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Here's another beginner question!

Bright Eyes by Mike Batt (The Complete Piano Player Book 2 by Kenneth Baker)

In this piece of music when do the markings in italics like mf and p begin to take effect?

Do they tell you how to play a whole bar or just from exactly the point where they are marked?

Yours,

percysledgefan

The markings take effect immediately and last until they are canceled out by a different dynamic marking. For example, that page starts on P (soft) so you will play P until measure 9 where it starts a crescendo (a gradual build-up of volume, marked by the lines opening up) to MF (sort of a moderate volume) where it'll continue being played MF until it hits the next P, so on and so forth. Hope this was helpful to you in some way. :p I'm not that great at explaining things, sorry.

If there are no crescendo (lines opening to the right) or decrescendo (lines closing to the right) then the volume change is usually fairly immediate and not gradual. There's always wiggle-room though, to quote Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean, "They're more guidelines than rules." That's the way I see it anyways. By that I don't mean play loud when it says play quietly, just saying that you don't have to work yourself up into being exact with the markings, you know what sounds good so just go with it and use the markings as help along the way, that's how I do it at least. For example, there are some piano sheets you'll find out there that won't have any dynamic markings whatsoever and will require you to figure them out on your own, in this case it helps to know how the song or piece goes.

Thanks dude! You explained it well.