Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Sightreading is an incredibly important skill for any musician. Being able to take a piece of music you have never seen before and play it at sight; it’s a pretty amazing skill to have.

I remember as a child I progressed with my piano playing but for a long time, I was terrible at sightreading. I used to see other musicians, like my father, who could sightread nearly anything! I have developed my sightreading to a high level, but it took a long time and a lot of work to achieve this skill, and it’s something that continues growing with your musical experience.

But why is sight reading so important? There are a number of reasons.

As you study an instrument you only get to study a limited number of pieces which require a great deal of work to get to a performance level; usually committing them to memory. And really, there are only a certain number of pieces you can learn in a year – and really only a finite number you can master over a lifetime. But who wants to be familiar with only a limited number of pieces? Most people will want to be able to play a broad spectrum of music and get the opportunity to try out other pieces just to see what types of music they want to learn.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to sit down and try a piece out to get a sense of it; to see if it’s worth studying? This is where sight reading can be incredibly useful. If you continue practicing sightreading on a daily basis, eventually you should be able to do this.

Another huge benefit to sight reading is playing with others. Meeting with other musicians informally and sightreading music together can be a rewarding experience; exploring new music with others offers a huge benefit to improving your playing and may even open new opportunities for your performances.

A huge benefit to learning how to sightread is the ability to spot trouble parts in music you are learning. If you can make it through a piece you will undoubtedly be able to tell which parts will require more practice than others. Being able to sightread a piece and go through it a few times will help you tremendously in figuring out what parts to focus on in your practice.

Really there are countless reasons why sight reading is important. It is something that every professional musician should be able to do at a reasonably high level. It’s also great fun exploring a wide range of music and being able to play with other musicians without necessarily practicing hours in advance.

This is a very interesting topic that someone asked me about the other day. It’s not that hard to sight-sing scales and it can be very beneficial to gaining a deeper understanding of your music. But the question is, how do you practice sight-singing intervals? Other than sight-singing a wide range of music, how is it possible to become better at sight-singing intervals that aren’t just one note apart as in scales?

You will see a demonstration in the video that accompanies this article that may help you achieve comfort in singing all of your intervals! I highly encourage you to watch the video for a thorough understanding of these techniques.

The first exercise (that I actually learned as a child) is based upon the notes of a major scale going up by a third and down by a step over and over again until you reach the octave above. Then go backward going down by a third, up by a step on and on until you are back on the starting note an octave below. This is extremely helpful in hearing and singing thirds.

Later in life, I wondered why stop at thirds? So (with some prompting from my father) I expanded my horizons to other intervals! First, try going up by fourths, down by thirds again and again as before – then reaching the top and going down by fourths and up by thirds which brings you back to the starting note. This is a challenging exercise which is very helpful for understanding other pitch relationships. If you are brave, you can go through all of your intervals in a similar manner. It gets progressively harder – wait until you try sevenths!

At first, this will be a great challenge. But eventually, you will become fluent with all of your intervals utilizing these exercises. You will get to a point where you will begin to comprehend the notes of music you hear because you will have mastered all diatonic pitch relationships.

The short answer is sure; why not? However, you really need to ask yourself what your intentions and expectations are. You should also be aware of the style of music that you would primarily want to play.

For example: if you want to play some blues or honky-tonk piano or maybe you want to play some pieces you make up or sing too, you might be just fine on your own. You might be able to find some good online resources and develop as a pianist and musician on your own.

When it comes to classical music, however, you will be at a severe disadvantage without the help of a teacher. The complexities of reading a score, the traditions developed over hundreds of years, advanced techniques, there are a number of roadblocks that would be incredibly difficult to overcome on your own. Even if you are a genius, you will progress at a much slower rate than someone who has assistance from an experienced teacher.

If you are interested in other genres of music – jazz, rock, country, etc. – you can try and sit down with other musicians who are better than you and gain a lot of knowledge and experience from these types of “informal lessons”. Some of the greatest musicians in these other styles of music are not traditionally trained.

If you are serious about becoming a musician – really in any style of music – you will greatly benefit from one on one instruction a great teacher can provide.

Practicing slowly is essential in order to develop and maintain a high level of piano playing. There are actually several different components I’m going to discuss when it comes to the magic of slow practice. Even pieces that you have polished and are on performance level will benefit from the reinforcement of going through slowly. This means playing the piece slowly and definitely looking at the musical score, using no pedal and most often using the metronome. Practicing like this will help solidify your memorization and your fingers. I find this is the best thing to do in the final practice for a performance you are well prepared for.

It’s a scary proposition to think that something you’ve spent thousands of dollars on could not be what it appears to be. Believe it or not, this actually happens in today’s piano market all the time and it’s something everyone should be aware of. Thankfully, figuring out if a piano is genuine is actually quite easy if you know what to look for.

Here in the local Los Angeles market there are a lot of auctions that contain pianos. I’ve heard from some people that there have been pianos there that have the Steinway name on them that aren’t actually Steinway pianos at all. Unsuspecting buyers might be bidding up a particular piano with no idea what they are actually getting. This is clearly a fraudulent practice preyed upon unsophisticated buyers.

Many times in auction houses you will not be allowed to fully inspect a piano; you will only be able to look at it from a distance. Luckily, even from a distance you can spot a few things that signal a genuine piano.

The easiest thing to replace on a piano is the decal on the fallboard. You can order pretty much any piano company decal imaginable online. This is done so that refinishers can order decals when they must remove the original. Just because it has a particular name on the fallboard doesn’t mean that it’s the actual brand of piano. You can put any piano decal on any piano if you want to.

Luckily, there is an incredibly easy way to tell if a piano is genuine. A piano will almost always have the name of the company cast into the plate of the piano. If it is a genuine Steinway, Mason & Hamlin, Baldwin, Yamaha, or other major company they will nearly always cast the name of the piano into the plate.

There are a few exceptions I’ve seen in some European pianos that have small plates screwed into the cast iron plate after it’s cast. Grotrian in particular had to remove their name from the plates of their pianos when they were successfully sued by Steinway. They had been Grotrian-Steinweg since the 19th century. But after losing to Steinway, they had to remove the “Steinweg” part of their name off all of their pianos in stock at the time.

There are many times you will see plastic name plates attached to a plate. These are typically stencil brand pianos. Stencil brands are pianos that are created by a different company (mostly in Asia) and bought by a retailer who then places a different name on the instrument. Most of the time, the original manufacturer will simply create a blank plate that the retailer can then add their specialized name to. These pianos are not fake; they are pianos that are manufactured and repurposed for another company.

The name in the plate is pretty much the only easily identifiable way to tell if a piano is genuine. Almost all the major high-end piano companies will cast the name directly into the plate – with a few exceptions.

Solfeggio, sometimes called sight-singing, is the ability to read and sing music at sight. This is an incredibly important skill for all musicians. So how do you develop these skills?

There are a couple of different systems and each one has different values. I’m going to explore these and you can decide what the best course of action is for you.

I grew up with a method called “movable do solfege”. You’ve probably heard it before: “Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do”. “Do” is the tonic, the first note of the major scale, and you simply progress up through the scale degrees. In movable do solfege, no matter what major key you are in, the tonic of that key is always do. For example, if you are in C major, C is “do”. This is important to remember because this is not the case when it comes to “fixed do” solfege.

In “fixed do” solfege C is always “do” (and “re” is d and so on). The notes never change syllables.

While these two methods are completely different, they are both important in their own ways.

The strength of “fixed do” comes from naming notes. No matter what iteration the note takes it will always correlate to the particular syllable in the “fixed do” system. C will always be “do”, D will always be “re” and so on. This can be incredibly useful – especially if you’re a conductor – because you will be able to determine the absolute pitch of each of the notes. Scores are transposed and there are different clefs so being able to determine the absolute pitch is a very powerful tool.

So why would you want to use movable do? Why should you constantly be changing the pitch of “do” and why would you want it in different places? The value is that you can hear music in the context of the key, so you can figure out the notes you are hearing. In other words, if you hear a pattern of notes (for example: do, mi, so ) you can determine that it’s a major triad chord; no matter what the key. This makes it possible to quantify the pitches relative to one another and determine these patterns of notes much easier. This can really help for people who don’t have perfect pitch – it’s a much easier way to know the notes you are hearing.

But what about the relative minor? There are actually two schools of thought for this. The way I was trained is that the key signature determines where “do” is, so the relative minor begins on “la”. This makes perfect sense and is still easy to grasp even if the piece switches between major and minor. This works out the same for all of the modes which share key signatures with major and minor scales but start on different scale degrees (like all the white keys from D-D would be a D dorian mode which shares the key signature of C major which has no sharps or flats).

The last thing we need to address is how to deal with accidentals (sharps, flats, and naturals). These are simply ignored in fixed do solfege but in movable do we add extra syllables to account for these accidentals.

An ascending chromatic scale would be:

Do-Di-Re-Ri-Mi-Fa-Fi-So-Si-La-Li-Ti-Do

Descending chromatic scale is:

Do-Ti-Te-La-Le-So-Se-Fa-Mi-Me-Re-Ra- Do

Movable do solfege is how I grew up with music and it’s how I hear music. I use it for every aspect of music, whether it’s reading music or even performing. All music is essentially playing by ear so even if you read it’s important to have a system in place that allows you to understand what you are hearing.

This question comes from another viewer who asks how to read ahead in music to improve their reading. So how do you achieve this and is it a good technique?

Well the truth is, reading ahead is actually not exactly how it works. Instead, it is a matter of looking at chunks of music instead of reading note by note much like reading text. When you first learn how to read a language, you must sound out each letter forming words. Eventually, you recognize words and even phrases. It is the same with reading music. You begin to recognize chords and progressions instead of just individual notes.

So instead of reading ahead in the music, it’s best to digest your music into chunks. If you break your music into these sections you will be able to absorb them much more easily and you will have an understanding of the structure of what you are playing helping the fluency of your reading.

You can even apply this same technique to sight reading. Instead of just reading all the notes and hoping for the best, the more you begin to break down your music into small chunks you will begin to recognize similar patterns. After a while this will become almost second nature and you will be able to read and digest all your music much more easily.

To put it in simple terms, in a musical context: Allegro means fast; while Moderato means moderately fast. (Actually, the Italian translation of Allegro is actually “happy” and Moderato means “moderate”). But these two terms can be confusing – how do you judge fast? What is moderately fast? And really, the speed really depends on the context of the original score; every piece has different requirements.

You might have even seen some metronomes which indicate Allegro from a certain number to another and other markings such as Andante with a range as well, but this is actually quite ridiculous. Each piece has a certain pulse to it and Allegro can’t be quantified in this way.

The biggest thing to remember is that Fast and Slow are Not Absolutes. The speeds and the markings are simply characters of the piece.

So where exactly to do these terms come from? They are Italian words. This is mostly because Western music has its roots in Western Europe and Italy was a big epicenter for music. Eventually, their terms were adopted by most of the music community.

If you study French or German music, sometimes you will run into a bunch of different terms from their languages. I suggest getting a dictionary, or use online or smartphone resources. Some of the German terms are so long they are almost impossible to pronounce!

This might sound like a silly question but sometimes you have a piece you can play with the music in front of you but you haven’t memorized it yet. You might be able to play the whole piece by barely glancing at the music but you still need it in parts. This can be cumbersome and is something you want to avoid. So how do you fix this?