Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

The question today is whether you should major in piano if you want to play in an orchestra. This is an interesting question because while you might see piano in an orchestra every now and then, it’s actually not that common. So would studying piano help your chances to play in an orchestra?

Most of the time when you see a pianist performing with an orchestra they are actually not part of the orchestra. They are typically a guest artist who is touring through and soloing with the orchestra. Very rarely does orchestral repertoire call for a piano part. There is typically one keyboard position – and it’s not always full-time – where they might cover piano, harpsichord, synthesizer, organ and even celeste. Many orchestras without full time seasons will often times utilize subs for these parts.

If it is your absolute passion to play in an orchestra, piano might not be the best choice for you. The great thing about the piano is that its solo repertoire is unmatched. It is larger than all other instruments combined! More than that, nearly all the solo pieces for other instruments such as violin, flute, clarinet, or nearly any other instrument have accompanying piano parts; so the piano is an intrinsic part of playing with other instruments. From piano trio to piano quintet, the piano is an important part of many types of music and it has an immense repertoire.

If you want to play in an orchestra what is the best instrument to study? Orchestras are mostly composed of string players, so that is a great choice. However, with any instrument, the work involved in becoming an accomplished player, much less a professional, is so formidable that you should really choose an instrument you genuinely prefer. You want to play something you love and if you have a passion for it you will be driven to practice more and as such you will be more successful and fulfilled.

Getting a position in an orchestra is incredibly difficult and picking an instrument with more potential job openings is never a safe bet. Landing a position with any orchestra will require massive amounts of practice and some luck.. You are best off finding an instrument that makes you happy and something you love playing.

Welcome to my multi-part series of piano exercises. This is a great exercise I learned in conservatory that provides a wonderful way to build strength in your technique.

Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to practice but you want to get the maximum amount of production out of your time – this is great exercise for this exact situation. It’s something you can easily do with just a few minutes every day.

Rather than playing an entire series of scales or arpeggios and without having to learn an entire etude, you can perform this exercise – which is based on a pattern of chords – relatively easily and frequently as a great way to improve your strength.

The exercise goes from a major triad, to a minor triad, to a diminished triad, to an augmented triad. If you’re unsure of what these mean we will have a series of videos explaining them in the near future.

You wouldn’t think that it would be tough dealing with a new piano. You would expect that you would simply set it up in your home and enjoy it. But it isn’t that simple. Caring for your piano is an important process and today I am going to offer a few tips to help you settle your piano in your home and prolong the enjoyment of your instrument.

First things first, you’ll want to make sure you are purchasing the right size piano for your home. I have a separate video that specifically addresses this situation:

Where to Place the Piano

There are all sorts of questions associated with placing a piano in a room: should you put it near a wall? How about placing a piano near a window? etc.

While there are a number of questions associated with placing a piano in a room, there is a simple rule to follow: if it is a place you personally would be comfortable sitting day in and day out, it’s probably a good spot for your piano!

Thing’s You Want to Avoid

Direct Sunlight

This is one of the most common problems with pianos in homes. People love the idea of placing a piano near an exposed window because it’s typically a nice spot for the instrument. This might actually be the worst spot in a room for a piano because the sun can cause an incredible amount of damage to the case of a piano sometimes in just a few weeks.

I can’t tell you how many people contact us with pianos they want to sell or consign that have significant sun damage. When you keep a piano in a room with the fly lid folded over the case and let it sit that way in direct sunlight you, your piano can become two-toned like this:

Luckily you can fix this but it’s not cheap and requires very specialized furniture work from a professional.

Avoid Air Vents and Keep a Consistent Environment

There is no quicker way to ruin an upright piano then placing it in front of a hot or cold air vent on a wall, or placing a grand piano over a vent blowing hot or cold air. Cold air return is not really a problem since it is pulling the air in, but keeping a piano near a vent blowing hot or cold air can damage your piano.

FInd the place in your home that has moderate temperature and humidity. Around 45-50% humidity is the ideal environment for your piano.

Excessive humidity can lead to rust on metal parts including the strings, and affect the tuning stability of the instrument.

Excessive dry environments can dry the wood, leather and felt parts – causing cracks in the soundboard, action issues and noise, along with other problems.

Luckily there are ways to tell if your piano is in the right environment. You can purchase an inexpensive humidity gauge to get an idea of the internal environment in your home. You can add humidifiers or plants to a room to add humidity to a room or get a dehumidifier or air conditioner to remove it.

Keep in mind, that enjoying your piano is important but it shouldn’t negatively affect your home. If you live near the beach you may want to keep your windows open. Fortunately there is a solution for you. A Dampp-Chaser system will be able to control the temperature and humidity of your piano’s soundboard. This is something you can have your piano technician install for you.

How Often to Tune

If you are buying a new piano or a piano that has just been rebuilt it will require more maintenance than other pianos in the first couple of years of ownership. The piano has to settle into it’s environment and it will require more frequent tunings as the strings stretch so it can stabilize.

You’ll probably want to have the piano tuned as the seasons change because the different temperatures and environments will affect the tuning of the instrument. At the least you will want to tune it two times a year when you go from heat to air conditioning and then back again. Even if the piano sounds OK, it might actually shift down or up and you might not notice. If you allow it to lose pitch over time, it can lead to more work for your piano tuner as they try and get it to hold a tuning at the standard A440 pitch.

There are applications you can get on your phone to see if your piano is playing at A440. Just load up the app, play A above middle C and see if your piano is in the range of A440. If it’s off by more than a couple of cents (438, 437, etc.), it’s certainly time to call your piano tuner.

Ask Your Tuner or Technician

Even if your piano seems fine, ask your tuner what maintenance it might benefit from such as lubricating the action, minor regulation, etc. – because these small things can add up and require major work in the future if you don’t keep on top of it.

Just getting a piano technician in your home can be an expensive task, so once they are there you should have them do any of the work that’s necessary since the extra amount they charge is often well worth it. Plus, you get to enjoy your piano on a higher level!

It’s also important that you find the best piano technician you can. The most expensive is not always the best, but you certainly don’t want to find someone who isn’t qualified to do the work needed – a piano in the wrong hands can be disastrous. A good idea is to look for local concert series or local symphony orchestra and see if you can find out who tunes their pianos – they probably utilize higher level piano technicians than average.

While there are people who are supposedly tone deaf and have difficulty trying to match pitch, there are people who have an innate problem with even keeping a beat and clapping along with a song. So, is there any way to develop this? Or is it something you are born with?

There is a certain amount of talent that is simply “born” into some people and they are able to keep a beat well on their own, but it’s not a skill that can’t be learned. If you find yourself rhythmically challenged, here are a few exercises that can help you develop a sense of beat.

Traditional methods include clapping along with a beat or a metronome but sometimes these methods simply don’t work. You might encounter students that even with this type of practice still can’t keep a beat. Don’t give up on them, there is hope!

Simply listening to music will help develop a sense of beat a great deal. All sorts of music, rhythmic music, jazz, classical, rock, anything you can listen to will help develop a sense of beat. Beyond listening you should try moving with the music.

This is an interesting question because a lot of times people get into studying instruments because they are enamored with certain pieces of music. It may drive them to a certain instrument and they wish to recreate the sound and music they’ve heard before. But is it a good idea to fill your repertoire with well-known pieces?

There are a few things to keep in mind when learning any new piece. One of the biggest is the familiarity of famous pieces versus lesser known works. When it comes to learning a piece you’ve heard dozens or hundreds of times before it can become a crutch – you know what it sounds like and you will naturally emulate what you’ve heard in the past.

When it comes to pieces you haven’t heard before it may be much harder to learn them on your own. It’s actually quite an accomplishment and something you should definitely undertake in your musical development to learn music you’ve never heard before. Don’t listen to it at all while you are learning it. Simply figure out the music as written and use your knowledge as your guide. Once you feel confident with the piece and can play it well, listen to some recordings of it. You might be pleasantly surprised at different interpretations of the same piece and you will certainly be taken with how much of a unique spin you have put on your own version of the piece!

When it comes to public performances, is it better to play pieces the audience will be familiar with? There is such a wealth of music available and much of it is unknown to a lot of people. After all, Beethoven wrote 32 piano sonatas and only a handful of them are really well known. On the one hand, you might be worried that by playing famous pieces you will be compared to other musicians and you will be expected to perform at a certain level. This is not always the case.

A lot of times choosing a famous piece can be a safe bet for a performer. Orchestras constantly play the same symphonies and concertos over and over again because people really want to continue to hear the music they known. The audiences will show up time and time again to hear these pieces because they are well known and loved – just the thought of hearing them again makes them happy.

One of the best things you can do for your programming is to use famous pieces as a hook to get people interested and generate an audience. Once you have them there, play the famous pieces you promised but also mix in some lesser known works – you will expose them to additional music and they will love you for it. It’s a great idea to pepper your repertoire with famous pieces and lesser known ones as well.

Today we are going to present a very important topic for all pianists out there: The Challenge of the Thumbs. The thumbs are your strongest fingers yet they propose one of the biggest challenges when it comes to playing the piano. We are going to talk about this today and I will offer some solutions for how to deal with these sometimes cumbersome, strong fingers.

If you place your hands side by side you’ll see that your thumbs are in the middle and your smaller fingers are on the ends.

This matters a great deal in piano playing because your thumbs are your strongest fingers and your fourth and fifth fingers are your weakest. Despite our anatomy, you want to delineate the melody on the top and the bass on the bottom which means that your weakest fingers must produce the most sound!

Without balancing your hands and letting your thumbs dominante you will get a muddy sound. This really is a cruel trick of nature since you want to bring out the melody and bass but we are stuck playing them with your weakest fingers. So how do you compensate for this?

These are two terms that have major similarities but they also have distinctly different functions.

Transposition is simply changing the key of a piece of music or section of music to another key.

Modulation is changing keys within a piece of music, often times coming back to the original key. There can be many modulations within a piece of music.

In the video provided with this article you will hear an example of modulation, where I go from C major, modulate to G major, and then back to C major. This is used frequently in pieces of music to add harmonic interest. Since most pieces end in the keys they started in, often times there is more than one modulation within a piece or movement of a larger work. Modulation is a compositional technique which is written into the score; it’s not something you would generally choose to do with a piece of music.

Transposition on the other hand is used to take something and then play it in a different key. For example, if you were to take a series of chords and then play them again just transposed up a half step, a whole step, or anywhere you would like. This is transposition. If you have ever heard a choir warm up, they might sing a group of notes transposing the series of notes up by half-steps to help the group warm up. This is a classic example of transposition.

Another real world example of transposition would be if you were playing piano with a singer. You want the singer to be comfortable singing in a particular range. Sometimes the songs are available transposed into different keys to put the music in a comfortable range for the particular singer. There are even keyboards now that have a transposition functions that make it simple to transpose your playing into different keys at the push of a button!

Modulation on the other hand is a compositional technique that allows a free flow of tone centers within a piece of music.