Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

This is a very important subject and it applies to all instruments and musicians. Creating and maintaining a meaningful and interesting body of work as a musician is something we all aspire to. This article will provide some tips so that you can build a repertoire that is both unique and personally fulfilling.

When students begin studying music and get a new book they are so excited. As time goes on and you present more books to them they are surprised when you begin to skip over pieces in the book. Students would often ask me why they simply wouldn’t learn all the lessons or pieces in order.

The truth is, once you progress to a certain level you need to be concerned with adding variety to your music; helping you showcase your skills better and develop a diverse set up musical skills. Covering a wide range of styles – even at earlier stages in your musical development will help you become a better and more well-rounded musician.

Once you get to a certain level in your development you must begin to focus on different styles of music or else you won’t advance as a well rounded musician. That’s why selecting pieces from the Baroque, Romantic, Classical and other musical eras will allow you to learn different techniques as well as diversify your music. Each one of these eras is distinguished by unique styles and sounds and learning the differences will help you progress further as a musician while making your studies more enjoyable.

It’s also important to build your repertoire based on the time it’s going to take you to learn different works. For example, you might be able to learn a Chopin Nocturne in just a week or two. But it could take you months to learn and master a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody or other extended work. Each one of these will not only expand your repertoire, but they will challenge you in unique ways. If you only focus on pieces that will take you a short amount of time to learn, you may not progress as quickly. By challenging yourself with harder pieces that may take months to learn, you can gain valuable skills and techniques which will raise the overall level of your playing even if these pieces don’t become a part of your active repertoire immediately. So, if you were learning a Bach fugue, this can be extremely difficult to memorize. A piece like this could exhaust you mentally if you only focused on this and nothing else for your practice time. Instead, you could be learning a Mozart Sonata or a Chopin Mazurka concurrently and you could expand your repertoire and work more effectively by giving yourself a mental break.

Over time you will begin to learn where your strengths and weaknesses are. You will discover where you need to focus your attention developing your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses.

So here are key points to remember in developing your repertoire:

– Choose pieces that offer a variety of stylistic periods.
– Study pieces with a variety of length.
– Study pieces with different levels of difficulty.

You may have heard this term before and might be familiar with the concept of an upright grand. At first it might sound like an oxymoron, but the term actually makes a lot of sense once you learn exactly what it means.

So what is an upright grand? Is it an upright piano or a grand piano?

The short answer is that it’s an upright piano. However, it’s not just any upright piano. At the turn of the 20th century, countless American piano companies manufactured very tall upright pianos. These instruments offered the sound of a grand piano because of the long strings and large soundboard area. They coined the term upright grand to describe these type of instruments.

This is a very common question around here at the store. Everyone who has a piano is going to experience this problem eventually. Our hands pick up a tremendous amount of dirt and grime throughout the day and eventually it’s going to get on your piano keys as you continue to play it. Cleaning keys is an easy process but it’s one that you want to make sure you do correctly because you can actually damage your keys by using incorrect methods.

The easiest solution for cleaning your key tops is the following:

A Damp – not wet.

– paper towel
– cloth
– cotton swab

If this doesn’t get all the dirt and gunk off the keys then you can try a high solution of alcohol (90% rubbing alcohol) but just damp and not wet. It’s important not to use too much alcohol on the keys as it can damage them.

If you’re afraid to use rubbing alcohol or you don’t have any then you can use white vinegar as a replacement. Again, make sure that you don’t use too much and that you just dampen the cloth or towel that you are using.

When it comes to Ivory Keys there is a little bit more of a challenge.

Ivory is a porous material which means that it’s going to be a bit more difficult to get them clean. Dirt will fall into the small holes in the keys and it could be very difficult to get it out in some circumstances.

I recommend the same steps as above for Ivory Keys but you need to be aware of a few differences.

First of all, Ivory keys will yellow over time. This is something you can’t control and is just a natural occurrence over time. A piano technician can remove the key tops for you and apply a solution of bleach to them in order to try and whiten the keys again. Most of the time this works pretty well but you will want to make sure you have a technician do this for you unless you are experienced in replacing key tops.

If you’ve played music for a while you’ve probably run across this term before and you might wonder what it means. Some people might dismiss it as being a term only applying to music which actually utilizes your breath but that is not the case.

The voice is the first musical instrument and to some extent all music derives from singing. Naturally with wind instruments this directly relates to using your breath but all instruments mimic the same concept. String instruments like violinists, cellists, and others utilize a technique that simulates the up and down of breathing with the bow. This technique should also apply to the piano – where phrases should rise and fall just like a breath does. When starting a new phrase it’s like starting a new breath.

Everything in life revolves around cycles and breathing is one of them. Unless you’re consciously aware of it you’d never notice your breaths but this same type of structure seeps into all aspects of our lives. Every day the sun rises and sets, ever since we were born we’ve been used to the simple nature of breathing in and out, and things like sitting at the beach and listening to the waves crash in and out are soothing things that remind of the cyclical nature of our existence. Music is no different.

But how does this translate to an instrument like the piano? You should really play every line you have like you are singing it. I encourage you to try this, you might be surprised at how much inherent expression it brings out in your music; it will give it character and life.

Memory can be one of the great challenges for musicians. You take the time to learn a piece, practice it again and again, and master it. Then you may forget something! Today we are going to discuss how to retain the music you’ve learned.

In this video Robert Estrin provides some tips to get a great tone out of your piano.

If you’ve played the piano you may be familiar with the term “A-440”. You might wonder what this actually refers to and if it’s something you need to be concerned with. Today we are going to go into detail on this subject and share everything you need to know about what A-440.

All sound is simply a series of vibrations that go through the air. The strings on a piano go through a certain number of vibration cycles per second – this is what actually produces the sound we hear. If you were to put a piano string under a microscope and slowed it way down, you would see the string moving back and forth for each vibration cycle. The air around the string also vibrates at the same frequency and when it hits your eardrums you will eventually hear the sound from the vibration the string has produced since your eardrums will sympathetically vibrate at the same speed.

So what does this all have to do with A-440? Everything! The A note above middle C should produce 440 vibration cycles per second when it is properly tuned. This is where the term A-440 comes from. You can actually test this on your own piano using a tuner or a tuner app on your smartphone.

Is it a bad thing if your piano is not tuned to A-440? It could be. Modern pianos are meant to be tuned and played at A-440 so they sound their best when they are tuned at that pitch. Some people actually like to tune their pianos a bit higher than A-440 because it produces a brighter sound they prefer. Some European orchestras tune to A-442 or even A-444 since they prefer that sound.

A-440 is the standard pitch for modern instruments.

This is especially important when you are playing with other instruments. Some instruments are able to tune up or down a certain degree and others don’t have this ability. If you were playing with someone who plays vibes or other mallet based instruments there is no way to tune these instruments. So, playing a piano tuned off of the standard A-440 pitch would sound quite ugly when played with an instrument tuned at concert pitch of A-440.

One more thing to note is that when you double the frequency of a note you simply get the same note an octave higher. So for example, if you play the A above A-440 you will produce A-880. Likewise, if you were to play an A an octave lower it would be A-220, or 220 cycles per second.

I recommend checking your piano periodically to ensure that it’s around the proper pitch. If the piano ever drops or even goes up in pitch it could take several tunings to make it stable again and achieve the correct pitch.