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There is a great song in the Library which is marked as Level 3 -- it's called "Irish Jig"

Actually, one of the Piano Marvel staff recommended three level three pieces to me from the library: Satin Gloves, Spinning, and Riding. I only tried Spinning so far. It was pleasant. Not too difficult. (Irish Jig has spoiled the Level 3 rating system... )

No thank you, never ever Irish Jigg Those 3 they recommended are in method 3D or E, I have done them. Spinning is pleasant but not in fast version.

I most have just not remembered whichever one of these was in Method 3D since I finished Method 3D already. I am currently stuck though on Technique 3D#17 "Shenandoah" for the 3rd day. I think I see why you gave up on Technique. I think I have made this extra tough on myself, since it is marked as "ear training", so I've been refusing to look at the notes during the scoring and memorize them that way, as I want to play from ear. But the fact that I've played this one about 100 time with my best being 93% probably means I've almost memorized the pattern anyways even though I'm not peeking. haha...

Some people are born with an absolute musical hearing and others do not. If you belong to the second category you can do ear training until you get mad, but it will never come. That's why I've given up in technique. At first I wrote everything down in technique, then I just had to fill in the blanks, but with the larger pieces it is not feasible and so time consuming. And actually that is a big scale cheating and I don't learn anything about it. My ambition when I started with Marvel was just to learn to read notes and learn the basics of playing piano. Even though it stings that not all my pianos have a golden star, both technique and method, but yes, so be it.

Sarah,

If you look at "popular piano solos" and "more popular piano solos" by Hal Leonard they both have multiple selections in multiple levels. They are not too long. A lot of Disney tunes, but not all. You don't have to do the boot camp part of it.

Hah. No. I got there in the end. It wasn't too hard actually. Once you have the two sections nailed it's just a case of playing them repeatedly without error.



There are some nice grades pieces that have just been added if you search for Composer: Hal Leonard it'll bring up the Popular Piano Solo books. Also, if you search for "Classical Boot Camp" there are some good graded classical pieces to try. Good luck!

EDIT: Sorry, GidgetKeys, just saw your response!

I've just started playing with a Teacher again so I'll probably be spending less time on Piano Marvel. I've been set quite this nice blues-y piece which is much harder. My own fault for telling him that I wanted to master stride piano. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiQ7HdEy-Ts

I've also got work to do on some sorely neglected scales, so I'll be jumping up to L4's Technique section to help me out.

Good luck with all that you still want to learn, I take some spring/summer vacation. No time to sit inside on the piano, it is better outside in the sun. See you back in autumn
I will still be practicing on rainy days, because I miss my piano quite quickly. But ending level 3 of Marvel will not be for now. To get the last longer pieces 100% I have to play a few days in succession, because if there is a week in between, I forgot everything again. And that I can't do now, way too many other things to do.

See you in the fall, Sarah! Enjoy your summer!

I previously used Piano Marvel to get the basic notes from "Cool" (an ABRSM Grade 5 piece) into my fingers and I know it works wonderfully well to just get my muscle memory set up - it then takes work outside of Piano Marvel to hone the piece.

This week I have started to try and learn Bach's two part Invention No 8. I entered the score via Musescore and exported the .mid and .xml files and uploaded them to Piano Marvel. Now I am having fun trying to build practice exercises from it. Yesterday I built a load of "Minced Exercises" and then some "Chopped" ones - but although I could easily do hands separate, as soon as I tried to put hands together I was struggling. So this morning I am taking a new approach and changing the "Chopped" exercises to start from the end and work backwards - adding extra bars/measures in for each new exercise until I get to the beginning and can play the whole piece.

Because creating and changing exercises is so easy once you have the piece in place, I can easily create the 17 practice exercises it will take to go from the last two bars to playing the whole piece, maybe half and hours work and I will be ready to go. I have chosen very low tempii (32, 48 and 64) so give me a chance of getting my muscle memory started and then worked up to a slow but steady pace. Once I have it in my fingers I hope I can improve it outside of PM.

Have a nice summer. I am just 20 lessons from the halfway point myself - 10 of each of 3E Method & Technique - yet life intrudes here too. I leave for London in two days to attend a graduation, and I've set the goal of finishing off these 20 lessons - and therefore level 3 - before I depart. It's a race against time to see if I make it.

BTW, for some reason, I found the C minor version of the Happy Birthday song to be even harder than Morning Mood. Seemingly inexplicably, I made 100+ mistakes on the Happy Birthday song - I would make the same mistake 4-5 times in a row, each time swearing the next time I wouldn't make "that particular error". For the life of me, I can't figure out why, unless had something to do with the piece being in a minor key. The Morning Mood jumps seemed less challenging to me in comparison. I've been recording the pieces that posed any difficulty on my SoundCloud, and this morning, my wife LOL'ed at me when she saw the Happy Birthday song there.

Finally! I scored 100% on Irish Jig...but it wasn't perfect. I had 2 red notes. 29 "official" attempts, but I practiced the music more than that. I'm moving on...

It actually took me less than 20 minutes to set this up, and after a brief trial I decided to go with 32, 40 and 48 as the tempii. The last measure is bar 34 and yesterday I did exercises 33->end, 31->end, 29->end at all tempii to 100%. I can play further back than that looking at the sheet music, so will try some more today. But like others the weather has kept me away from the piano for most of the day

Wanted to add that when my brain wasn't processing the minor key Happy Birthday song, I had just read this, and so I too tried to work measure-by-measure from the end to the beginning of the song -- all 10 or so measures of it. Although there were no pre-chopped exercises that did this, I did this by manually highlighting the measures. Whether it was the mere fact of achieving enough repetitions or the technique of "growing" from the end does really help, my first successful rendition of these (10) measures came during this process.

This is the first time I've tried this, and my impression of it is that you clear the new measure(s) you just introduced and are then in familiar territory and so relax, making the playing much more fluid and (I think important to accuracy) finding you have enough time to think ahead of time how the next few notes go, and can then tell your fingers to play those specific notes.

Along with a misfeature I found today (another story), I found a very cool undocumented feature. I can't imagine I'm the first one to notice this. I was in Method 3E#14, "Satin Gloves", and played the video, 4:52 of going through the entire piece. Then I tried to learn it in practice mode. While in practice mode, I decided I needed to check the fingering on a part, and decided to watch the video again. So I clicked the video link while in practice mode, expecting to get the same 4:52 video as before. No! Instead, I got a 9:18 video showing every practice mode segment, and depending on which practice mode segment you are in, you get a different piece of the 9:18 video, showing very detailed fingering. Whoa! Now that is cool and obviously took a lot of effort (if it was done for practice mode in other pieces). But now why was this feature never mentioned or documented?

Now that explanation does make sense to me. Is this your theory of why this is working for us, or is it something your teacher or something you read suggested? Because if you invented it, I think you should post this idea in its own thread on this board, since it is a learning innovation and deserves not to be buried in a Piano Marvel thread

Question to anyone who is advanced enough to know this. In the following segment of a piece called "Satin Gloves", is there any reason why the last measure should start with a staccatissimo?
odd staccatissimo in last measure of Satin Gloves (sorry for link, tried to embed as image and it refused to do so)
I tried to play it this way, and it doesn't even sound right since it interrupts the arpeggio quite abruptly. Could it be a notation error?

I read somewhere (I think it might have been in "Fundamentals of Piano Practice"?) that it was a good idea to learn from the back end forward, because it helps along the lines I mentioned. The specific feeling that I wrote about was what I was experiencing. having tried this for the first time. So I haven't invented the approach.

I just wonder if its because all the previous two octave runs ends in a staccato and this is sort of saying the same, but then carrying on. Don't really know

Now this is an interesting observation that I hadn't noticed. Yes, that would be a possibility. Does such a thing have a musicological name? I mean a "pretend" ending to a song that actually continues on? Maybe as I think you may be implying, it isn't trying to be a "pretend ending", but just to emphasize where the previous arpeggios ended. It's weird anyways. My ears are confused.

I wonder about a lot of things about this piece, Satin Gloves. First of all, it is a composition by the Piano Marvel owner. It has these staccatissimo pikes. Why staccatissimo? It's hardly dynamics for beginners like me. Why not just staccato? There are pieces using staccato before Method 3E. There are 7 arpeggios, and all get these staccatissimo pikes on the last one or two notes, except for two of them. The 2nd and the 6th. I wonder if they could be mistakes? I play it and it doesn't make any sense to my ear why two of these should be different than the others? Is this my OCD talking? Then I watch the video of the Piano Marvel owner playing the song, and he definitely doesn't play any of these particular notes staccatissimo (or at least as I understand staccatissimo from having looked it up). In fact, in the video, on his screen that appears in the video, the notes are not staccatissimo. I wonder if the staccatissimo is simply a notation error, or a programming "bug", but that seems unlike since it's too "fancy" a notation to be anything but deliberate here. Since he is the owner and piece's composer, he could have recorded himself playing this piece and then decided later it would sound better having staccatissimo pikes on some of the notes. We already see from the videos, he prefers the authentic to re-recording videos with small errors, and that could explain why he didn't re-record the video after changing the score.

I opened a personal record of 3 trouble tickets for this piece, most just asking questions about a very oddly composed piece.