Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Do you consider this triplets exercise useful?

Holy crapolo -- exercise?

To me that's way too hard to call an exercise. IMO it's an exercise in the same respect that Chopin etudes make us "develop" our technique.

Looks to me like something that can be an 'exercise' only if you already have a tremendous ability to do stuff like that, in which case I would think you don't need an exercise.. I'm pretty good with that kind of stuff but wouldn't be able to just sit down and play it. I'd have to work on it, and pretty hard.

If you can do that fluently, why are you still doing triplet exercises rather than repertoire?

If you can do that fluently, why are you still doing triplet excercises rather than repertoire?

If you can do that fluently, why are you still doing triplet excercises rather than repertoire?

If the goal is to perform from memorized/learned repertoire, then this is way overdoing it.

That's something I don't want to do. Only sight-reading, and hence this exercise. So basically I'm asking: do you consider this a good exercise for those who want to improve their sightreading?

Probably not as much as you'd like, because you rarely see these kind of passages in real music.

That's something I don't want to do. Only sight-reading, and hence this exercise. So basically I'm asking: do you consider this a good exercise for those who want to improve their sightreading?

....When you're sight reading and you can't figure it out, just simplify it on the spot so the general beat is still right and move on.

That's something I don't want to do. Only sight-reading, and hence this exercise. So basically I'm asking: do you consider this a good exercise for those who want to improve their sightreading?

It's interesting because you called it a triplets exercise and said that you don't encounter them enough in repertoire to get practice doing them in combination with other rhythms. Hence the assumption that it was an exercise to help you with playing triplets.

Since you're trying to get better at sightreading, however, I don't necessarily know if this is the best way to go about it. You'd probably be better off sightreading and learning lots of pieces. You basically have to encounter enough patterns and variations on that pattern in repertoire to get an idea of what's going on at sight.

There are plenty of pieces at various levels that highlight playing triplets as well as playing them in conjunction with other rhythms that you may want to look into. Again, I think that is much more effective than sightreading something computer-generated where you can't possibly make use of the patterns that occur in music to aid you (which is a necessary component of sight reading).

I don't find an exercise such as this useful for developing sight-reading skills in standard repertoire nor in developing polyrhythms involving triplets. Rarely does one come across music - except in very contemporary compositions - where the rhythmic patterns are constantly changing as they do in this exercise. I would find it much more helpful to use exercises that, individually, concentrate on one combination of rhythmic patterns rather than on constantly changing patterns.

That said, I am sure that, on a certain level, this type of exercise would work, but it also seems to me to require the type of mental gymnastics (constant shifting of rhythmic patterns so that there is no pattern) that doesn't allow one to concentrate on one pattern and get it right before going on to the next.
Exercises are most effective, as you well know, when they repeat patterns or allow us to repeat consistent patterns long enough for those pattern(s) to settle into the brain and fingers. It seems to me that these constantly changing patterns constitute not exercises but rhythmic challenges to be solved, challenges that rarely appear in all but contemporary music.

Regards,

Why don't you just sight read repertoire and, when you reach a challenging part, work it out until you can play it fluently?