Fundamentals of Piano Practice
fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io
fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io
I have stumbled across this book many times, I have read it. It's the single most controversial book that I've read about piano technique and playing that I've found.
The author, is not even a player himself (!!!). There's a great summary of reviews about the book here (https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=38247.0), if you're starting into piano, stay away, get a decent teacher.
That's not to say that he doesn't have any interesting insights, but IMO this is an entirely inappropriate book for an ab initio beginner. The value of his insights comes from another perspective on piano pedagogy, but it's an untrained one; better to learn the ropes as they're commonly understood before you seek the guy who's all about an unorthodox presentation of them.
At the bare minimum, get a teacher so you can learn how to hold your hands.
I clearly remember the first time I went through the book, being a bit shocked when I read this particular take.
"Both methods are required to play the scale but each is needed under different circumstances; TO is needed for fast, difficult passages and TU is useful for slow, legato passages, or when notes need to be held while playing other notes."
"Beginners should be taught TU first because it is needed for slow passages and takes longer to learn. The TO method should be taught as soon as faster scales are needed, within the first two years of lessons."
To belabour this point for non-pianists, the parent is describing what "thumb over" really is: a sort of physical consequence of playing a fast ascending arpeggio/scale. It isn't an alternative to "thumb under" so much as a good-faith approximation of it at speed. "Practicing" "thumb over", as in this YouTube video [0], would likely threaten the mapping of fingers to keys in a newer player. It's not wrong to acknowledge its existence, but IMO it's properly conceived of as a skill that develops as a consequence of playing normally (though quickly), not an alternative to it.
Because (and in spite of) the fact that he doesn't play piano, his observations on "thumb over" are interesting, but unless you're already aware of the true nature of "thumb over" his authoritative tone will lead you astray in terms of conceptual categorization.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLTbURVEEO4
[1] https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/chapte...
Your linked reviews spend a considerable amount of energy complaining about the author's lack of pedigree, of one sort or another...or paraphrasing things the author didn't say. Which isn't really paraphrasing, is it?
I think I've been playing piano since I was 7 too. After years away, I've been helping to teach my son. Most of the advice in the basic practice section is really, really good. Many of the techniques describe correspond quite well to what my son's (quite excellent) teacher asks him to do...and they work.
The book totally falls apart when getting into the weeds. Piano is a corporal activity after all and while yes, there's definitely "frameworks" to make learning pieces more efficient, or practicing more efficient, the author gives very bad advice when he starts crossing the threshold towards what's technical and corporal... because he just doesn't know.
It seems to me that piano is a physical activity that is impossible to teach through text, and that a good teacher is the only way. But I'd like to be wrong, or at least find some useful tips.
(This is to say nothing of interpretation and other musical matters, which seem even more impossible to transmit through writing...)
In piano (but true for a lot of sports too), when you hit a certain level, it will be more about how to make a lot of things work for your body, your hands... the way you are built. Doing that alone is possible, specially if you had a lot of instruction before. It does require a lot, a lot of intuition and a very solid foundation. It's also easier with the appropriate teacher, or mentor/s I should say.
Hopefully this helps you out a little?
I've been playing myself for like 25 years, classically trained for my whole childhood. I've always enjoyed improvisation and love jazz piano so much, but I've found it really hard to build from my very limited improv vocabulary into "serious" jazz, and I've had a hard time learning how to learn jazz, if that makes sense.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Piano-Book-Mark-Levine/dp/096147...
Basically I'd say there are 3 parts in learning improvisation: the theoretical part (which is already a complex one because there are several possible theoretical approaches to jazz improvisation), the imitation part (learn and play back existing phrases, or better complete solos from the masters), the by-ear / singing part (the toughest one that most actually don't reach, at least reliably).
Don't forget that there is definitely a large social part in jazz improvisation; I'd rate my improvisation ability as uninteresting most of the time; I can get "in the zone" accidentally by myself, but more often it's a band thing: playing with the right people often enough and long enough to get together in "the zone". Yes, that's exactly the same zone as the programming one; you're lost in the music, feeling what's coming next and what notes should be played by whom (there only comes your technical ability in the picture) without thinking about it.
In my personal case, a long practice of classical piano hampered my early capability at improvisation for a long time and I needed the crutch of theory, and to intellectualize the process. Some blessed people "ear" the right notes without needing any justification "why" they are the right ones.
When you've got a long practice of your instrument, the difficulty is to free yourself from the reassuring but useless knowledge and habits you have that bring you to play this scale or this phrase because it's "in your fingers". The best way to reach that point is to have hundreds of ready phrases in all tones "in your fingers", and then try to forget them and listen to the music. Hopefully, you'll feel what goes where, like an unrolling, animated puzzle, or a Tetris game.
Personally I've found Kent Hewitt's advice to be very useful, I think it may help a lot of people. What's great in his playing is that he keeps it very simple, but always richly melodic. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdmjw5sm9Kn83TB_rA_QBCw
Another piece of advice I can give you is to learn to recognize chords and all the different ways they're built (by stacking thirds or fourths, etc) and how they come in succession (the usual II V I VI and friends) to get a better feel of what comes here or there.
> When you've got a long practice of your instrument, the difficulty is to free yourself from the reassuring but useless knowledge and habits you have that bring you to play this scale or this phrase because it's "in your fingers". The best way to reach that point is to have hundreds of ready phrases in all tones "in your fingers", and then try to forget them and listen to the music. Hopefully, you'll feel what goes where, like an unrolling, animated puzzle, or a Tetris game.
My biggest leap in jazz so far, was to stop thinking about chord-scale relations and just focusing on chord-tones and extensions to outline the harmony of a piece, and approach notes to connect them.
I listen to a ton of jazz (nothing else but Jazz for a while). I've been transcribing Charlie Parker for a whole year, really working on his phrasing, heads, articulation, getting deep.
Disclaimer, I still think I'm terrible. My goal is to be somewhere less terrible in a couple more years... but I know I won't feel like that when I get there :D
PS: Get a great teacher, that's the biggest thing you can do to help yourself. Crazy good cats available for lessons these days.
- listen a lot to the greats and the players you love. The most common problem I see in students is them not listening to much/any jazz and expecting to be able to sound good.
- transcribe a lot, solos you love but dont know what they're doing. Solos on any instrument. Then play them. (If you can play them without transcribing them, great.)
Claims to be very RSI resistant and healthy ?
In a nutshell, there is the concept of single rotation and double rotation. When finger-to-finger movement is in one direction, like 1,2,3, you use double rotations. When going from 3 to 1, a single rotation. The movements are highly exaggerated for learning and demonstration.
I think it's easy to get hung up on "how can I play piano if I'm rotating my hand all over the place?" In my opinion, a large part of learning rotation and how to use it for slow practice on difficult passages is about freeing your arm and hand so they are not unintentionally opposing movement. Playing with tension or unintentional opposition, especially if you play hours a day, is one way to get RSI (tendonitis).
Here are some excellent YT resources for piano I have bookmarked. Several of these have videos that talk about forearm rotation:
https://www.youtube.com/user/cedarvillemusic
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3vYz1SAtcbRhsatydObGQw
https://www.youtube.com/user/PianistMagazine (Graham Fitch)
https://www.youtube.com/user/SteveMass1101
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr0BMA5yu3AS0alkR7kYwEQ
https://www.youtube.com/user/aw4piano
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLsMRd097KLJMvkNzC4rYAA
https://www.youtube.com/c/DanielBarenboim/videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6tpkZhNpJiTnlUgoiUe9QQGood luck :)
I would also second that advice too! My wife taught her some basics but we got a private teacher for her about a year ago, that has supercharged her ability.
She does a 40 minute lesson once a week. The teacher writes notes on what she is to practice and learn. She practices her work for about an hour a day, and spends maybe another 30 minutes figuring out songs she likes (the Harry Potter theme is her current interest).
I would recommend doing the same to anyone else, a private teacher is the way to go.
As a side note, she didn't just start from zero, we've had her in some form of music and rhythm class since she was 9 months old. She has a good ear for music, timing and instruction, to the point where she used to surprise other parents/teachers with how attentive she was.
Also I make sure to have the classical radio on every morning and evening to further train her ear ;)
That's really cool, could you elaborate?
I'm not even a physicist but I cannot help but to see non linear interpolated curves and surfaces when I hear music. (curvature being somehow related to dissonance).
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx_kugSemfY
And tuning is all about 'numerical puns', similar to how eg 2^10 ~ 10^3, but for perfect fifths and octaves etc.
Of course, our physiology and culture is a bit too complicated and convoluted to understand everything about music from first principles like this. So most of the time you are better off learning (and treating) music as music instead of as applied math or physics.
> In summary, the process of learning this genre consists of practicing the chords and scales sufficiently so that, given a melody, you can “feel” the right and wrong chords that go along with it.
That's only scratching the surface and will not get you playing jazz. Listening to and copying the greats - Bird, Monk, Evans, Coltrane, Rollins, et al. That's how you learn to play jazz.
>It is clear that this genre is here to stay, has great educational and practical value, is relatively easy to learn, and can be a lot of fun.
Relatively easy to learn??? Clearly the author hasn't or isn't playing jazz.
The author might be super talented compared to you. He might find easy what you call difficult, or his definition of easy is different to ours.
Might~
I read it a couple years ago and it completely changed how I approach practicing.
It fits with the current zeitgeist, where clickbait is everywhere, even in respected newspapers.
- Do not try to practice the whole piece at once. Split it into pieces
- Start by listening to the piece. If possible get multiple performances/recordings (usually easy with YouTube) to get a feel for different interpretations.
- Take the piece and number each measure from 1 to finish. Figure out where the repetitions are, which measures are the easiest, which the hardest (this will differ for left and right hand usually), where key/timing changes happen
- Practice both hands separately, start with a single measure that is one of the hardest (if need be you can split it up even more). Overlap the measures slightly so that you also practice the transitions. Play as slowly as you need to so that you can play expressively from the very beginning (albeit with only one hand). As you learn the measure, increase speed, but only so much that you can still play expressively. Switch hands once your hand gets tired.
- Since one hand (usually the left hand) is often much easier to play in many measures or even entire pieces, it will get much less practice. To offset this, make sure to also practice the hardest measure for each hand first. Sometimes you might even need to practice the left hand from a different piece (if the current piece only has easy stuff), while the right hand is resting.
- Keep practicing all the measures in the piece in this fashion (with one hand) until you can play them expressively even at higher speeds than the piece is usually played at.
- Now is the time to put the hands together. Use the same method of practice as described above (splitting up the piece into overlapping measures, starting with the hardest one), only this time use both hands.
There are other nuggets of wisdom in the book, for example:
- How to properly practice playing chords
- Very fast notes played in succession are really just "imperfectly played chords", where your hand is already in the position of playing the chord, except one or more fingers are slightly lower than the others as your hand goes down. Thinking of it this way, you're not trying to speed up individual notes, but "slow down" a chord.
This summary omits one of the major themes of the book. Granted, the discussion of speed is quite nuanced. See 1.II.13: https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/chapte...
One relevant excerpt, though large chunks of the book are dedicated to this topic:
> To vary the speed, first get up to some manageable “maximum speed” at which you can play accurately. Then go faster (using parallel sets, etc., if necessary), and take note of how the playing needs to be changed (don’t worry if you are not playing accurately at this point because you are not repeating it many times). Then use that motion and play at the previous “maximum accurate speed”. It should now be noticeably easier. Practice at this speed for a while, then try slower speeds to make sure that you are completely relaxed and absolutely accurate. Then repeat the whole procedure. In this way, you ratchet up the speed in manageable jumps and work on each needed skill separately.
This has been my biggest ever piano hack. I now practice bar-by-bar and don't move on until I'm happy, and its taken my practice to a whole new level
The end result is a book that is useful, but that could do with some serious editing by an advanced pianist or at least someone more knowledgeable about various piano teaching practices.
What's the alternative approach? Repeatedly play the entire song making mistakes at the crux, but insisting on playing the easy parts and pushing through the difficult ones?
This deliberate one-measure-until-it’s-perfect isn’t something many folks learn on their own.
But man, this is life in general. Difficult math? Solving a bunch of arithmetic won’t help you with laplace transforms or difficult integrals. You need to practice the hard problems to get better at the hard things.
However, it seems like it would be a motivation killer. I'd have thought there was more emotional value in getting through the whole piece, to hear each part in context, to "follow the story".
Can you talk about this method's interaction with your motivation? Would it suit an absolute beginner?
(I'm commenting from my imagination rather than experience. I almost always rely on a sequencer to play for me ;-) )
Listening to the piece first is always helpful, but be careful not to become overly dependent on learning by ear - it can cripple your sight reading in the long run. Same goes for separate hand practice. While both of these can speed up your progress early on, becoming a good sight reader pays dividends later on.
I bought a ton of books in this series and started spending time every day playing them:
https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Evans-Jazz-Piano-Solos/dp/145840...
I'm classically trained but really enjoy playing these. They're hard enough to be challenging yet not something you have to practice for months like many classical pieces. An especially good thing for sight reading is that instead of lots of fast passages like in a lot of classical music, there are lots of chords where you have to read and play 8 notes on a beat. With time (I did this for about a year), you start reading entire chords by sight rather than individual notes.
Working to get better at sight reading makes learning new music much more enjoyable. You could probably do it by reading a lot of classical music below your playing level too, but for me, the jazz stuff is a nice break and something different.
My teacher was forever nagging me to "play what's written, not my interpretation of it". She'd also tell me to "go home and practice the actual lesson", boring Czerny scales or such, "...and not muck around and waste time playing songbook stuff that I liked the sound of".
I downloaded the book a long time ago as a PDF from somewhere. It also included this sentence and it stuck out to me because it was so weird. The rest of the tone of the book felt in the same style to me so I never second guessed it, but you might be correct.
"This is the best book ever written on how to practice at the piano! The revelation of this book is that there are highly efficient practice methods that can accelerate your learning rate, by up to 1,000 times if you have not yet learned the most efficient practice methods (see IV.5). What is surprising is that, although these methods were known since the earliest days of piano, they were seldom taught because only a few teachers knew about them and these knowledgeable teachers never bothered to disseminate this knowledge. "
I read
> This is the best book ever written on how to practice at the piano!
> This is a work in progress, some sections have not been copied over, there are probably a few formatting errors/inconsistencies, and generally nuttiness. Please ignore or contribute patches on GitHub.
> This is Sphinx adaptation of Chaun C. Chang’s excellent book, Fundamentals of Piano Practice.
By finger numbering I mean the standard scheme where thumb=1, index=2, ..., pinky=5, and the notes on the sheet music have these numbers.
This is the biggest mystery to me. I understand there is not a One True Canonical Fingering for a given sequence of notes. But some fingerings make the music much easier than others.
Wish some HN coder genius would write a program that given sheet music as input, outputs the top 1-3 recommended fingerings for that music with explanations for which rules were applied.
How do highly-skilled pianist come up with fingering? Are there any kind of rules? I think there are. But it may be so automatic that they don't actively think about them.
On the other hand, if we have a large quantity of high-quality sheets with fingering labeled, we can train a transformer which is supposed to learn the implicit rules pretty well.
Practicing includes the identification of the fingerings that can work for you. I don't think AI will ever get you all the way there. Sure, you can put in some beginning rules like don't cross your thumb under from a white key to a black key, but there's always going to be a fingering that is ideal for one pianist that won't work for another.
For casual adult playing though, I'd never reach" high level" playing. All I want is to play easy songs I like (I'm sure there are plenty of people like me), for which I think an automatic algorithm is pretty likely to work.
Even for the simplest music, say a C major triad chord in the right hand - C-E-G - you could play it 1-3-5, 1-2-4, 1-2-3, 2-3-5 etc. I have big hands, so 1-3-5 feels the least comfortable of those, although it may be the 'automatic' choice. I agree with what others have said, that learning scales and arpeggios teaches you almost all you need to know about sensible fingerings on piano, and then having fingering pre-written on any music is entirely unnecessary. Books of scales and arpeggios have fingering written in, which you should learn.
I often feel that the fingering I come up with myself as a beginner is suboptimal. What I usually do is to watch youtube videos repeatedly to study what experts do. And that really helps me correct some bad adhoc fingering. I'm sure it's an experience thing - I can totally understand why experts would consider fingering on a sheet as useless. But for beginners it can make a huge difference. You probably don't care about beginners. But that is a huge market with strong needs unsatisfied (besides auto-fingering, auto-transcription of popular songs is another one).
My second paragraph was about beginners and what seems to me their best course, not sure why you say that. (TAB for guitarist beginners similarly "can make a huge difference" I'm sure, but also it keeps you a beginner.) It seems you ignored what I said about scales and arpeggios. I wrote my previous comment because it seemed you similarly ignored what the person you replied to said before. But sure, whatever works for you. Good luck!
I care absolutely nothing about piano basics. I have a busy full-time job and tons of side projects so I have absolutely no patience for learning boring basics. I paid hundreds of buck for piano lessons in college but I ended up going to only two lessons (again - busy!). Yeah I know it would possibly develop bad habits, but as long as I can play pieces I like, why would I care? I just want the thing that would satisfy my short-term needs. I know that spending some time training my basics would make me a better player, but this boringness is going to let me give up on piano entirely.
Again, no offense intended - just trying to describe a unique persona. So no need to educate me on practicing the basics - I have had enough of those from many people...
If you're learning on your own as an adult, I highly recommend "Alfred's Basic Piano Course" book 1. You start from the very start, and by the end of the book, you'll be able to sight read
Anyway, I labeled all the keys on my machine. C-D-G-F-G-A
I memorized C for chopsticks. (C will always be the white key to the left of the two black keys.)
I memorized F for Fork. (F will always be to left of three black keys.)
I then found a song I liked on Google with chords.
I picked a Ronny Millsap song, and played it over, and over again.
Am I any good--hell no, but keeping piano/guitar simple helped me.
Eddie Van Halen saw that his son was having a very hard time learning to play bass guitar. Wolfe told his father their are just too many chords. Eddie gave him some great fatherly advice.
"You don't need to learn all the chords. 11 chords will allow you to play a lot of songs."
A lot of Country, and rock, songs only have a few chords.
To answer you... I don't come up with fingering. I just do what my hands do. The fingerings in printed music are guidelines for pedagogy.
Honestly I'm not even sure I explicitly practice fingering. It's just repetition. I frequently think I change it though.
That being said as someone whos played so long it's like an extension of my arm, don't take my word for it. Experts are notoriously bad at explaining their techniques. I do think it's just practice though. No secret
That is, unfortunately for someone trying to learn, the entire goal of learning to play piano in a way. To turn the entire process from looking at a sheet (or hearing it in your head) to sounds happening to become essentially instinct.
The best way to do this is repetition. This is what scales and arpeggios and excercises are for. By internalizing the scales you build up what feels correct, based on your hands, the length of your fingers, the different strengths and weaknesses of every single joint and bone and muscle and tendon. You have to use the repetition to find out what each transition and different motions feel like, and interpolate that to what's in front of you.
While I am NOT claiming to be "some coder genius", a program that does exactly this is something on my "projects to-do" list. My partner (who's improving her piano skills) keeps crying out for more sheet music with fingerings...
Is there already a canonical set of rules to apply? My approach is to find fingerings through a sort of beam search, using a utility function for how hard it is to move between points in a 10 dimensional "finger space".
I'm sure this approach is Probably Wrong or at least Overkill, but it's the most mathematically interesting way... :)
I like the way you think. thumbs up
My personal interest was more along the lines of acquiring statistical data from expert play. I'm supremely interested in this problem from a mathematical standpoint, but the data-set did not exist and I shelved the project as I'm a novice player.
I don't think the data-set would be very hard or very expensive to construct, given several experts and a program to generate note sequences. One could also sample from a large population of players, but then you have the bootstrap problem of attracting them before you offer enough value.
There are some very promising pathways for this developing if you're interested in the statistical approach. In any case I'd love to keep up with your project if you continue on.
It is one reason why instrumentalists spend so much time practicing things like scales and arpeggios. Because in practice 90% of music is made of these or small variations on them, so once these are "muscle memory" you truly don't think about fingerings any more.
When I took classical piano lessons, each week we'd have a new key assignment and we'd have to practice scales, chords, and arpeggios in that key.
My piano teacher hand crafted a very nice sheet that listed all scale and arpeggio fingering for all keys, but that is buried somewhere in storage. This website [1] seems to have the same info.
You must first access the corpus of data on fingerings. AFAICT that is an oral history passed among piano teachers.
Even then, you must account for how different fingering approaches quantize to various tempo changes. E.g., there's a tempo beyond which I can start throwing my thumb (well, my arm) past my pinky in the development section of the last movement of Beethoven's Appassionata sonata. Below that tempo the fingering is basically nonsense.
You could probably put together some basic set of rules for recommended amateur fingerings. Even there, I think the quantization to tempo is sufficiently complicated that you'd risk creating something like an ML algo that merely improves at persuasively rationalizing arbitrary fingerings.
Edit: I just looked back at the passage and it's actually throwing my index finger past my ring finger. Funny enough, I tried the same passage throwing my thumb past my pinky-- it works fairly well at a fast enough tempo and is awkward and error prone if played too slowly. In either case, the same logic applies.
I'll also add my anecdata to the parent's thoughts on quantization of fingerings to tempos. I like ragtime, and I've grown to notice that playing it properly (that is, slowly, as Joplin is always going on about in the margins) often requires what is essentially more difficult fingering than that which is required to play it quickly (that is, the !!FUN!! way). Someone in another subthread mentioned having to physically model the arm and hand. I think that's essentially correct.
>You must first access the corpus of data on fingerings. AFAICT that is an oral history passed among piano teachers.
At the risk of a vague digression, I'd also like to point out the difficulty the parent had in extracting exactly what their hand was doing outside of the context of "sitting in front of a piano, playing the notes in question". The whole point of fingerings being added to a difficult section -- whether by the publisher or the performer -- is to aid the speedy automatization of that difficult section, with the aim of converting it into an uncontroversially straightforward section, like those in the rest of the piece that don't need fingerings. The best piano teacher I ever had, when working out fingerings for a difficult unlabelled section, would play it slowly a few times while looking at, and thinking about, her finger position. Then, she'd try to play it at as close to full speed as she could, and observe what her hand was doing. That is, leverage the automatization that fingerings are supposed to supplement. It's not just piano teacher oral histories one should ought to digitize, it's also piano teacher premotor cortices!
I hope the internet won't become flooded with sheet music that has bad auto-generated fingering, because it's something that you really trust. If I encounter some strange fingering I trust that the composer knew something that I don't that I maybe should work hard to apply to my own technique, obviously this will damage your technique if it's nonsensical.
It seems all the more illogical as very similar patterns occur in bar 2, 6, and 10, and the thumb is used every time there.
(Not a pianist myself)
I grew up with a piano in the house, have had sheet music for loads of instruments (played sax, piano, guitar, family had trumpet/clarinet/misc in house too). Have taken music theory classes, performed in bands in middle/high schools and college.
I've never seen sheet music have 'fingering' info ever.
Can someone point me to examples of what is being referred to here?
Image search returns some examples: https://ddg.gg/?q=piano+sheet+music+fingering&ia=images&iax=...
Classical guitar sheet music often has markings for fingering. See the first example on this page. http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.21/Documentation/snippets/fretted...
I’d contend finger numbering is more about learning the notes of a piece easily for beginners rather than about actual fingering.
A problem may be that once fingering becomes intuitive, then there's no incentive to write it down, and you might not even be able to articulate why you chose a particular finger.
I only think about it when I'm trying to work out a difficult passage, and then I'm usually thinking of intervals and shifts that afford me the best chance of playing in tune. Fortunately that's not an issue on the piano, but the idea of finding an ergonomic and less mistake-prone fingering is probably a similarity.
On the other hand you might be surprised at how little it might cost to have a pianist or piano student number some music for you. At least on cello and bass music, when material has fingerings, they only need to indicate the ones that are non-obvious.
An optimal fingering for n notes played one at a time by an F fingered hand can be found in nF^2 time, or I believe n(F^F)^2 if you allow F note chords. "Optimal" in the sense of minimizing a cost function defined in terms of state transitions: c(t, f, t', f') is the cost of playing note t with finger f, followed by note t' with finger f'. E.g. c(a3, 1, b3, 2) < c(a3, 1, b3, 5) because it's unpleasant to scrunch your pinky (5) that close to your thumb. (Notably, t/t' do not mean t_i and t_j, two notes in the piece.) There are papers quantifying such cost functions, apparently.
Side rant -
Having grown up on violin, but learning piano as an adult, (and as a programmer), it kills me to index fingers from 1 (thumb) to 5 (pinky). Violin doesn't use the thumb, so the pointer to pinky are 1->4! Worse, as a Suzuki violinist, I hear (to some approximation) the number of the finger I'm thinking about while playing. Worse yet, I read bass by "adding two" notes to treble, so I get a nice off-by-two to think about with my off-by-one.
I should, uh, probably get a teacher.
That said, many fingering choices are practical and dictated by the geography of the keyboard and the oddities of our hand anatomy. Armed with a knowledge of the fingering of all of the major and minor scales, the patterns and paradigms encountered in actual compositions become clearer. I recommend MacFarren's scale book but there are others. Beyond pattern recognition and an attempt to understand the musical intent, there's just trial and error. When approaching a new work, I'll spend quite a bit of time trying options in ambiguous passages. It's time well-spent. Pro-tip: don't write in every single finger number. It creates too much visual distraction on the page. Write in only when there's an inflection point. If you have a descending passage in the RH that is 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1, let's say, just write the 5...1-3 or possibly just 5...3. String players are the absolute best at this concept, only annotating finger numbers when there's a shift of position or an odd extension.
True. For any given passage, there are at least two different One True Canonical Fingerings, and no matter what you do you will be Wrong and criticized without mercy for your ridiculous incompetence.
If you look ahead a bit at a line of music, you can sort of anticipate how many fingers you'll need in the direction you're going and that helps plan which ones to use. But as others have said, knowing how to play scales contributes a lot to your planning skills.
I also really enjoy the tone of this book. I think the author might actually be manic. I can't find it now in this online version, but in my decade old printed edition I remember in one of the sections he describes a problem his book might cause in the world where by teaching people to tune their own pianos so well, you might be concerned that it would lead to putting piano tuners out of business. He then insists you should not worry about this imagined problem because his piano teaching method is so great, that there will be orders of magnitude more piano students thanks to his book, which would lead to ever higher job security for piano tuners/technicians as not every student will have the time or interest to actually tune their pianos, despite now knowing how to do so very well thanks to this book.
Amazing stuff.
While writing it, I discovered that piano pedagogy had never been researched, documented, and analyzed properly
is totally wrong. There's a Piano Pedagogy group just in the Bay Area, and lots of books on it.
I was an Adult Beginner, which is sorta a Thing. My teacher had about 12 adult students, and we had separate recitals from the kids. The hidden reason for this is, you don't want to hear some 9-year-old kid who plays better than you ever will.
Almost all of the other adults had played as a child and given it up. Many teachers won't take adults like me because they have unrealistic ideas about how good they're going to be. The truth is, you are not going to be very good, and lots of people who are orders of magnitude better than you can't make any real money playing piano, because that level of skill is so common.
The interesting thing about how our brains work is: I could memorize effortlessly, but I couldn't sight read worth shit. There are other people who are the exact opposite.
Lastly, one thing they said really resonated with me:
The first thing that must be done is to eliminate the habits of stopping and backtracking (stuttering), at every mistake. The best time to develop the skill of not stopping at every mistake is when you begin your first piano lessons.
OMG, in the recitals there was one lady who just had to play every note correctly, no matter how many times she had to try. She stopped at every mistake and "corrected" it, until you wanted to scream at her.
This isn't so much of a problem if your intention is not playing professionally. Learning easy and intermediate pieces is a lot of fun. Also making your own music using a MIDI keyboard and a DAW.
None of the above refute the parent's statement. They author is aware there are such things as piano pedagody groups and books. Key word here is "properly" (which might be accurate or not, but that's what should be refuted).
At least in the family of brass instruments, I am fairly confident that they're largely still living in the dark ages and often don't understand fundamentally how the instrument is even played, at least from a scientific/physical perspective, so good luck if you end up with a teacher/professor who expects you to play one way when in reality you'd probably be much better off playing another way. This happened to me early on and I eventually learned that there has in fact been some pretty good research and documentation into brass technique but it's pretty niche and lots of music professors pretty much entirely disregard it because of the above point about it being a very conservative field. Donald Reinhardt is kind of the one who kicked off a lot of that movement but there's a number of people who have been carrying on that work.
If a similar thing has been happening in the piano field I wouldn't be at all surprised (although I do think that the brass field is particularly ripe for things to go rotten in this way just because the brass embouchure is particularly complicated and also hard to observe).
So I got one for cheap, and took a couple lessons from him. Damn, that thing is hard!
He played at LucasFilm for a couple weeks, to build their library of sounds. He said for that one week, he made more money than his son in high tech.
The one thing about piano teaching, similar to dog training, playing golf, and so many other areas, is:
Every teacher thinks every other teacher is full of it.
But I'm still having so much fun!! Playing simple piano pieces or fooling around with synth or arranger or playing with my kids etc. Piano has such a low barrier of entry to just tinkle around, and such phenomenal keyboards can be had for so little money used if you research a bit, I feel totally spoiled :-). There's YouTube videos and online lessons and awesome books for any style.
My one tip to adult learners - understand that music theory is not the same as learning to play is not the same as learning music notation / sight reading. Traditional music teachers with captive audience of 10 year olds whose parents force them to attend, start with notes reading which has no pay off for unbelievable amount of time. As a busy motivated adult there's no shame and lots of advantages to first learn your way around the instrument and a few songs or improv, even some good theory, before conittibg yourself to grind and learn by rote of music notation. It is NOT intuitive and you won't benefit from it immediately. Especially as piano has different clef for left and right hand... Mostly Because grouchy 18th century old Austrian white males hate you! :-D
I started lessons in my early 30s, (although had a strong background in music before). Never had an interest in performing.
I view it like going to the gym. I don't lift weights to win some sort of weightlifting competition. So similarly I view playing piano as exercise for my mind, particularly areas which don't get as much of a workout programming and whatnot.
And while I do go to recitals where kids 25 years younger than me play harder pieces, I bet I can program a lot better than they can (probably) :)
>It is NOT intuitive and you won't benefit from it immediately.
What? How do you hope to play anything other than basic melodies if you can't read music? You'd have to develop your ear, which is much harder than learning to read music x)
> Especially as piano has different clef for left and right hand... Mostly Because grouchy 18th century old Austrian white males hate you! :-D
It's because the grand staff is centered around middle C.
I play several instruments but can only read music for piano. Guitar, banjo, and harmonica I play entirely by ear or sometimes with some tablature to get started.
Imagine you're 40 years old and you've never played an instrument. You have limited ambition - you want to have fun and play a little bit around campfire. How do you start, let's say on a guitar:
1. I show you G, C, D chords and print out a simple, easily understandable chart you can take home. You now can play hundreds of songs after 30 min lesson and a few mins of practice. You can spend time playing around and slowly learning rhythm, strumming techniques and patterns, while singing to your songs and getting a feel for your instrument. A week or three later I show you E-minor and now you can play virtually every pop song made in last 20 years. [1] If you get excited and interested, we throw in Aminor, and eventually F Major and now you know power chords and you're the master of it all. You're having fun, you're playing, you're improving, and you're having FUN. You can focus on good techniques and sounding good. When and if you want more, we can learn basic music theory and pentatonic patterns, and then one day if you're serious and ready for some pain, you can learn some staff notation.
Or!
2. I give you some books and tell you to learn notes. You download an app or six to enable you to mindlessly practices notes every day. You spend months studying by rote and can maybe play Twinkle Twinkle Little star, poorly. But it's academic because you gave up a long time before you got there as there was no FUN to be had and you have children and work and household chores and this is a poor investment of your precious, precious time.
>>How do you hope to play anything other than basic melodies if you can't read music?
I mean, it's 2021. Look around. We are SPOILED for choices when it comes to learning! There's pianote and flowkey and casio lk line and songsterr and YouTube and tablature and karaoke apps and anything and everything. It's wonderful and we should embrace that every person can learn differently and enjoy themselves! :)
FWIW, I've played Amelie on piano, Green Onions on organ, I want to Break free on synth and made some small synthwave songs entirely from scratch without reading music (but with thorough understanding of what I was playing - keys and changes and transitions and inversions) . I've recorded a cover version of White room including Rhythm and Solo, and now play bass in a 3 piece band, for fun, without needing to read music. Yes I've learned it eventually, but frankly as a 43 year old it's brought no benefit yet in the two years since I've done so.
YES if you are a pro dedicated musician interacting with others you must learn it. But I think a lot of old-school musicians forget or don't want to understand what it's like to be a casual adult player who just wants to have some fun and jam. Empathy is lacking. Just because previous generation went through some enforced painful rite of passage, doesn't mean everybody has to - let's have an actual discussion on specific customized learning path that benefits each person's goals and constraints.
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Second point, I firmly believe, especially for Hacker-News audience, is that learning staff notation too early is counter-productive. It gives enormous undeserved privilege and primacy to C major and it prevents you from making crucial connections early on. In Western 12 note equal temperament, there are 12 notes. That's it, 12 notes, repeating. You can start wherever you want and it's the same. You don't care if you start from C or Bb. There are patterns and intervals and triads and chords and things that sound good that are completely relative and you can learn SO much without staff notation messing you up. Then you do learn staff notation, and you realize it's always lying to you. The spaces on staff notation are not representative to anything in the real world. Between E and F there's one semitone; but between F and G there are two semitones, even though they are the same spacing on the staff. And if you move from the safety of C major to anything else, you are SCREEEEEWED as na adult student wanting to have fun. Notation stops any pretense of sense logic and patterns and it's a quagmire of flats and sharps you're supposed to remember as you painfully make your way through. It takes something beautiful, built on relative patterns, and jams that lovely circle into jagged square hole that's on fire. Yes, eventually, you need to learn the same stupid crippling language everybody else uses, but that's not in any way to say that the language is beautiful or practical or helpful. It's just the notation we're stuck in Western music.
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I think most importantly, a lot of people completely conflate "music theory" with "staff notation".
I've spent a long time reading "Music Theory books" which just want to teach you staff notation, which has zero explanatory powers (and I firmly believe has negative initial explanatory value). Finally, I came upon on this [2] book, which starts with "If you want to learn staff notation, awesome; we have a sibling book for that; but this is a book on music theory which is independent on any specific notation system". I read that book and every page was revelation and insight and made me a better player. Modern motivated geeky interested enthusiastic adults don't have to be stuck in the method that our grandparents taught captive 10 year olds.
I dunno, maybe it'll blow your mind, maybe you cannot see it, but I could discuss dominant 7th and minor harmonics and modes and pentatonics and intervals and triads and augmented & diminished and all that good, meaty, fun, fascinating, geeky stuff with my instructor without needing or referencing staff notation at all.
>>It's because the grand staff is centered around middle C.
That explains precisely nothing. It's not even circular, it's a rote memorized factoid thrown out instead of explanation that can be understood and discussed. The bass and treble are off by two. Two!!! If you truly cannot see that for a student, let alone for anybody, it would've been better if Piano staffs were same notes but one or two straight octaves apart, I feel you're not making an effort to see it from anybody else's eyes. My challenge is to find a practical, discussable reason two hands on same piano are off by two notes on staff that has inherent value and cannot be trivially reduced to "because 18th century grouchy Austrians said so" :)
>>It's by far one of the easiest parts of learning to play an instrument.
Well that's just wrong, but we can agree to STROOOONGLY disagree on this one :P
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ
2: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/1986061833/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_...
I'd like to add that in 2021 learning writing and reading is counter-productive. Text-to speech and vice versa software is widely available, and spelling rules for English require a ridiculous effort for little benefit except backwards compatibility with legacy books. As an adult learner you are SCREEEEWED even trying to figure out how to pronounce the things written above.
More to the point though, Kids ARE taught speech FIRST (as is my point with an instrument)! They in fact DO learn complex sentences and language patterns and communication way way before we teach them writing. We are not even contemplating teaching 1 year olds writing before we teach them language. So you are 100% making my point for me :).
Similarly in languages, I once went through 2 years of learning foreign language by rote memorization of tenses and rules and declensions and it was awful (this was not in North America) . Got nobody in the class anywhere. 10 A-plus students couldn't make a conversational sentence after 2 years. Much more success is accomplished by teaching people here to speak and understand language first.
And again to address different part of your comment and my point: I claim staff notation for people who WANT to understand patterns and theory In music can be counterproductive. Get the feel for relativity of keys first, before we smash C major up your throat. Alphabets by and large aren't that counterproductive, so it's a bit of a false comparison on that level too, though we can have a good discussion of phonetic alphabets vs whatever the heck English has. Staff notation is not inherently logical and representative of patterns in 12 note equal temperament. It's just an archaic system we are stuck in though others have been proposed. It's qwerty! :)
Through all of this tough, I don't see an actual counter argument - this seems to always get people riled up and upset, But why SHOULD an adult wanting to strum or jam and have some fun, be taught staff notation FIRST? What goal does it accomplish, why is that a beneficial order of operation, other than "that's how I was taught"? Let's have a charitable, productive honest discussion :)
Your language course sounds really odd to me and I'm not sure if I should believe it actually happened.
I don't really get why you are so hung up with C major. Sure, if you play piano the first few pieces are probably in C major unless one of them is Chopsticks but the method books that I have seen have all exercises in different keys almost from the beginning.
- (Yes, I wrote that by myself though that's a strange question to ask :)
- Yes that course was real. Two years of Latin, 1995, Prva Susacka Gimnazija u Rijeci. You can wake me up at 2 am and I can recite "Terra Terrae Terrae Terram Terra Terrae Terrarum Terris Terras Terris" in about 6 seconds (just measured:). And that's literally what our exams were for two years - conjugate this verb; recite declension of this noun; give me a list of propositions; at no point did we actually learn to speak it conversationally, or tested on reading comprehension or speaking skills. Extreme example but it exists!
Now let's see if we can productively engage on same topic together:
- I am not talking about "reading or writing" or "music theory" or "Communicating with other musicians in general". I am making claims very specifically about western music staff notation, being taught first or early, for casually interested potential musicians. Not that "communicating music is unimportant" or "professional musician doesn't need staff notation"
As such my claim specifically is:
- Staff notation is provably and demonstrably not necessary, and I claim not helpful, to either start learning an instrument or communicate with other musicians or learn advanced music theory; and further, a lot of fairly advanced fun can be had with music without learning staff notation.
That's it, that's my claim.
We need to arrive at better understanding of where we disagree. A LOT of very good musicians mentally, subconsciously do not distinguish between "Music theory" and "Staff notation". I am NOT claiming Music Theory is not helpful - I am enjoying it tremendously. Understanding what you're playing and how and why is great! But staff notation is completely lateral to learning Music Theory, as I mentioned above but may get missed.
Some examples that may help see where I'm coming from - You do NOT need Staff notation to:
- Tell your bandmate "hey, can you try doing a riff in E major pentatonic?"
- Understand keys, triads, chords, inversions, intervals, etc; or communicate them
- Learn a chord progression of a song
- Learn a solo, learn to improvise, learn to arrange
.... Whopsie, Sorry, kids are waking up from their nap, I'll write more in couple of hours, I'd be eager to continue this conversation, whether here or on Hangouts/Gmail/Whatsapp/Whatever :). But my central point here is - staff notation is perceived by some as necessary to a) learn music theory b) play an instrument c) communicate musical concepts, and today in 2021 there are plentiful counter examples to that, beyond theoretical discussion :)
Exhibit A: Paul McCartney, who's produced some of the most timeless music ever written, and can't read music.
Exhibit Others: it's too early in the morning for me to think of those. Give me some time.
However, everyone who plays on the studio session to record your composed-by-ear masterpiece for the CD will be an excellent sight reader. Guaranteed. They wouldn't have gotten the gig if they weren't.
"Staff notation" is pretty damn flexible, as you'll learn if you try to write a program to produce it as well as music publishers have done for centuries. You already said it's a way to communicate with other musicians, but I'd just add that oftentimes in popular music, that communication is just a score with a tempo and bar lines marked off, with chords and rests in the bars -- no individual notes.
Furthermore, there's immense room for interpretation: if the chord is G7#13, an experienced player will laugh and say to himself "ok, so that's just an altered seventh, and by the way, I always add a ninth to a seventh chord."
Interesting. My high school German classes involved repeating "an, auf, hinter, in, neben, über, unter, vor, zwischen" until everyone remembers it and that didn't really mean that there wouldn't have been conversation practice. Maybe it's the Latin language, I have heard similar stories from others too.
I guess it's possible to learn music theory without staff notation if you really try to do so, but to me it sounds just incredibly stubborn to not make the connection between the notes and the lines that dots are drawn on. The connection between the sounds and the letters is much more arbitrary than the connection to dots on lines and you don't seem to have problem with it. If anything, the note that's either H or B depending the culture is written the same way on staff everywhere. And if you're afraid of C major, you're not really getting away from accidentals by just using letters instead of staff notation.
Edit:
> Staff notation is not inherently logical and representative of patterns in 12 note equal temperament. It's just an archaic system we are stuck in though others have been proposed
Most music in European tradition is written in diatonic, not chromatic scales, and while equal temperament is common, it's not all there is. The staff notation with key signatures is just too handy for writing down diatonic music to ignore. Of course it's not a perfect fit for other tuning systems but from "let's play the riff in E minor pentatonic" I'd guess you're not thinking about going atonal or outside 12-tone system either.
I had a college instrumental performance professor yell at me to "sit still" because this was happening all the time at our weekly recital hour, it was driving me crazy, and I would jerk, or shake my head or hang it, or facepalm, or clench my fists.
They were right to call me out because I was being rude and I toned down my reactions after that, but... ugh. I hate that the professors tolerated that — it was such a disservice to their students.
Just think "poker face."
They want you to blow through glitches without drawing attention to them or even thinking about them, because that's how you bring them along in a shared, spellbinding experience.
You would think you could play at rehearsals for a community theater group. Those are really low budget organizations and a lot of the staff doesn't even get paid. The rehearsal pianist got paid $50 for the entire show.
Even that guy is way better than most of us will ever be.
A surprise I had is that 9 yo is an advanced age in musical spheres. There’s international young pianist competitions won by 10~11 year olds. They are usually bound to become pro players, so not the average kid in your local music school, but it’s a good frame of mind for thinking about how good a 10 yo can be.
oh man, that is frustrating! Somebody once said that a good musician will make their mistakes sound musical. Thinking that you must stop to correct a mistake is a fundamental misunderstanding about how music is perceived. I don't blame her though, I was once like this too. I think this is the default behavior for many adult beginners especially.
I live in Italy, here there are two kind of musicians: 1) conservatory majors, with really really strong "fundamentals" but none to zero improvisation skills 2) other people who followed a learning path of anglo-saxon derivation, usually they have some degree of play-by-ear and improvisation skills but they show a severe lack on fundamentals skills. By "fundamentals" I mean sight reading (meant as sight reading on first sight, everyone can read with enough time), ability to sing what you want to play in tune before playing it, strong inner sense of time and subdivision, knowledge of theory and harmony. Side note: if you ever see musicians perform in Italy (maybe this applies to other European countries like Germany and France too) there is a very easy way to recognize if they have a classical / conservatory background: look at their feet. If they tap a foot there is a very strong chance they have no classical background as it is seen as the kind of baby wheels thing that prevents solfege from developing a strong inner sense of time.
Back on topic: as you can see there are these big two big subsets of music learning. What I'm doing is simply mix them: I study sight reading and solfege (trying to sing in tune) but at the same time I spend time transcribing by ear and following improvisation methods. There are some very strong sinergies in this: the ability to sing (in tune, not mumbling it) makes transcribing orders of magnitude easier. Same applies to knowledge of harmonic motions. Doing progressive reading exercises vastly improved my ability to play and understand odd rhythmic patterns to the point I can actually sense the lack of precision they have when I play in a garage band with my friends (not professional musicians but they have been playing for more than 20 years).
To make an even simpler example: I can play without looking at my guitar, a lot of people can't. This feel a lot like seeing people unable to type on a computer keyboard without looking at it.
On stage in choruses, I would do it, but only inside my shoes (with my toe) so no one could see it. I see nothing wrong with it, but then, I didn't go to conservatory.
I never sang in a gospel choir, but I would hope that in those, it's not only permitted, it's encouraged. Along with swinging your arms & your head, and bobbing up and down.
>(...) Mental Play (...) It is almost unbelievable that such an essential skill has been mostly neglected by piano teachers.
which is a top "crank red flag".
> The probability of playing incorrectly is nearly 100%, because there is almost an infinity of ways to play incorrectly but only one best way.
I'm sure this book has some useful information within, but my 5 minutes spent checking out different parts have so far left a very poor impression. Combined with its verbosity, it's hard to justify giving it serious attention...
In the first movement of Apposionata Op. 57, there's a pattern that goes from hand to hand, in groups of five. Difficult for the left hand. So my teacher had me learn it in the right hand too, but inverted.
So in the left hand it went Db Eb G Eb Db. In the right hand that would be Eb Db A Db Eb, an octave up. Mirror image. You'd play both at the same time.
It sounded awful (and then kind of cool after a while) but it worked really well.
My favourite performance of it (not Lang Lang!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEptNFzLpjk
EDIT: A couple notes about the above performance, for those interested:
First, the section I was describing above is at 3:09.
Second, and purely trivial - she has a mistake that is extremely common among pianists. Everyone copies each other and they miss details. At the top of the figure that starts at 7:53, measure 219, there's an 8th rest, not a 16th rest before the last three notes. Same with the following patterns. Both the Dover and Schnabel editions clearly show these eighth rests, but no one plays them.
I suppose it's possible that Dover and Schnabel are both wrong and there's some autograph edition out there somewhere that has the 16th rest, but accidentally changing it to an 8th rest (and adjusting the following note values) in multiple places would be a really weird mistake to make in printing.
http://www.pianopractice.org/ , suggest a link change.
More up to date?
I enjoyed reading a text about weightlifting exercises once. It's not a substitute for carrying out the exercises or having an observer comment, but the underlying principles could be used to explain my performance (or lack thereof) and extend to other exercises.
I have my own notes on piano kinesiology which I've built up, which I refer to as necessary, but it would be easier if someone else had already done it, as it's clearly not the case that a book can't teach you which muscles to engage.
so of course the mental models are correlative _as well as_ causative e.g. "if you keep slamming your finger into the keys you will likely develop RSI and you will have drastically impeded your ability to control your tone or dynamics" <--- doesn't get much more causative than that.
furthermore, what you've asked for sounds like it would be receiving instructions like, "contract your pronator quadratus to 17%, rotate 34° to strike G3 at a 48.5° angle with your L ring finger, and here's all the angles and associated muscular tensions associated with each phalange that you'll need to master: ...." ? Is that what you mean?
I have yet to meet someone who is unable to receive postural feedback if it's not framed in terms of anatomy. Human movement locomotion does not come from conscious direction to move individual muscles, it's a much more integrated experience (e.g. "extend your right leg" -- want to guess how many coordinated actions of muscles and neurons are are involved in that?
For rock/prog I think Rock Discipline by John Petrucci is the best book available if you're prepared to put in a lot of work and, well, discipline. The name is not accidental: it's hard AF, so if someone is looking for a silver bullet, keep looking.
But at least for guitar a book is not a replacement for a good teacher, and it can't be: there's too much nuance and too many ways to screw things up. Screw up your right wrist movement, and you won't be able to play fast. Screw up your left hand position, and you won't be able to do legato (hammer-ons and pull-offs) and chords will be difficult as well. Synchronization is hard too, especially in hybrid styles, where not every note is picked. Screw up muting and you won't be able to play clean. And the worst part is, you don't even hear yourself as you're playing, if you aren't recording, because your mind is struggling to control and synchronize your hands, which takes more effort than it does on a piano because the left hand does something completely different from the right. That's not even considering that music theory is much harder to learn on the guitar than it is on the piano.
Even some established guitarists don't really know how to play properly (Kirk Hammett or Slash are perennial examples), and a lot of those that do know how to play don't know the theory. They've just learned the technique and a few licks, and that's enough if you don't have to learn someone else's music and don't need Petrucci's levels of sophistication. But knowing theory really opens up the instrument and makes it a lot easier to learn pieces, since you get to see the "grammar" of the thing.
Now, my wife is completing her education degree and I see a lot of this approach being implemented in K-12: identify and focus on weaknesses; use your strengths to enhance your weakness; spend time on the big problems; balancing holistic approaches with concise methods, etc. All seem obvious and yet I didn't have a single teacher in music or otherwise suggest any of them to me.
Moreover, Chang's a techie—an experienced scientist—so there's no bullshit or unnecessary padding here. As such, he'll appeal to many HN readers who tinkle the ivories from time to time and who'd like to improve their technique.
P.S.: I found his piano tuning info/techniques most interesting. As a hacker who couldn't leave well enough alone and who managed to put my old upright well out of wack and sounding like bar piano out of an old Western movie, this info would have been absolutely invaluable.
Since publication when electronic aids were expensive, there's apps you can put on your phone for little or no money. Pitchlab Pro is excellent, but there may be patent issues in your jurisdiction. Also you now have to go through Amazon.
These days YouTube offers different interpretations of just about everything. It gives you something to aim for.
Several years later I bought a cheap 49-key midi keyboard and fired up YouTube, still going and improving every day.
Just do it, really; sit down and learn how to play something you like, your way.
I started piano lessons 9 years ago when I was 27. I had a background in marching band where we were not allowed to carry sheet music with us on the field for 4 years in college
I think that experience with marching band really forced me to develop my ear and learn to memorize music. Also I was terrible at reading music so I used my ear (which also wasn't that good) to fill in the gaps.
Eventually I became proficient enough at this that I could just listen to the other saxophone players and play what they were playing. I didn't know anything about keys, chords, intervals, or anything. I just played what I heard because I had no other choice.
Perhaps putting yourself in similar situations would be helpful. For example, I'm now a keyboard player in a band and I have to be able to learn a song that I've never heard at a moment's notice. That kind of pressure would force anybody to develop their ear because sheet music is just not as useful in that kind of setting.
https://www.instagram.com/serenepianist/
serene was a hacker at google/tor/cmu and then went deep into piano and is an amazing concert pianist. she loved this book!
I’m a piano beginner and my lingering anxieties are:
1. Am I building bad habits?
2. Am I learning in first gear without realizing it?
As for learning in first gear, don't be afraid to make mistakes, as long as you are thinking about the mistakes and analyzing them, rather than blindly repeating them as "a thing that is hard so I will work in it later while I approach the parts of the piece that I enjoy." The way to improve is by hurling yourself at something too difficult for you, and then slowly improving your technique once you are able to analyze why a particular bit of music you're working on is beyond you.
To play a piece *perfectly, it is like wiping a glass window. You want to play the piece perfectly, every. single. time. So as you build the piece in your head, you cannot leave the equivalent of 'you missed a spot.' If your technique manages to be perfect, clear glass, the listener can 'see' through it to the music. It is dangerous that you already know the piece in your head, because your memory of the music can trump the mistake even as you are making it, because you hear 'how the piece should be' rather than how you're playing it. It's imperative to listen to recordings of your work as you polish it; only at the level of mastery does this become a superfluous tool. By listening to it back, you effectively can 'see' all the spots on the window that you are trying to wipe away.
Finally, there are only two types of playing the piano: practice, which involves deliberate and labored cleaning-up of your weaknesses and mistakes, and playing, which is the exhibition of your efforts to make something beautiful and perfect. The book does address this; most amateurs enjoy playing more than they practice, so they play a lot and fool themselves into thinking they are practicing (I am very guilty of this) and rarely practice, so their playing sounds like they need more practice :)
Nevertheless, in terms of optimization in the context of going it alone, having resources on _how_ to learn rather than _what_ to learn is great.