Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Bernhard’s Tips

Everyone has different learning styles. Some prefer to learn by doing, some by reading, and there are a lot of styles in-between.

I suspect that Fidel was talking about the white on black background.

I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't play the piano, or at least didn't try out some of the things in his book.

I believe from some things I've read (discussions he's participated in) that though his daughters are advanced, he himself was closer to advanced intermediate. But some people are more interested in studying a phenomenon than participating it, odd as that may seem.

I actually found Chang's book very useful. Many of the points in the book actually overlap with Bernhard’s posts. Especially topics like mental practice, memorisation and sight reading.
However, Bernhard's posts are relatively very easy to read. He uses a much simpler and descriptive language and to make it very easy to understand what he says. Chang's book on the other hand, is very clinical and tedious to read, but if one has the patience to read the book cover to cover, one will certainly benefit a lot.

Thanks. That's interesting to know. I love studying high performance sports training, even though I have never participated in any sport. Not even once.

I have read many books, blogs, articles, etc. on how to be a better pianist and concluded that reading does very little to improve my playing. The information seems to go in one ear and out the other. I get Pianist magazine and only a handful of articles help my playing. Watching Graham Fitch demonstrate a technique on YT is way more useful than just reading about it in PM. I have to either get hands on instruction, or watch a video and then immediately practice what was demonstrated.

re: Berhanrd's "plan"



I talked to Bernhard a few years ago because there was a thread here where it was being used like a bible, and it felt wrong. It was. Here is what he had to say in our conversations.

In a live lesson, a good teacher will be drawing on all his knowledge and experience, and reacting from moment to moment in his teaching to what that student is doing, now, and where that student is at. The teaching is fluid, dynamic, and variable. This cannot be replicated in a forum. So you dismantle what was a fluid unit, and lay it on the table as separate bits. It is up to students reading these "bits" to reassemble them into a whole, and use them creatively and intelligently.

This did not happen. Folks were using the bits literally, religiously. It was never how he intended. I think that is why he stopped posting there.

At the time, my own teacher had been thinking of writing a book about his teaching methods, after almost 50 years experience. He stopped, for fear his ideas would become a bible or a manual. Since the teaching is (again) interactive, based on the particular teacher's experience and observations of the moment, any direct copying of what a senior teacher wrote in a book, would be contrary to how that teacher teaches - since it's of a different nature. Having just had that conversation is what made me contact Bernhard. I asked him, "Is it like this?" and he said yes.

I don't know if this would be a good example of the above:

I once was asked to tutor a 12 year old who was in Special Ed and reading at a mid grade 1 level when I tested him. Working with this student, I noticed that he could read big words, but not longer sentences. Conversations with parent also gave me a vague impression of pressure. He seemed scared of written words. I sort of vaguely identified with when you try to read music, and you try to read all the notes at once in a kind of panic. Thereupon I created this exercise in our lesson:

Sample sentence: "Bob, looking at the cat, is happy."
Method: We take turns reading - the comma is the signal to switch places. It gets read as:

teacher: Bob
student: looking at the cat
teacher: is happy.

Then switch, with student starting. Then student does both parts, using two voices - squeak voice, growl voice.

By doing this, the student had to slow down to notice and look for the commas; go to slow down period; got to notice the little clauses making up long sentences. Some weeks later the same student came skipping in, announcing he had gone early into the classroom, pulled out the books in the classroom library, "I can read all of them!"

The student was now reading at a grade 8 level - at least!

The point here is that if somebody reading what I did, were to literally have students take turns, or do squeaks and grows, they would not be teaching how I taught. The actual teaching was to see the whole picture, to have knowledge about teaching and learning, identify the probably nature of the problem, and try something appropriate. The squeak/growl example may be food for thought, to get the cogs turning, but it is not "a thing to follow religiously".

This is roughly how I understand Bernhard's contributions, and what I was told at the time. I hope I have not paraphrased anything wrongly.

Thanks for the insights (squeak voice), Keystring (growl), but I’m wondering (squeak voice), what prompted you to reopen the topic (growl)? Lol! Joking on the voices but actually curious though.

I’m always looking for ways to reinforce positive tips and ideas, great post cmb13.

Simple. A wrong click. I thought I was in a different thread, and that the Bernhard issue had somehow drifted over to it. I was wondering now "Where did my post go?" and that's when I noticed what happened.

LOL! Well the insights are nice here also.