords

If you're still reading, you obviously know your ABC's.  Do you think you'd be reading if you had to consciously identify every single individual letter?  Probably not.  I-t i-s h-a-r-d t-o r-e-a-d o-n-e l-e-t-t-e-r a-t a t-i-m-e and understand everything.  To even say you are reading, you need to recognize groups of letters as single words.  In music, this translates as intervals and chords.  These show you the shape of the patterns, things you are more likely to recognize at a playing tempo than the individual notes.  For intervals: start with generic 2nds, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, etc and when that is easy, learn to distinguish between major, minor, perfect, augmented and diminished (depending on your level).  For chords, start with being able to identify your primary chords as well as find the bottom note in any root-position (stacked in 3rds) chord.  Then practice identifying chords in inversions, as well as playing them.  Then work to types of chords (major, minor, augmented, diminished, types of 7ths).

Musictheory.net exercises: Interval Identification and Chord Identification

Learn to incorporate key signatures

Notice I didn't say "learn your key signatures".  What good is it to know that a key signature of 3 sharps could be A major if you forget to always play F, C and G as F#, C# and G# when you come across it?  Yes, you need to know what your key signature is, but you also need to be able to apply it to your playing.

Musictheory.net exercises: Key Signature Identification (for naming what it is) and Note Identification with settings checking key signatures to be incorporated that you would likely play at some point (for applying it).

ALWAYS LOOK AHEAD

When it comes to recognizing motives, sequences, phrases and other horizontal patterns, you have to look ahead.  You're still reading this blog.  Have you understood everything to this point (minus any technical terms you haven't yet covered)?  Then that means several things:  1. You know your letters. 2.  You can quickly string those letters together to identify words.  3.  You know what at least most of those words mean, and can deduce what the others mean by the context.  4.  You...probably... are... not... reading...one...word...at...a... time.   Look at the next 5 examples.  The first is a clean 8 measure example of a piece many of you might sightread.

Original work.  No copyright is infringed.

Sorry for the lack of resolution in this example, but you should be able to make out what it is.  Here are 4 ways you might be looking at the notes as you play them.  Consider what you're playing to be on the far left of any given circle with what you're seeing as you play to be the rest of the circle.  They are ranked from worst to best.

I only bothered with the first two measures.  Basically you're looking 1 beat at a time.

2 beats at a time.  This is obviously better, but you're still going to stall or have to play very slowly.

I would say that, at the bare minimum, this is where you should start when you read through a piece.  The problem comes in going from one measure to another.  You need to keep looking ahead.  Therefore...

This is ideal.  You are looking far enough ahead.  Also, notice the overlapping circles (oops, I missed one at the end).  You KEEP looking ahead.  Now you can see chord patterns, chord changes, the shape of the phrase, rhythm patterns.  Notice the instruction at the end of the first line.  You need to look to measure 5 to see what it coming up.

Looking ahead is essential.  As I mentioned on the previous entry in this series, I am not a natural sight-reader.  Everything I'm suggesting that you do are things I do now that I have not always done.  Occasionally, I find myself struggling to play something with accuracy, even something that is a 3rd or 4th time playing, and nearly always this goes away when I realize that I am not consistently looking ahead.  ALWAYS LOOK AHEAD.  DO NOT STARE AT THE NOTE YOU ARE PLAYING.

More steps to success

1.  Until you have mastered sight-reading, always use a metronome.  Set the metronome to a conservative tempo and stick with it no matter what.  The metronome has one purpose: to remind you that the beat goes on whether you're ready to play the next beat or not.  Do not correct wrong notes.  You have the option of leaving a note out, or an entire beat, while you "look ahead" and jump back in ON TIME.  Do not pause while you figure out what you should play.  You can do that when you're actually practicing the music, but sightreading is NOT practice.  Don't treat the two elements the same way.

2.  Look at a piece before you begin.  Identify the clefs and key signatures.  Look for patterns.  Look for tricky spots.  Most importantly, mentally review the rhythm.  Go for RHYTHM FIRST when you sight-read.  Who cares if you miss some notes?  Get the rhythm!

3.   Sightread at least 2-3 sessions per week of 10-20 minutes each to practice this skill.  Choose easier music and, at least, music you are not currently learning (or may never take the time to learn).  Method books from methods you haven't played before are good.  Many people recommend hymnals.  These are great provided you have any experience at all in playing hymns, which involves a lot of quick decisions as to whether or not the tenor voice should be played with the left hand or right thumb.

4.  As the first section implies, keep studying theory.  The more information you can identify immediately about the music, the better you will play.

5.  Keep working on technique.  You shouldn't have to practice a passage based on chords, scales and arpeggios where it is clearly one of those three and not some mix.  The better your technique, the better you will sight-read.

6.  Related to my first tip.  Give yourself permission to mess up.  Just play it with a carefree attitude.  You'll be surprised how much better it sounds even with mistakes if you just keep going.

7. Just in case you missed it between this and Part 1 in this series:  KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE MUSIC.  You can't read what you don't see.  Don't look at your hands at all except when jumping, and then learn to bounce your eyes down and back.  They should never settle for even a full second on the piano.

Here are 2 links that I would recommend for those wanting more detail.

http://pianosightreading.blogspot.com/  Be sure to check out the menu on the right of all posts so that you can follow in order.  I especially recommend posts number 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 13, 14, 28, 29 and 33.

Also, check out http://www.belmont.edu/music/PDFs/sightreading_tips.pdf for a more comprehensive list of what makes for good sight-reading.

Sight-reading Basics part 1: Learning Your Instrument

In my previous post, I offered an article on sight-reading, on some theories of what makes a person a good sight-reader.  Regardless of how natural your aptitude is, any musician can and should strive to become a sight-reader.  Personally speaking, I got through my first dozen years of lessons solely on the merits of my ability to use my ear and to memorize.  I would all but panic if you gave me something to play for the first time expecting it to be anywhere close to good if it was any more than half my current performance level.  Then came college and scholarship requirements, which included accompanying, which furthermore included a lot of sight-reading.  I would come in around week 4 of the semester and would be handed the piano part for the first time while the vocalist or other instrumentalist would already be getting up to tempo and mostly done learning their part.  By necessity, I had to get better.

It's a good thing that I did.  In my career, I've been asked to sight-read a LOT.  As a professional musician, it's probably the one aspect of my musicianship that would most cause questions as to my competence if it were still weak.  Someone who can play by ear is respected, but there is understanding if you happen to be a musician who doesn't play by ear.  If you can't sight-read well, this speaks of inexperience.  No matter how much music experience you have, you still have to practice specifically to get better at sight-reading.  It doesn't just happen.

Don't worry.  This looks impossible to me as well!

In part 2 of this series, I'll talk about some of the things I did to improve my own skills as far as reading the music and playing it.  They aren't any different than what the vast majority of teachers will tell you.  However, there's a very important skill they forget to tell you, and that's KNOWING YOUR INSTRUMENT.

One of the biggest keys to success with sight-reading is keeping your eyes on your music.  However, you can't very well keep your eyes on the music if you don't know your instrument well enough to play comfortably without looking at it.  A violinist has to know where to press each string and operate the bow without looking.  A brass player has to know valve combinations without looking.  A woodwind player needs to know two hand fingering combinations and where the holes/keys are without watching their hands.  As a pianist, you need to know the keyboard so well that by knowing where your hands are when you started, you know where every other key is at all times.

Let's start with the very basics.  Do you know your keys?  Furthermore, can you name each letter (along with sharp or flat as needed) without looking.  It all starts with the black keys.  If you know your two groups of keys well, then you can use your fingers to find the 3 black key groups and 2 black key groups to determine which of the following letters you are playing.

If you need to work on your keys, an exercise I recommend is 5 times daily to take each group, go up and down the keys PLAYING and SAYING ALOUD the letters as you play (CDE going up, EDC going down).  You can also start on any letter, play and SAY going up until you get to the letter where you started an octave higher.  (ABCDEFGA going up, AGFEDCBA going down.  Then go to BCDEFGAB, CDEFGABC, etc)

You can also make flashcards of the keys to the left by drawing a blank set of the keys, placing an X on the key you want to name and printing the letter name on the opposite side.

Also, you can go to my favorite website for helping: musictheory.net

One of the exercises is called Keyboard Note Identification.

When you go to that game, you'll see the online game which looks something like this.

Simply put, you name the key that is highlighted as fast and as correctly as you can.  Please remember that SPEED is just as important as ACCURACY.  Your goal is to get to the point where you do not have to consciously think to name the key.   Until you get to the point, you will not be able to take your eyes off the keys and know for certain what you are playing.  If you only want to work with sharps (or flats) or just want the white keys, you can go to the settings button at the top and uncheck the ones you don't want as choices.

One other exercise is to take a 5 finger position such as (C-D-E-F-G), then play up and down the pentascale without looking at your fingers.  Then move your hand so that each finger is 1 key higher than it was before and recite (D-E-F-G-A) up and down.  Then start with E, etc.  At some point, Start with C, then jump to E, then G.  Then start with C, jump to F, then B.  Keep requiring greater jumps.

Last but not least, there are the two blind key challenges.

#1:  Look up at the ceiling, or close your eyes.  Randomly play a key and name what it is with your eyes closed.  Even if you think you know what it is by the way it sounds, confirm by feeling around for the nearby black key groups.

#2:  For those with great ears, this is a bigger challenge.  Close your eyes or look up and away from the piano, choose a letter at random (such as G).  Reach down, feel your groups, and play the G correctly on first attempt without looking.

Good luck!  Learn your instrument, and you'll be ready for the next steps in the basics of sightreading.

Sight-Reading Article

In recent lessons, I've been talking a lot about the importance of sight-reading.  There are many things to cover on this topic, and I am going to take another article or two soon to discuss more about sight-reading.  In the meantime, here is an interesting but brief article on what makes someone a good sight-reader.

5 X 5 approach

I have shared this following approach to practice already in some of your lessons, and I wanted to introduce it to everyone else here.

This concept was inspired by a fitness video I saw.  The guy had a workout called 5 by 5.  He took 5 challenging bodyweight exercises and recommended doing 5 sets of 5 reps.

One thing that always stuck from my own piano education is the rule that if you can do something 5 times correctly, you have learned it.

I would further add that if you can do something 5 times correctly, and continue to do that every day until you've done it for 5 consecutive days, then you REALLY should have it down.

The Five Rules

The rules are really simple.

1.  Whatever you practice, do it 5 times in a row correctly.

2.  Correctly means 100% accuracy.  If you missed one note or one finger, it was not correct.

3.  If you mess up, the count starts over.  Go through what you're practicing 4 times without a mistake and miss a fingering on the 5th attempt?  Sorry, but you have to start all over.

4.  This means that accuracy and precision are by far the most important things.  Speed does not matter at all.  Go absolutely as slow as you need!

5.  Repeat 5 days in a row, and marvel at how much easier it gets each time.  Speed will come without effort.

Ways to incorporate 5 X 5 practice

• Take any challenging technique (a new scale, chord progression) and practice it as slowly as needed.  Just ensure that every note you play is correct...no matter how slow.  Do it 5 times in a row.  Don't allow it to speed up for the first 2 days.  On days 3 and 4, allow it to gradually speed up each repetition.  Day 5, it should be feeling easy.  Get your 5 times in carefully, then test yourself for speed.
• Take any particularly difficult part of a piece you're working on, practice the very end of the section 5 times, work back a measure to get into it and do that 5 times.  Keep doing that until you're starting from the beginning of the section.  Again, it must always be correct, and you need to do this 5 days in a row.  It should get easier each day.
• If you're working on something like reading notes on a staff, you could go to MusicTheory.com's note exercise, change the settings so that you're working on only the notes you're trying to learn, and see how many notes you can correctly identify in a 5 minute session.  Write down your score (number correct).  Do another 5 minute session the next 4 days, and see if the number you can correctly identify goes up.

Use your imagination when applying this.  It works because it demands perfection first, and repetition second.  Be patient early on.  You will undoubtedly mess up and have to start over your count, and it will feel like it's taking forever.  However, you will eventually get good at this type of practice and see it as nothing more than a tool that will reliably make you a better pianist.

Welcome 2015, Becoming Observant

Yes, I am still here.  In 2014, I was involved with 9 shows.  That was more than I did in 2012-13 combined.  Also, I spent the year teaching at a local community college.  Needless to say, many things fell by the wayside including this blog, but I'm not at all short on things I want to share, so I hope to be giving you more frequent things to read.  I am doing fewer shows and only teaching privately, so hopefully this will help.

Coming soon: I will talk about suggested goals for this year.  In the meantime, you may want to read what I suggested for last year.

IMPROVING OBSERVATION

One general way that nearly all of my students need to improve on for becoming better music students is to sharpen their powers of observation.  In music, you need to notice several things:

• Familiar chord progressions and voicings
• Key signatures
• Melodic patterns
• Repeated sections and their variations
• Textual instructions (slow down, up an octave)
• Dynamics
• Fingerings

...and so on.  I can't tell you how much lesson time is spent pointing out to a student that they simply need to look more carefully at what they're playing.  They know what the note is, but they don't notice it until I say "check it again."  They get to a repeated section of something they played well the first time and approach it like it's new material.  Musicians are people who are very observant.  They notice things they see and things they hear.  When my wife logs off on her wii, she tends to do it at the same rhythm to get 3 distinct patterns of 2 notes, 1 note, and 2 more notes.  I went to the piano and found that they make a great waltz.  Did you know that cylindrical fluorescent lightbulbs constantly hum on a Bb?  Have you ever listened to the rhythm of a car alarm, or the complicated songs of birds?

There's late '90s British television show called Spaced that has this one scene that nails how many musicians think.  This minor character, Tyres, is visiting his friends.  He's usually wearing headphones, frequently visits a lot of clubs, and basically transforms everything into music.  Watch what happens inside his head as soon as the phone starts ringing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ0zGZ2t7xE

One exercise I've always suggested to people for improving observations is to select a mundane object, like a clock on the wall, and write down 20 things about it.  Today, I found this article about How to Boost Your Observation Skills and Pay Attention.  Please read it, as I think you will find a lot that will help you with your music and with life away from your instrument as well.