"I practice with my keyboard on the floor" and other wacky configurations!

Yes, this is an actual quote from one of my students this morning...which brings up an important issue.  This is not ok!  The student in question then continues..."and I sit criss-cross applesauce while I practice."  Oh, dear!  I didn't think I really needed to address this.  Surely they know better than to practice in a manner that produces poor technique and slouchy posture.  Surely they are all sitting on piano benches while practicing.  But I should never assume anything.  So today I offer you a token of wisdom on "practice configurations."

What is the right practice configuration? 

• Proper Seating!  Sit on a piano bench, or at a minimum, a creaky chair patched with duct tape like the one American pianist Glenn Gould would drag around from venue to recording studio (actually, I hope you don't do this.  Glenn was a tad eccentric.).
• It's all about arm angle!!!  When the keyboard is at the proper height in relation to your seating, your arms will form a right angle (90 degrees) at the elbow when your hands are outstretched, shoulders relaxed, elbows hanging loosely by your sides, ready to play.  If your arm angle is less than 90 degrees, your keyboard stand is too high in relation to your seating.  If your arm angle is greater than 90 degrees, your keyboard stand is too low in relation to your seating.  Keyboard stands are usually adjustable -- just move to a different set of holes.  Some benches are adjustable.  Do what you need to do to get the right arm angle!  It's important!
• Kitchen tables are for food, and floors are for feet!  Please don't practice with your keyboard on the kitchen table.  And the floor is just bad.  Bad.  Bad.  There are stands made for just about every kind of keyboard and you can find one just for your keyboard on Google.  If you haven't bought your keyboard yet, do make sure you purchase a piano with a stand.

I hope that helps all of you parents wondering if the keyboard-on-the-floor thing is ok.  It's not.  It will, indeed, sabotage all your piano teacher's efforts to instill good technique into your child's piano-playing.  

I do in-home consultations to evaluate your practice set-up and the mechanical fitness of your instrument.  I also go to student homes and install notation and recording software for students, getting your keyboard and computer to talk to each other so you can be an artist!  Click the link below to schedule your instrument assessment or technology installation now!

Crash Course in Accompanying

I am a far better accompanist than I used to be, but I am still learning and fine-tuning my methods.  Through the years, I have learned a lot from my mistakes.  I have dropped a few notes, skipped a few bars when I got lost, and played a major chord instead of minor.  I have had bad page turns, or pages that got stuck, or discovered that the lighting was so poor I could hardly read the notes.  I have jumped the gun because I misinterpreted the downbeat with an unclear conductor, and I have even failed to read my own instructions in the music a few times.  Everyone knows these mistakes are embarassing.  We want to do anything to avoid them.  Fortunately, I wisened up about score preparation and have changed my strategy when it comes to accompanying.  You may be surprised that I don't emphasize physical practice at the piano very much at all.  Here is my crash course in accompanying:

1.  Listen to a recording of the piece.  Scratch that.  Listen to several recordings of it.  Youtube is such a gift to our generation.  Use it!  The first thing I try to do now is listen to the piece before rehearsing it.  But you must listen while reading the score.

2.  Sing the parts along with the recording.    For choir music, pretend you are soprano and sing the whole soprano part.  Then sing the whole alto part.  Do the same with the mens' parts.  Do this while reading the score.  I don't care how badly you sing.  Just hum along while listening if you like.  This way you will be very familiar with the parts and part-reading/ open-score reading won't be so hard when the director/ conductor asks you to do it.

3. Check for difficult page turns.  Locate the repeats, DS al Fines, and DS al Codas.  If they require you to turn backward more than one page, or forward more more than one page at a time, ask for a page turner, or make a copies in reduced size that you can tape together.  You don't want any of your back-turns or multiple page turns to de-rail you in rehearsal or performance. 

4.  If you're turning your own pages, write in all your page turns, at the bottom right of the previous page.  This is so, so important!  I write in the upcoming 2 or 3 chords and the harmonic rhythm (how often the chord changes, like every half note, for instance).  This has saved me from many errors over the years.  If you own an iPad and you do a lot of accompanying, you may want to look into the Air Turn, a foot pedal that turns music pages you have scanned or uploaded to your iPad.  If you do go with the Air Turn, any music purchased on musicnotes.com may be synced to your iPad.  I don't know about you, but I'm excited to try this soon!

5.  Write in all the chords of the accompaniment.  At the very minimum, you will want to do this in sections that are in difficult keys, like 6 flats.  Now do you see why I emphasize mastering music theory?  This practice has also saved me from many botched measures.  Even if I don't get every detail in the rehearsal, I try to play the right chord.

6.  Analyze any open score sections for chord progressions, and write in the chords and inversions.  (Open score is defined as a musical choral or orchestral score in which each part has a staff to itself).  Open score reading is the most difficult form of piano reading.  You are reading four separate staves at one time, and I know very few people who can do this well.  If you write in the chord progressions, it will give you a shorthand of sorts to help you keep things flowing in rehearsal.

7.  Practice the ending first.  Why?  Because it is usually different than the rest of the piece, and has specific timing issues, such as ritardandos or fermatas.  I was once accompanying a piece for a community chorus and I failed to look at the ending.  We I got there during rehearsal, the chords changed very quickly.  I didn't know the rhythm of the chord changes because it was kind of unpredictable, and I botched the ending.  The director was not very undertanding with me, and I learned my lesson!

8.  Then, if you have time, practice.  Honestly, most accompaniment literature is not physically challenging.  Physical practice should truly be the last thing you do.  When you do have time to physically practice, focus your practice on the ending, difficult keys within the piece, and transitions between keys.  These are the parts your conductor will expect you to have down!

I hope that helps you in your accompanying adventures.  Share with your students!  Most students don't realize the importance of mental practice and study!  I would love to hear how you prepare for accompanying.  Maybe you have suggestions I didn't think of.

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Halloween as Springboard to J.S. Bach and Organ? Yes!

I am the first to admit that I am not a huge fan of the organ.  I much prefer my piano.  But one of the coolest "Halloween" pieces of all time is a classical piece written for organ by J.S. Bach.  What is it, you might ask?  Why -- Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565)  -- of course!  If you don't recall what this piece is, check out this video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4FXvojtq6g&feature=player_embedded

Ok, so Bach devoted all of his music to the glory of God.  So how did his piece come to be associated with a holiday which is considered to be pagan in origin?  It's simple, really.  The first page or so is very scary-sounding and Hollywood found that it registered high on the fear meter!  It has been used in no less than 19 movies, from the Disney classic "Fantasia" to horror movies.  Although I'm sure J.S. Bach intended to do nothing more than induce a proper fear of God with his bold opening statement (Figure A, below), we actually use this piece to scare each other in horror movies, haunted houses, and Halloween media hype.  Fortunately, our kids hear a little Bach every Halloween because of this media saturation.  So I have begun using the Toccatta's Halloween association as a springboard for introducing J.S. Bach and organ to my students -- especially those with classical phobia (I have some who would never consider Bach as worthy for their attention if it weren't for this piece). 

In addition to giving them some appreciation for the classics of the Baroque era, the Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor presents the perfect opener for a discussion of one of the most complex engineering feats in existence -- the pipe organ.  Your budding engineers and scientists might appreciate this (subject matter for another post).

And you might throw in a little sidenote about how Bach, a gifted composer, was really just this very humble church organist who felt that....

"The final aim of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul." 

He didn't seek any fame or fortune for his mind-boggling compositions.  In fact, the guy who created this cool piece was just an ordinary family guy (he had 7 children by his first wife, then 13 by his second wife, whom he married after he was widowed), yet he is now recognized as one of the greatest composers of all time.

And how about showing students how much coordination is required to play this complex instrument?  Show them the video above.  It gives students an excellent demonstration of how the foot pedals work in organ music.  I tell them this is where the very big, low notes come from.  A lot of kids don't know that there is a virtual piano keyboard at your feet and each pedal has a different pitch.  So this video is very enlightening as far as the foot pedals go.   

While some piano teachers may dismiss this piece as too difficult for intermediate students, I think the first page is very attainable through proper instruction.  And my students LOVE, LOVE, LOVE playing this piece!  By showing my students the patterns and chords in the music this month, I was able to teach the first page of this to virtually all of my intermediate and advanced students.  They don't need to play the whole 8-minute piece to get a taste of Bach and organ music.   Even the first page is enough to show their friends.  They can go home and play the piece on their keyboards with a pipe organ sound (most of my students have a keyboard and/or piano).  If two hands is too hard, the piece is easily reduced to right hand only.  One of my students, who is handing out candy instead of trick-or-treating this year, says he is going to put his keyboard out on the sidewalk and play this piece on Halloween night.  And that's what it's all about!  Getting them excited about music and making it fun!

If you take a look at the first measure, it looks pretty intimidating to a young intermediate student.  Imagine how much their confidence is boosted when then leave the lesson, knowing they played this difficult-looking music!



Figure A (Measure 1)

 

Figure B

 



For much of the piece, the left hand is a carbon copy of the right hand (Figures A and B), and that makes it much easier to learn than other two-handed music.  Although I printed the sheet music for them, they didn't have to use it very much since I taught them by rote (memorizing instantly through listening and observation of the teacher's demonstration) and by pointing out the patterns and chords.  To learn how I teach the first page in just one lesson, look for my next post!

Halloween Improvisations With Keyboard Sounds

I have a pretty old digital ensemble piano that is a mammoth sound factory.  This instrument adds a lot of excitement to seasonal projects such as Halloween improvisations.  What is a Halloween improvisation, you ask?  Allow me to elaborate..

I don't believe in the occult or really "celebrate" Halloween, but it is a fact that most my students participate in Halloween customs such as trick-or-treating and wearing costumes.  They also associate Halloween with scary sounds and songs.  I have several awesome Halloween-style sounds on my keyboard, including goblins, dark movie scene, and crystal. 

For our Halloween improvisation duet today, my student improvised in pentascales, following my chord progressions.  For instance, if I played A minor, he improvised in A minor 5-finger position.  If I played G major, he improvised in G major 5-finger position.  The pattern continues.  Here it is:

http://soundcloud.com/jennifer-warren-baker/halloween-duet-with-goblins

I think he enjoyed it.  I will post the sheet music for the teacher part for anyone interested, but the progression is A minor, G major, F major, D minor, and repeat.  It's just a tad spooky sounding, but not over-the-top.

Another student, ecstatic about my goblins sound, just enjoyed sitting on long, slow "goblin chords" while I improvised a dramatic piano part.  Here it is:

http://soundcloud.com/jennifer-warren-baker/the-fear

I just had to watch his hands closely to see what goblin chords he was playing so I could do the same chord with piano.  On a second track, I had him add some orchestral percussion with my gong sound!!!  As we sat back and listened to our creation, he began to dramatize a fight scene he was imagining and said he couldn't wait to show it to his friends.

So Halloween -- even though I'm not a huge fan -- can be a springboard for exciting projects which get them excited about music and keep them coming back!!!

Major Scale Fingering Made Easy - A Helpful Chart

(Scroll down to download a PDF of the chart!)

My students hear it all the time from me:

"Major scales in music are like the multiplication tables in math.  You cannot advance in math without knowing your multiplication tables, and you cannot advance in music without knowing your major scales."

 

Major Scales = Multiplication Tables of Music! 

 

Why is it so hard to advance in music without knowing your major scales?  Everything in music is a based on major scales.  For instance, a major chord is made up of the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of the major scale.  Minor scales and blues scales are described as alterations of the major scale, or formulas based on the major scales. 

 

Without knowing your major scales, you will have difficulty understanding chords, and without knowing your chords, well...my opinion on this is very strong -- you're doomed!  Your reading and memorization will be much more difficult without knowing your chords.  Improvising and playing chord-style/ playing from lead sheets will also be pretty much impossible without knowing your major chords.  And if chords are built from scales, we need to know the scales first!

 

I also describe each scale as a musical language.  I explain to my students that our goal as pianists is to be completely fluent in reading and speaking (playing) each musical language. 

 

 

Each scale is a musical language.  We need to be fluent in every language!

As soon as you can, learn your piano scales in two octaves (even hands separate is fine at first).  The fingering patterns will be much more apparent when you are playing two octaves, and everyone knows that music is much easier when you can see the patterns!  Once you can play two octaves, you can extend that easily to three or four octaves. 

Here is a chart I have been envisioning for years.  I created this chart today to help my students organize the major scales in their minds, understand the patterns, and master them more quickly.  The focus of this chart is fingering patterns, not the notes of the scales (I have put key signatures on the chart to help with that).  I find that, when students see the patterns, scale mastery comes much more quickly!  I hope to post a poster-sized chart on my studio wall.  I think this chart will help any piano hobbyist to compare and contrast the major scales and their various fingerings -- to see how they're the same and different. 

In the chart below, the scales which begin on white keys are in white ovals.  The scales which begin on black keys are in the gray ovals.  Students should learn the scales from top to bottom, following the flow of the chart lines.  I have grouped the major scales by shared fingering patterns.  It is much easier to learn the ones that share fingering patterns first.  For example, pianists should master C, G, D, A, and E major (the first 5 in the circle of 5ths) first because they all share the same fingering pattern.   You will notice that there are 5 scales with unique fingerings - B, F, Bb, Eb, and Ab major.  These should be the last learned because they are exceptions to the patterns found in the other scales.  F# and C# both follow "black key finger matching" rules, so once you understand those rules, you realize that the scales with the most sharps are actually the easiest to learn and play!  For now, I offer this chart for free (small preview below)!  To download a free PDF of this chart, click the link here:  Major Scale Fingering Chart.  And please let me know in the comments section if you find this chart helpful, or if needs any edits!

Pianists Don't Do Nails

I don't "do my nails."  Never have, never will.  I'm not going to pout over my plain, boyish nails.  It's far more sanitary to keep them short.  I'm sure the bacteria population under my ultra-short nails is much lower than it would be if they were an inch long and coated in red lacquer.  How can you see the dirt under all that color anyhow? 

But honestly, the real reason I keep my nails short is...

 

You cannot play the piano with long nails.   

Case in point...

A student came in today who always seems to have long nails.  I am frustrated.  I have told this student over and over to cut her nails.  Her long nails make it impossible for her to have the finger curvature necessary to play piano.  The final knuckle joint in her fingers always buckles.  Her fingers are flat and her wrists collapse.  I believe I have already addressed the nail issue with her parents.  But the problem has persisted for many months.  As a result, she plays with a weak sound and sloppy execution.  She cannot get her fingers to do what she wants. 

Maybe it's time for a sign to go on my wall....

"Leave your ego and vanity at home.  Humble hearts and short nails welcome." 

I try so hard not to have a punitive teaching approach, but maybe I need to start writing tickets from the Piano Police.  Or cancelling lessons if they arrive with long nails (ok, maybe too harsh).  Is it that hard?  Maybe I need to sell a beginner piano packet that includes nail clippers with the metronome.  Or I could put a checklist on their practice sheet...are your nails short?

No - I have it.  I will give them engraved nail clippers at the end of the school year as my "thank you for your business" gift.   

Here's the deal, folks.  Long nails don't make for good piano playing.  Long nails make fingers go flat.  This results in low wrists and poor technique, leading to a high rate of error in one's playing.  Want to do a fast scale run?  Want to do anything fast?  Well you may as well forget it if your nails are long.  Even if you're playing slowly, long nails lead to sloppy execution.  So let go of your vanity and cut them.  And that goes for boys too!  Boys are just as guilty of growing man-claws.

Cut them every week, as short as you can.  And please, please, cut them before your lesson!  You cannot play guitar, violin, and most other instruments with long nails.  So don't think you're the only one subject to this grooming imperative.  No matter what instrument you play -- nails just get in the way!