Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

If you have played piano for any length of time you may have come across this situation. Sometimes your music will have the same note written for both hands and they are meant to be played at the same time. You might wonder how to approach this and why a composer would do this. We are going to cover both of these questions today.

This is a really good question and one that comes up quite often. You might think when you first start out that writing the letters of the notes above your music will help you because you won’t have to count through all the lines and spaces so you can easily identify what notes to play. What harm could possibly come from making your music a little bit easier to read?

You are shortchanging yourself if you do this. If you write the names of the notes in your music, you’ll never have to figure them out – and so you won’t learn to read them! You will be creating a crutch that will hinder your music reading development. Think how difficult sightreading would be if you depended upon having the names of the notes written in your music.

Sometimes you might have some notes that go far above the staff into ledger lines and you might be tempted to write the names of the notes in these circumstances. This creates the same problem. If you take the time to make yourself figure them out every single time you encounter them, you will eventually learn to recognize the notes and you will become fluent at reading them. If you depend upon writing the names of the notes in your score, you will come to rely on that as your solution and will not become a facile reader.

Now there might be occasions when you are missing notes – in this case it’s fine to circle them. Sometimes you might want to write lines in the music to know where the beats in the rhythm are as well. Making notes to help you understand your music is fine. But writing the notes in your music will hinder your progress. So, figure them out whenever you read and your facility with reading music will continue growing.

This topic will certainly have varying degrees of opinions. Some teachers will tell you that you should never look at your hands and others will say you must always look at your hands. I think there is an ideal situation for looking at your hands or not looking at your hands depending upon what type of music you are performing.

There are two distinctly different types of piano playing when it comes to classical music. There is solo music and chamber music. When it comes to solo music, generally you play from memory. With chamber music you will typically be reading a score since there are other musical parts of the other musicians you must be aware of.

When it comes to solo music, there can be leaps that will require you to memorize your scores so you can watch your hands as they make those leaps around the keyboard. It’s extremely difficult to do this without looking at your hands. There are also page turns to deal with which can be a real pain!

Chamber music is a little different because it involves more instruments then just the piano. The piano score actually contains the parts of the other instruments so when you’re playing it’s very important to see what is going on. If you are playing chamber music with other musicians you really should never have to take your eyes off the score except for quick glances – you should be following along the whole time. There might be sections you want to memorize because they have large leaps but typically you don’t want to take your focus off of the score in front of you.

With enough training you can learn how to play piano without having to look at your hands. It might seem impossible but it can be done and there are many fine blind pianists out there who prove it’s possible. You can learn to negotiate large leaps in your music through your peripheral vision as well.

When it comes to solo music, if you have your music memorized I don’t really see any reason why you wouldn’t want to look at your hands. It gives you the opportunity to keep your eyes on the keyboard and make sure that you are hitting the correct notes and have your hands in the right positions.

This is a question I get frequently. People with antique pianos often wonder what they can do when one or more ivories are chipped or missing. This can be a real annoyance particularly when it’s in the middle of the keyboard.

This is a great question and it’s something people don’t often consider. Most of the time people are used to the lesson plan of learning a new piece during the week – if you’re just starting it will probably only take you a week to learn – and then starting another piece the next week. The question is, what should you do with those older pieces and when you advance further in your playing, is it possible to work on two pieces at the same time?

When it comes to learning new pieces, it’s always a good idea to continue to practice the pieces you’ve already learned. It’s not worth forgetting about them. If you’ve taken the time to learn them, you should continue to reinforce them and expand your repertoire as much as possible. It’s much better to have a few pieces of music in your repertoire that you can play extremely well and as you continue to practice your older pieces you will be able to play them easier and more effectively. As you continue to learn new music and continue to practice all of your pieces you, will expand your repertoire very quickly.

Once you get to a certain point you might have too much music, which means that you might have to start dropping older repertoire to have the time to learn new pieces. This is a good place to be. It’s always great to have a solid repertoire you can refer to and once you begin to learn and master new pieces you can simply replace older ones you no longer like as much or you don’t think showcase your talents as well. Later you may revisit these pieces.

Instead of playing exercises, try playing your older music It can be more beneficial than simply practicing just exercises and it will allow you to refine your playing even more. I highly recommend playing older music as warm up exercises. You will become intimately familiar and comfortable with the music.

Once you advance to a certain level of music, it’s going to take you a long time to learn and master a new piece. If you’re entering competitions or playing recitals you will have to learn a lot of music all at the same time. It’s beneficial to practice each of your pieces at least thirty minutes to an hour a day – and many times you will have to practice much more than that. Learning one piece at a time simply isn’t feasible for a schedule like this and you will have to learn more than one piece at a time in order to keep yourself current with your music and the goals you’ve set for yourself.

So the short answer is yes, you should always practice more than one piece at a time, especially your review pieces in your repertoire because it only expands your personal music library and enables you to have many pieces on a high level at the same time. I know some people who simply learn a new piece each week and drop the older ones they were learning – they never have a piece that is on a high level they can simply play at a moment’s notice. The bottom line is that if you are to perform concerts, you must have a substantial repertoire under your fingers even though you can’t keep everything you’ve learned on a high level all the time.

This might sound like a crazy question, however, this might be possible!

Player pianos have come a long way since the days of paper rolls and pedal-based systems:

Eventually player systems progressed to floppy disks, to CDs and eventually to what we have today, which are player systems that are barely even visible on the pianos:

Today’s systems are controlled wirelessly through remotes, smart phones, and tablets that actually work off your home’s wi-fi network. Because these systems are based on a wi-fi connection, they could theoretically be hacked!

You’d need to have someone who is pretty adept at breaking into home networks and a strange reason to hack your piano but anything is possible right?

The only scenario I could see this being even a remote possibility is if you’re a famous musician who stores your piano recordings on your piano’s player system – such as Disklavier or other recording device. Maybe someone would want to steal your music or destroy your work for malicious purposes. This is a far-fetched scenario, but it could potentially happen!

Expert hackers will always find a way around encryptions but keeping strangers out of your wireless network or piano is dependant on you to come up with a strong passwords and not share them publicly.

While I don’t think people will be hacking into your piano anytime soon, if you have a wireless player system on your piano and hear your piano playing in the middle of the night for no reason – this could be why!

Like most things when it comes to the piano, this question does not have a simple answer. There is no absolute standard for how many strings are on a piano but there are some general guidelines that can shed some light on this question.

Some people might assume that since there are 88 keys on a piano, there would be 88 strings; but this isn’t the case. Most keys on the piano actually strike 3 strings when depressed. They are steel strings that run from the highest treble all the way to the bass section. Once you hit the bass section of the piano, the strings become copper wound and there are less of them per note (2 and eventually 1 on the lowest notes).

Now the problem in figuring out how many strings are on a piano depends on something called scale design. Scale design is a complex topic which I’ve covered in the past:

But basically what you need to know is that all pianos have unique scale designs with different numbers of strings in each section. Each piano switches from the triple steel strings to copper strings with different numbers of dual and single copper bass strings!

So the simple answer is you can’t say how many strings are on a piano exactly, but it ranges generally from about 220 to 240 strings.

Now this really should give you a renewed respect for your piano tuner if it hasn’t already! They have to tune every single one of those strings making sure they are all in proper pitch with each other. The octaves and intervals have to sound as pure as possible; their are also overtones to deal with – the process is actually quite complex.