Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum My 3 month "anniversary"

It's 3 months today since I started learning to play the piano, and it's been a really enjoyable experience, although without a doubt the most difficult and (at times) frustrating skill I've ever tried to learn. My teacher uses the Schaum method books, and I've so far "mastered" (or at least gained an ability to play reasonably well) 27 out of the 36 pieces in book 1 of the series. They don't seem to be very popular books around this forum, but I really like it. It teaches "traditional" classical piano technique, and I'm now up to the point where most tunes have melody in both the left and right hand parts. When I first started playing I thought I'd never be able to gain the ability to play with "hand independence" but, rather to my surprise, it's a skill that has slowly developed with practice. I have an excellent teacher - I only see him for half an hour a week, but he's been an enormous help to me.

I'm already playing what, to my ears at least, is "proper" music and I'm very happy with my progress. I look forward to the next 3 months!

Fantastic to hear Cheshire and to my mind if they sound like proper classical music they are. Sounds like you are making great progress.

It is brilliant isn't it.

It is indeed! This is my "retirement project" (started a little early - I'm retiring in August) and it's been extremely enjoyable. I do want to branch out into more popular music, but my teacher wants to get to the end of the Schaum Red Book which I'm currently going through first. He says (and it makes a lot of sense, I think) that anyone who can play with proper hand independence can easily learn to play melody with chord accompaniments, but that the reverse is of course not true, so the plan, once I finish this book (which I should easily do by August) is to then split my time between continuing with improving my classical technique, but then also starting to learn keyboard-style playing, too. My teacher is happy to teach me both.

Congrats!


"Keyboard-style?" Is that a real term? Is that just referring to chord piano - as in pop/rock/contemporary/hymns?

It's the term my teacher uses, so I've picked it up from him. He means the style of playing melody with the right hand and chords with the left.

If he will be teaching you chord piano, you might also ask him to teach you how to read/play from lead sheets in fake books, and then you'd be able to freely play many pop/rock songs the way they are usually notated.

Yes, that's the plan. The other style I want to learn to play is the also popular type of notation where you have a melody line, below which is a 2-part piano accompaniment. Given that most people don't have three hands, I'm sure there must be some technique to playing such music solo, which I want to learn.

Nice to hear you are making progress. Alfred’s Piano Adventures series is more popular for beginners.

When I started playing as an adult, I practiced practically everyday. A few people in the family took lessons as a child and stopped playing years ago. I am always conscious the need to catch up to my peers. Even playing at an intermediate level I still feel that if I don’t practice for a week, my playing can get rusty.

When it comes to piano, I am a latecomer. In my younger days (before age 35), I can never imagine playing a few pieces at a public piano last week. Only the past 2 years I started spending more time on social media. For the first few years, I was totally on my own. I haven’t really taken the time to celebrate. Every milestone means more work ahead.

Music is a personal thing. Coming from a non-musical family nobody around have the passion for playing music. The only 2 people who still play occasionally were in the Suzuki program and had year-end recitals in front of the parents.

Good luck...

good to hear and happy anniversary

Congrats on the anniversary.

Do you mean scores like they sell on musicnotes.com? If so, I hate that, at least the way it works now. I'm sure I would spend more money there if I could turn off that hideous MIDI accompaniment while just hearing the piano part. You can do that in their app but only after you buy, when you're just browsing it isn't an option. Anyway, if others hate this as much as I do it might not hurt to let them hear about it.

Ha ha yes that annoys me too! An alternative of course is the "Easy Piano" arrangements but many of those are TOO easy.... Simplified too much I think.

And congrats to Cheshire Chris. I see his posts here all the time, but being a newbie myself, it never occurred to me he hadn't already been here for years! Time flies when you're having fun.

That's not a site I'm familiar with, but I'm referring to the style of notation that's very common in books of printed piano music of popular songs. You have the vocal part printed on a single treble clef (ie the melody) and then below that a piano accompaniment on treble and bass clef. That's the style of notation I want to learn how to play. Given the fact that one has only two hands, it can't be played exactly as printed.

Yes, if you can’t find a good solo arrangement you have to become adept at reducing three lines to two, which means picking out the essential parts of the accompaniment at sight. Or you make your own arrangements, which I prefer because these piano and vocal arrangements usually bear no relation to the original track anyhow.

Isn't the top treble clef just the voice part? I thought pianists were to play the bass and lower treble clef only. Are pianists suppose to do something with the voice part too?

You are not supposed to play all three clefs.

But if you study the music you will find that the top note of the piano treble clef mirrors the single note of the vocal line in the single treble clef above it. They are the same note, so if you are playing the piano part, you are automatically playing the vocal line.

Much of such music is like that, although there are exceptions.

Well, that depends. If you are accompanying someone who is singing - or a group - then, traditionally, you play the two staves of the piano part only. In much of popular music, the piano treble clef carries the same melody that the vocal line carries, so if you want to play a popular song on the piano as a rather simplified piano solo, then you play only the two staves representing the piano part. As you become more advanced, you can make your own arrangements of a popular song by elaborating the piano part but still retaining the melody, however you decide to do that.

In classical songs for voice and piano, the vocal line is very frequently not represented in the piano part. The piano paints a background picture or mood to enhance the mood or atmosphere of the song. If you want to make a piano solo out of a classical song originally written for voice and piano, then you have work to do. This is why several great classical composers of piano music - think of Liszt as the prime example - wrote piano solo arrangements of classical songs (Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, etc.).

Regards,

There are tons of popular piano and voice arrangements where this isn’t the case and the piano accompaniment does not contain the vocal line. And rightly so, because if it did that would be quite a rubbish accompaniment. But it obviously means it isn’t suitable for piano solo without adaptation.

Here's an example of what I was referencing. Maybe I'll learn something here...

Link to score

Hopefully the link worked. If you press the button to play the music (little triangle just above the upper right hand corner of the score) you can clearly hear what is intended to be for piano and then the hideous MIDI representation of the vocals on the 2nd page. It's just an illustration. I'm not trying to change anyone's taste in music.

In my mind, the little curly brace that connects the bass & treble clefs is telling me that these are intended to be played by the piano, or at least some instrument with the polyphony and range to play it. When the 3rd clef comes in on page 2 I ignore it if I'm playing piano, unless I'm singing, which I'm incapable of doing simultaneously at this time.

I showed my teacher an example of the type of piece I want to be able to play, and he played it by sight reading absolutely amazingly well, so if he can play it himself, he can hopefully teach me how to play it, too. My plan, once I finish the current method book, is to alternate lessons between continuing with the next book in the Schaum series to carry on improving my classical playing, and starting to learn popular pieces.

Yes, it’s a knack, and you’ll soon start to get it I’m sure!