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I play classical piano and started around 1 year and 8 months ago. Up to that point I had played a little here and there, but mostly developed bad habits and took like 15 minutes to read one bar of notes. First I had one on one lessons with someone at a nearby music school, then auditioned and joined the applied program at a nearby community college. I had known I had some musical abilities as a kid but never got seriously into music. What finally pushed me into getting serious was watching the pianist Marc-André Hamelin who I found by coincidence. Right around two years ago I was enjoying Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto and heard that there was a Piano Concerto of even larger size and difficulty, so I searched on YouTube and found a live performance of the entire Busoni Concerto by Hamelin and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra (found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohPzurDZzZ4). It convinced me both that YouTube is loving awesome and classical piano is the real deal. More inspirations: Alkan (composer of the most difficult music in all piano repertoire that is also beautiful, so not counting unplayable transcendental 20th century trash) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TBAouelk8U&playnext=1&list=PLE82B1B66AA12309D&feature=results_main - C.V. Alkan - Concerto for Solo Piano playlist, perf. Marc-André Hamelin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIEhFsi6hF8 - C.V. Alkan - Concerto for Solo Piano III. Allegro Alla Barbaraesca, perf. Live Marc-André Hamelin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6OQpkOUijE - 12 Études Dans Tous Les Tons Mineurs, Op. 39: No. 12: Le Festin D'Esope perf. Bernard Ringeissen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRFGIUN2MLA&list=PL2517B9EDF8BC5B36 - C.V. Alkan Grand Sonata Op.33 (whole playlist), perf. Marc-André Hamelin Bach (Hell loving yes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEgMf17ttTs - J.S. Bach - E major Prelude, WTC, Book 2, Perf. by Andras Schiff This is some of the only Schiff Bach I've found on YouTube and unfortunately, once you hear Schiff, it's hard to appreciate anyone else's Bach. Here some practice tips that I know are true but still don't follow consistently enough of course: 1) The most important tip ever for the piano is to assume and believe that everything is possible until proven otherwise. And proven otherwise doesn't mean a few tries or working at something for a day - sometimes it can take months or years before you can do something but if you keep working eventual victory will never be in doubt. The basic principle is that if you do something slow gradually, build it up faster and faster over time, and repeat it a bunch of times, then human hands on the piano can do just about loving anything. This principle defeats even the most insane acrobatic nonsense needed for one of Alkan's compositions. Time + slow practice + repetition = win piano. 2) It is false to believe you have some special inadequacy that prevents you from learning anything any other of your favorite pianists can play. Sure, marginal differences in talent might exist between you and say, Sir Hammy the Piano Pillager, but the infinitely more important factor is time and experience and with enough of these there is no reason you can't play anything you want to play. Effort overcomes all obstacles in time. 3) The reality of practice is that we all know the most efficient way to improve. Never play the piece, only work on subdivided sections at an extremely slow pace and gradually grind it out. Then put it together super slow when everything is literally perfect. In fact, the most effective and efficient pianist of all time was the guy who never played a piece except on performance day, and spent the rest of his 12 hours a day efficiently practicing parallel sets of difficult moves over and over with complete concentration, focus, and discipline. We can all envision the platonic ideal and although none of us can reach it, we ignore it at our peril. Decide what's more important to you - the quality of your performances, or the enjoyment of your practice. 4) Totally agree on the tasks and goals orientation, and the idea of keeping a log. I also think that in addition to a written log, you should constantly be assigning yourself short mini-tasks every 15 minutes or so. One of the best ways to focus yourself is to assign yourself a task and to do nothing else until you complete it. If you don't have the discipline to constantly do this, you are virtually guaranteeing your concentration will wander and your efficiency in learning will drop as you do random things. Well, that's all I have to say. edit: man what the gently caress why does it keep turning my video links into some forum thing that doesn't work CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 28, 2013 |
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Jun 26, 2013 06:16
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I wanted to post about an excellent lesson I had just now, and emphasize the point of how important it is to be smart about how you practice. You can waste countless hours practicing one way, and 5 minutes practicing another way, and get the same or better results with the 5 minutes. Every instrument has it's own methods, but the rule is methods are so extremely important that this lesson blew the lid off my head and my brain ejected because it couldn't handle the reality of how much time I've wasted with lovely methods.
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Jul 23, 2013 05:35
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Yiggy posted:Could you elaborate briefly? Normally, I'd be more eager to share specific knowledge but here I feel like this knowledge has a kind of premium on it and I would be putting music teachers out of business if I just gave it away. But here is the basic idea: practice consciously rather than unconsciously, and never play unconsciously until the music is totally flawless. I had never really considered the value of practicing or playing music consciously, but the truth is that if you don't do this pretty soon your muscle memory outraces your brain. Oddly enough most of the time I play music (always with the chance of mistakes) I am not thinking consciously about my actual playing - it's been shelved away. This would be OK if it was technically flawless, but it isn't, and that is because I didn't consciously make it so while practicing. The methods of getting it flawless are rather complicated and counter-intuitive for piano, and I had never really encountered them before in their entirety or had them explained as well as they were in this lesson.
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Jul 23, 2013 09:01
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Yiggy posted:Well, its good you're making progress, but respectfully I just want to say you're being too vague and cryptic. I'd like to believe in This One Neat Trick that Music Teachers don't want You to know, I would... First I want to say, god drat you, and all musicians will die penniless because of the internet (contrary to popular opinion, on the whole the past 15 years have been devastating to the livelihood of musicians). It is only recently that I've come to realize how much all of this 'free on the internet' poo poo is screwing people over who make their living through this knowledge because the system is not set up to give them proper compensation. Well, now that that's out of the way here's the rub. The particular exercises are different because instruments work in different ways. For example, key points about engaging different parts of your upper body and how to develop strong fingers and relax at the same time has nothing to do with many instruments, just like key points about proper intonation has nothing to do with piano because it is always either in tune or not. The method of thinking hard about what you are doing in a very analytical and deliberate way, however, seems universal and also counter-intuitive. It is also extremely difficult to do but vastly more efficient. When I sit down to play something on the piano (old habits), I don't put any conscious thought at all into what I am about to play. Effectively, my brain shuts off and motor memory kicks in. Then I operate at the musical level, which is actually desirable in the end, but is extremely detrimental until the music is flawless. What I never understood how to do is solve the technical problems to begin with, so I was faced with either going nowhere or trying to skip past it to some degree (both are bad). As far as how to solve technique on your instrument, I am not sure how much I learned is directly applicable to yours but the ideas in general probably are. Here are examples of what I learned. Before playing any notes, prepare your hands to play the notes by raising your wrists (in this particular piece this is valid). Visualize the note on the key before you play it and exactly how the motion will look. Try to access your kinesthetic memory and experience how the motion will feel before doing it. If possible, try to hear the note or sing it before you play it. Use the score to know exactly what you play next. Reference the score for every single note in this method and develop a photographic memory of the score (if you do this a ton for every note anyone can get good at this). After doing all of this mental exercise, only when you are 100% certain that what you are playing next will be correct do you execute the motion to strike the note. Bring your fingers down, strike the key, and do not allow the finger to collapse. Then, after the keystroke, immediately consciously relax. Rinse and repeat. Do this for every single note. That way when you learn it, it will be 100% accurate plus you will be training the method for total accuracy. It takes forever, but it's not even close to being over. You can do this method except instead of playing one note, play two in a row and hold one for a very long time while making the other short (again this for a piece that is extremely fast and just groups of sixteenths). Then do 3 notes and 4 notes in row. If you do everything written above, it will be awhile before you can do 3 or 4 notes in a row because it requires intense concentration and the ability to visualize into the future before playing. I found when I first tried that I was totally mindfucked. And that's the idea. Every method I learned involved intense deliberation before and during playing, from visualizing the patterns of the keys to learning every harmony both in how it looks and how it sounds. In other words, as you play the piece you are thinking about every single harmony before and as it happens from many angles. To increase the speed of the piece, you do all of this and increase the tempo 1 click at a time. If you can play the whole piece laser beam flawlessly once, you can increase the speed 1 click. The second a mistake happens anywhere, STOP immediately. Go to that area including how to get into that area, i.e. where the actual mistake was, which is more often between bars. Get used to practicing from the 3rd and 4th sixteenth of a bar. Go there and for every mistake do this brutal work 5 times correctly. After learning the piece this way, it will be so solid that you can safely enter the music level and your brain and fingers won't be left behind. These methods aren't magical, just impossible to figure out on your own. But once you understand them they make perfect sense and are very logical. I share your frustration that my other teachers never helped me with my technique, instead they critique my playing which I find to be annoying. It's like, yes I know that was a wrong note, yes I know that doesn't sound the way it should, so now what do I do to fix it? Why, just practice. What you practice 6+hours a day? Well I guess you just don't cut it. BS. Etc. This typed from a phone and probably full of errors. Hope it helped though. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Jul 23, 2013 |
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Jul 23, 2013 22:21
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Yiggy posted:The big key to me, is the stopping on mistakes, grinding them out, and not moving on until the phrase(s) have gotten focused attention and work. My last teacher in many ways was too lackadaisical, small errors and flubs would go away with "time and practice." My current teacher, not so much. He tells me every time I screw up, which can be disappointingly often some days. And we stop and don't move on until I get it right or we run out of time. "No compromise!" But if you think about it, the no compromise approach is the only one that makes sense. If you allow even one mistake into your muscle memory, you're just going to have to do extra work to erase it later. I never really comprehended that before, so now I'm sucker for this method. Laziness is sort of a problem for me, but it's less laziness and more just not having the understanding to put confidence and faith in doing things one way. quote:One possible difference I might be able to add to your deliberate practice is that when I have problem phrases or technique, in practice I'm not supposed to just grind out the phrase isolated from the piece, but also writing some sort of more general exercise which emphasizes the pattern or technique, and then playing it all the way up and down the register to practice it on all notes. Sort of like the Hanon exercises. Sometimes its just practicing a specific method of attacking or approaching a certain note, over and over again. Sometimes its interval training, rhythmic exercises or practicing permutations of different subdivisions. Since most of the music is improvisational, the exercises are important since you want to able to play certain combinations and techniques anywhere and everywhere. Well, this instructor didn't mention any 'specific' (i.e., Hanon, Czerny, Joseffy, whatever) exercises, but nothing I heard contradicts this. It just seems like doing what I wrote is enough exercise on it's own and it's built purely from the music. In fact, for pianists she did mention some of the most generic exercises and their specific uses for teaching different body motions. I put absolutely zero thought into what part of my body I was doing for what, but this pianist told me that you should be consciously choosing what body parts you will use to play each note. Ask yourself - does this require fingers, wrists, forearms, shoulders, wrist rotation, combinations of these, etc. What you use not only produces a different tone, but different moves work better for different things. Shoulders work best for chords, wrist and elbow rotation work best for arpeggios, octaves can be played a variety of ways but tend to do best with forearm power, etc. Hearing this teacher say they think about this for every single bar had a big impression on me. Before I just unconsciously used whatever felt appropriate, not putting any particular value in these different motions. quote:Still, thanks again for the tips. At some point once I'm home again I need to sit in front of the keys and study harmony some more, and so that advice in particular, thinking about harmonies and the sound before playing them out, should be helpful. For me it's just about having confidence in the approach, which can only come from understanding and also kind of trusting the opinion of from whom you are receiving the information. In this case, this pianist is extremely good and has had insanely good teachers (the 1hr lesson was appropriately expensive). The piece that was the focus of the lesson is her warm up piece and she can demolish it. I knew for this reason that she knows her poo poo, because this is a piece is the kind of piece that requires the right methods and will be permanently out of the reach of any piano players that don't know them. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Jul 24, 2013 |
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Jul 24, 2013 05:52
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Atomic Spud posted:I've gotta be honest here; while everything you've posted is very true, and very useful, it's not really groundbreaking or something music teachers don't want you to know. On the contrary, it is pretty much exactly what they want you to know. Pretty much the biggest part of music education from an individual standpoint is getting students to realize exactly this. A good chunk of an instructor's job is to give students tools so that when they practice, they can do exactly what you suggest with the "conscious practicing." But this is exactly what so many teachers do not know how to do or cannot do. So many teachers are just music critics, and give you no help with technique or practice methods. Even 'good ones.' My current applied music teacher is an insane pianist who was a child prodigy, attending Juliard at age 11. She's had many exceptional students including one recently that also wound up in Juliard. But as far as lessons go, she pretty much just listens to what I play and critiques it. She can point out every single wrong note (she has insane perfect pitch abilities) which is of course useful, except that I also know when I am playing a wrong note. I also know when stuff sounds like poo poo and is wrong, etc. but I never get any help with what the gently caress do I do to fix it. This is why I sought out a lesson from someone else, a 'second opinion' if you will. My applied teacher has floated some of these ideas my way before but never with the logic or understanding that I've needed to apply them in any meaningful way to my practice. And since I have no idea what is right, it's not like I know to tell her something's missing because I have no idea if something is or something isn't, and you tend to just trust your teacher and blame your failings on yourself. All I have is my frustration and confusion. I never really meant to present what I learned as some trick teachers don't want you to know. I had actually never had these ideas clearly or sensibly explained to me by any teacher of mine so that they actually made sense until now. I consider that explanation and logic to be something that's rare and therefore perhaps valuable enough not to just share with everyone on the internet for the same reason I don't pirate music. This other person I had a lesson with clearly has not only had these ideas floated to her but also has worked with them, and fleshed them out herself, added to them, applied them, and can personally demonstrate their effectiveness. She also probably has experience teaching them or has very good insight from her own learning experiences to relate to the learning experiences of others. This is a very valuable quality and I would hate to diminish it. I am genuinely surprised if they are more widespread then I thought. That doesn't mean I think they are some magical trick, just that they are not really fully understood by most teachers, or these teachers don't have the ability to properly explain them to their students. It's one thing to say, "Practice slow and don't make mistakes" as a recitation from some random pedagogical source, and quite another to explain the concept so that the student fully understands what you are saying. The problem with giving a student an order is that they can follow what you say until it breaks or doesn't give results, and then they are dead in the water which creates both frustration within them about the learning process and distrust of your merits as a teacher. Anyone can say something like this as a teacher and still not have a clear idea what it means. There are a lot of bad teachers out there and even good players who don't fully understand these concepts, or at least don't understand them well enough to explain them to others. Jazz Marimba posted:It really isn't something music teachers don't want to tell people because then they'll be out of a job, it's more that most people don't want to hear that they have to put *that much goddamn effort* into learning. Even most people that want to be musicians just don't have the motivation to sit down and do things at an arhythmic ~20bpm until they get it right, because all they see is the finished product and not all the work that went into it. I can't speak for others, but for me this is the complete opposite of true. If anyone is like me, they have endless motivation and are already willing to practice 12 hours a day (I would but my health doesn't permit it - so I'm working on my health until I can). For me it's just about confidence in a method that comes from understanding it, and also having results clearly demonstrated and not being a product of long-term faith. I am not going to spend lots of time doing something if it's not working, it doesn't make sense, it isn't getting results, and it's frustrating. No one would, except maybe a young child. I think it's more a feature of adult learners that for all of their motivation, they just can't follow orders because they are adults. There needs to be a dialog, and interaction, and some kind of abstract understanding.
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Jul 29, 2013 10:55
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More inspiration: Pages of Doom,  and Pages of Doom Conquered (Left to Right): No. 1 (perf. Marc-André Hamelin): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ohPzurDZzZ4&t=3380 No. 2 (perf. Valentina Lisitsa): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=EhEpvIpe-6s&t=559 No. 3/6 (perf. Marc-André Hamelin): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVacAeAThT8 No. 4 (perf. Marc-André Hamelin): http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL2517B9EDF8BC5B36&feature=player_detailpage&v=Py7BxB51OTA&t=369 No. 5 (perf. Marc-André Hamelin): http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL2517B9EDF8BC5B36&feature=player_detailpage&v=Py7BxB51OTA&t=286
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Jul 30, 2013 09:23
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For piano players here's an excellent source of inspiration. András Schiff, one of the best pianists alive today, lectures on all 32 Beethoven Sonatas. This was when he was performing and recording the entire cycle. Each lecture is quite long and packed with musical and historical goodness. http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/page/0,,1943867,00.html
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Aug 5, 2013 21:01
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Oh man, this is totally the first piano concerto I'm going to study:TheBandOffice posted:The video is showing up as removed for me. But I'm going to hazard a guess and say No. 2 or 5? Both of which are beautiful. The original was removed. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO Well here's Hamelin's version which is of course also amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGfoyEXZV3A The other one was even better though. Way better. Sad face. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Aug 31, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 06:06
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Now that I'm back at school my routine has 'settled' somewhat. I had been spending most of my time at the piano lately modifying my practice, rather than worrying about what I'm specifically practicing. However I will be performing this semester several times so I need to focus on preparing for those. 1) I spend at least 10-15 minutes during practice, and much more time out of practice, assessing my current situation with the instrument. This includes planning out my current session, analyzing the music I'm playing (working out fingerings, analyzing the harmonies, deciding what I will spend my time focusing on), etc. If I don't spend at least some time planning things, I will get lost pretty quickly. So I spend around this much time quietly thinking to myself and/or writing. I also take around 5-10 minutes off every hour of playing or so to reset this process and re-assess what I'm doing, as well as rest, stretch, drink water, use the restroom, eat a snack, etc. 2) For technique, I'm currently playing the Joseffy Exercises, various pieces from the Little Pischna, and scales, arpeggios, and chords. I'm also learning the Czerny Toccata Op. 92, which is a monstrous etude. The amount of time I spend on technique varies somewhat in each session, depending on how quickly I reach diminishing returns. The Toccata, the Joseffy exercises, or even the Pischna pieces, are all extremely taxing and they drain my concentration and energy rapidly. I have to measure myself to see how much of it I can stand before it becomes unhealthy and counter-productive. Typically, more than a half an hour to an hour of this work is more than I could ever stand in one session, and I would likely have to take a break and not touch these exercises for another day or longer. Then I might work on scales and arpeggios, or just take a break from technique depending on how I feel. I have no desire at all to ruin myself, and some of these exercises will be too difficult to practice without this kind of effort for a good, long while (friend pianist Cory once said about Joseffy: "Ow, those exercises hurt, lol. It took me like a year to find out how to make them not hurt.") 3) When working on repertoire, I spend all of my time drilling particular difficult sections. There is one piece with three presto cadenzas with runs - over the summer I spent all of my time working on those runs and didn't even bother with the rest of the piece. I find that every piece is highly irregular and 95% of your time should be devoted narrowly to a few areas. There is one Bach prelude where I have chosen to master insanely difficult finger substitutions and stretches just to achieve a very marginal increase in legato in a few bars. The rest of the piece has been flawless for awhile, but I have spent months of practice drilling those few bars (all 5 of them), and they are still not 'quite' up to speed with everything else (although thankfully they are within performing territory). If it is brand new I will analyze the piece, then I will apply the 'laser beam' approaches I've discussed earlier in this thread. Currently I'm working with a lot of older repertoire, much of which was not learned with such sophisticated learning insights, but that's life - I spend a lot of time reworking these pieces as best as I am able while trying not to lose the progress I have made. If it's a piece I am experienced with and almost ready to perform, typically I will start off practicing by playing through the piece once to establish a 'state of the piece' while paying attention to where the issues are. Then I will spend the rest of the time drilling those issues. If there is a troublesome mistake, I react according it's severity and try to establish where the problem lies. I might start by slowing the area down hands separate, bit by bit, until the mistake disappears. If this is not working very well, I will switch to practicing the area hands separately slowing down until I find an error-less tempo. In fact, most of the time I just go straight to solving the problems hands separately, because it's so much easier. Then I will spend time problem solving with various techniques and increasing the tempo as I go to see if my solutions are working. I will note that I do not use the metronome when working on my pieces this way, except in the problem solving process and only when it's necessary. In general, I don't practice rigidly with a metronome all of the time, although I know I need to use it more. I still haven't quite replaced that habit. However, in my head I have several set tempos to work from. I have a decent sense of rhythm and can set a tempo of 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 etc. BPMs manually in my head and stick with them when I practice and play. I can use them to solve problems sometimes but more often I will need to pull out the metronome to gradually increase tempos or to steady my playing. Naturally, as a result of old habits, my playing is very un-metronomic and of course sometimes could benefit from being more so. On the plus side, I have a natural and very advanced understanding of agogics in performance and practice - in my head I am constantly manipulating the rhythms, sostenuto, rubato, etc. of the music I am working on and for any given piece I have about a million different ways of subtly altering timing for musical effect. Playing rigidly according to a pulse is completely alien to my musical thinking, which is what has made it so difficult to accept using it all of the time. I need to use it more though for sure - I've noticed that my tempo can waver sometimes unacceptably. 4) When not practicing, nearly every moment of my time not sleeping (and relaxing, hanging out, whatever obviously) is in some way devoted to musical study. I sing in three different singing groups (chorale, church choir, a capella), I listen to and explore new music constantly, I arrange music and work with musical notation software, I'm studying musical theory and taking composition lessons, and very soon I will take a nose dive into composition itself in a competition coming up. I am working on music all of the time in my mind, imagining various ways of playing my pieces, listening to my favorite pieces, modifying pieces, and even trying to invent new ones, although I'm nowhere near there yet. I think the first thought I woke up to this morning was a fingering idea for a 3rd in a passage of one of the 9 piano pieces I'm working on. But yeah. All of this other stuff is critically important for me. Now that the summer is over I won't be spending 6 hours practicing every day, so these other avenues become a part of my extended practice away from the instrument. I feel like if I weren't involved in these other activities, my concentration and inspiration would wane and the quality of my musicianship would be low. I don't believe in just being an instrumentalist - your musicianship from history to theory needs to be total and complete and I am so glad to be working my way there in this wonderful music program.
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Sep 7, 2013 08:20
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Warchicken posted:"I have a good internal metronome", said every music student who couldn't play evenly if you put a gun to their head. Playing rigidly to a pulse and playing evenly are not the same thing. I've heard this same shpiel from countless students who all thought they didn't need to do it or whatever way you want to put 'but I don't waaaaaaannaaaaa'. I guarantee you that when I play rep, I likely use at least as much rubato, but when I practice? metronome. metronome. metronome. <insert semi-defensive response blah blah> Don't get me wrong, I do use the metronome and understand it's importance - I just use it sparingly and as a tool to assist my ear and sense of rhythm, not replace it. It's true that everyone can benefit from the use of the metronome, but some people have a different ear and brain than others and have a different experience in terms of how frequently they need this tool and how important it is in their learning style. Early on in my lessons I hated the metronome and resisted it for the wrong reasons, but now I understand it's uses and proper place in practice. I had pretty big tempo issues when I first started playing but these issues have gradually worked themselves out despite my 'infrequent' metronome use. I've found that my 'tempo-free' brain becomes more properly grounded over time automatically but it doesn't change how I experience or play music. I can't help if this is how it works for me, and it's hard to obsess over something that doesn't seem strictly necessary (for the time-being). The main issues come not from tempo primarily, but with pieces that are far above my level in technical demands. Fluid tempo in this case becomes a byproduct of vigorous note accuracy and incredibly disciplined practice of which 'tempo-ramping' is a part, but a late part and a very straightforward part. Despite improving a lot in this area, I'm still not satisfied however and have been gradually using the metronome more in practicing as I stated. The main issue for me is getting used to using the metronome in a process that's already full of variables. When confronted with a gazillion problems, steady tempo is just one, and they can't all be solved at the same time. I'm used to relying on internal tempos (or learning things out of time) to simplify learning difficult material, because using the metronome adds one more thing to concentrate on in a process already totally overwhelming me. I had been using the metronome here and there to 'calibrate' and rely on this calibration without the metronome on the whole time. Now I'm gradually increasing how frequently I use it. Or, if there's something that requires special attention, I will use the 'ramp up the tempo method'. A lot of the time I don't get that far however, because I cannot play things acceptably at any tempo. I have not viscerally experienced the value of using the 'ramp the tempo up' method all of the time in practice, but I know what I've read and heard that it's important and I know the enormous pitfall of relying on my own intuition. The way I use this method is discussed in that earlier post I made. A lot of the methods I'm using now do not require learning in strict time and in fact are best not because note accuracy, aural analysis, harmonic analysis, keyboard layout analysis, training various memories, etc. taxes your brain enough as it is and any tempo you would be playing at would be just stupidly slow (I do believe there really is such a thing as too slow, but yes, even 1/16th of the real tempo can be acceptable in some cases for slow practice). It takes time to change habits, but in the end the habits are a means to an end. My playing is improving quite rapidly and tempo fluctuation is rarely an issue anymore, so I'm content not to obsess over this fact of my practice (relatively infrequent metronome use). I'm a lot more worried about how there is never a piece for which I can solve all of the technical challenges before I'm forced to perform it or move on, which is frustrating like no other.
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Sep 7, 2013 23:03
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Another thought occurred to me while devouring a Rinaldi's Deli sandwich - the thought of using the metronome for tempo practice or rhythm practice. The metronome can be used to help with either one, but for me they are very separate things. I use the metronome RELIGIOUSLY to learn new rhythmic patterns that I am not familiar with. However this doesn't take very long (or at least, not repetitive daily practice in the manner otherwise discussed) and once I've internalized the feel of that pattern, I know how it sounds and so I know if I'm playing it correctly or not when I'm playing a section or piece at any tempo. I hear the way it's supposed to sound in my head and correct it or adjust it a such. The pitfall here of course is if you learn it or perceive it incorrectly, which was a problem when my music reading was abysmal, but not anymore as it's now acceptably mediocre. However, once you've internalized or can hear all of the rhythmic elements of a piece, then tempo really isn't such a big deal - it's just the backdrop to which those patterns are set. You can consciously increase or decrease this to get a sense of how these rhythmic things change, but once you have the rhythmic patterns locked in, the tempo is secondary and subject only to the demands of the context of musical expression. Rigid is expected in some case, rubato in others, and subtle agogics I believe in all cases or it's not music. Of course, the metronome is great for helping to keep this steady and getting a sense of how the patterns change subtly, but this groove or pocket sense is so strong for me that almost the only time I have a problem is when the patterns are new to me, or I don't have the technique to play it. When I first joined the A Capella group on campus and was doing jazz charts, it was a total nightmare with all of these syncopated rhythmic patterns I had never encountered. My reading is terrible, my sight singing is even worse (i.e. non-existent), my vocal technique was newbie, and these were difficult pieces - imagine the nightmare. However, there was really only one main problem to solve - how does that one pattern actually feel or sound? For this, it took a lot of work with the metronome to completely 'get it'. But once I got that, that was pretty much it. There's one other thing I can think of - in performance, I have to fight naturally against speeding up because of adrenaline. This again seems to be a separate issue. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Sep 8, 2013 |
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Sep 7, 2013 23:53
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Warchicken posted:Do you have a private teacher? I don't have to ask to know what they would say in response to all that, because it's the same thing I would say, and do, to all my students who say it. No one's experience is this simple though, because things aren't this simple. At some point you get stuck at a speed wall, and repeating something over and over with a metronome is more often NOT what you want to do in order to overcome it. For one thing, it's tiring and potentially injuring, and for another, it's inefficient. It's more efficient to apply counter-intuitive methods like spurts, rhythmic variations, rhythmic accents, etc., which are not in strict time. The motions for playing something faster change the same way the gaits of a horse change - they are different in quality, not quickness, to slower motions. The only way you will discover these motions is by experimenting pushing your speed. You need to experiment playing much faster in order to discover new motions (while avoiding ingraining mistakes of course). Also, no matter what you do, sometimes you will not be able to play something at a certain speed for awhile and no amount of repitition will get you there if your brain isn't ready. If you play super slowly and 100% accurately only with a metronome, you will never learn how to play faster. If you play faster only, you will ingrain too many mistakes. You have to find the right balance which is as close to no mistakes as possible, but mistakes are unavoidable to the learning process. Also, when building up the many layers that are a piece, sometimes you have to dispense with some to focus on others. In my case, sometimes I dispense with a metronomic tempo to focus more easily on the other insanely difficult things I am doing which would be impossible or incredibly inefficient if I included tempo in the huge equation (for that moment). Steady tempo is actually one of the things I'm least concerned with in learning pieces - it's very easy to do once you've solved the technical hurdles. And many aspects of solving technical hurdles are handled outside of tempo. edited: less blabbin', more coherency CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Sep 8, 2013 |
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Sep 8, 2013 01:40
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Warchicken posted:Potentially injuring? What? I have two private teachers, and I also I never said this. I said a metronome isn't sometimes required to keep tempo while practicing, and that's because it isn't. You can practice slowly and accurately without a metronome. I can't speak for other instruments, but for piano playing, a lot of problem solving is more easily done outside of time or without a metronome constantly clicking, and there is no disadvantage as long as you aren't making mistakes. List of times not to use a metronome: 1) You are practicing a very small section (a few notes) that doesn't neatly fit into a beat or crosses beats - there's no reason to practice this against a tempo unless you are insecure about the rhythm. Note that everything I'm saying here about metronomes and tempo doesn't apply to metronomes and rhythm. If you aren't completely solid about how to count a particular rhythmic pattern, then absolutely DO use a metronome until you understand it well enough to play it without a metronome. As long as you are not making mistakes, you don't immediately need to use a tempo counter while you isolate these small groups of notes - instead you can count a steady and slow internal beat or, set one with a metronome but then silence the metronome afterward to concentrate more on the technical issues (while also practicing to play without the metronome!). 2) You are practicing a section where you can already play most of it up to speed or already faster, in which case playing the whole thing metronomically is a waste of time. 3) You are using any of the methods I discussed in that one post I made about 'secret techniques' or whatever, except the part about what to do when all those layers are mastered and it's time to increase the tempo. 4) You are exploring new motions by playing faster, which is a prerequisite for getting better. These excursions are brief and not repeated over and over. In some cases a metronome can be used, but it's not required in all cases. 5) Anytime you are learning something extremely difficult and doing everything you want to do is not possible all at once, and setting an ultra ridiculously slow tempo is not helpful either. 6) In general, as C.C. Chang mentioned in his Fundamentals of Piano Practice, one should be weary of the pitfalls of slow practice while also knowing why it is indispensable. One of them is that slow practice takes a lot more time. If you spend too much time playing slowly, your rate of progress will be much slower, because you can practice something 6 times in one minute if it takes 10 seconds or 4 times if takes 15 seconds. It's true that you don't want to ingrain mistakes - you should try to find a balance as close to no mistakes as you can. 7) Finally, the practical world we live in is that we have time constraints on pieces as students. Sometimes we are faced with a choice of either accepting a certain degree of error or not playing the piece. Quoth my PRIVATE instructor Jonas, as I was explaining to him why I was progressing too slow on a piece, saying that I was going to play every single bar hands separately flawlessly at every tempo one click at a time, "Whoa, I mean that's great and everything man but, you'll never finish the piece!" The goal of practicing without mistakes is actually not so much that you don't make mistakes (which of course is big), but rather that you cultivate habits of increasing accuracy over time. Mistakes in performances don't matter that much as a student, but you want to ingrain vigorous habits for later on in your career and learn as you go to make less of them. This is because in the real world mistakes in performances are very bad. However, whether you learned mistakes or made them in your old repertoire doesn't matter a whole lot and in general won't hinder your progress except that you need to learn to be more careful practicing. It's not like your whole technique goes down the drain because you weren't super accurate in your first year. Just make sure you solve that and improve your practice over time to save you pain and suffering when mistakes start to matter a lot. quote:Yes, the motions are sometimes different for slow playing versus fast playing, but again, if you learn to play a piece at every tempo, you will discover a huge amount more ways to be expressive with it in the process, and what works and what doesn't. That's not the issue I'm talking about though. I'm saying that as you move from gait to gait, the motions change, so you can't just sit there and try to increase the metronome incrementally. You will never get better. I agree with the point that you want to learn to master every 'gait' and in that sense, you can master 'tempos'. If that's what you are talking about, then that makes sense. If you are saying something along the lines of, 'Master 71bpm, then master 72bpm', then that makes no sense. Maybe I was wrong to assume that. quote:Also, practicing the way I am saying is far, far more efficient. You can spend four hours practicing at tempo and go nowhere, or maybe you'll get somewhere, or you can spend one hour practicing slowly with a metronome and definitely improve a drastic amount. Nowhere have I docked slow practice in general. I agree it's extremely important - but you can also practice slowly and accurately and not be using a metronome. quote:I don't mean to just keep arguing about this in an annoying fashion or anything, I simply can't agree with someone saying not use a metronome for 90%+ of your practice time. I use the metronome far less than this, mostly because what I am working on is so far above my level. I'm 27 years old, and I started playing when I was 26. The repertoire I'm working on is something most people would be working on in double or triple (or much more even) the time I've been studying piano seriously. It's most often the case that I can't use the metronome practicing what I'm playing because it's riddled with technical difficulties that are too difficult to be set in time, and inter-spaced with things that are not worth practicing. Some examples: Fantasia in D Minor, Mozart This piece has three cadenzas and one mini cadenza at a presto tempo. The rest of the piece is trivially easy technically, although it still takes some degree of time and effort to learn and is not 'easy' to make very musical and beautiful of course. But for my purposes it's worth dedicating less than 10% of my time towards. However the cadenzas are scalar flourishes best played at least 140-160bpm. You can't really go much slower than that without them being completely devoid of their musical function, therefore meaning you are not playing the piece anymore. When practicing these, setting a metronome and playing them over and over while slightly increasing the tempo is a gigantic waste of time, because certain parts of the scale (the runs with consecutive fingers) are easy to play very quickly while some note combinations (finger crosses) are maddenly difficult to play, with the speed wall for these starting as low as 80bpm for most people (92-100ish bpm for me). It takes a long time to develop the technique to play scales rapidly, but the fastest way to get there is not tempo-rampin'. You are better off practicing those little note combinations over and over with various techniques and exercises. The most simple is a spurt, which is not practiced with a metronome and would be worthless if it was. Various accents, rhythmic exercises, etc. are also called for and while they can be played with a metronome, there's no big need here to be incredibly precise with the tempo. These cadenzas are structures that must be built piece by piece, and this is not the time to be fretting about the tempo because learning speedy motions is more primary. Of course, sometimes I will bust out the metronome and play the whole passage just to see where I'm at, or I will deliberately use the metronome if I am interested AT THAT POINT in a clean tempo because perhaps I feel it might be getting sloppy. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Sep 10, 2013 |
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Sep 10, 2013 07:00
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Warchicken posted:Why would it be worthless if it was practiced with a metronome? I'm talking about a lot of different things, so you have to say to what thing you are applying this statement. Which techniques and exercises? I acknowledge the usefulness of using a metronome in many situations, such as 1) Practicing fluidity between sections or groups of notes 2) Solidifying unfamiliar rhythmic patterns 3) Assessing where your current speed wall exists and in what groups of notes 4) As a crucial final element of finishing a piece or passage, you must be able to play through it evenly with a metronome at gradually increasing tempos However, there are layers below these that are even more fundamental, which I listed above. If you are doing a spurt, there's no need to use a metronome a lot of the time - you are simply using a burst of indeterminate speed. You could use a metronome and practice that burst of indeterminate speed at a certain speed, but there's no particular need to. You are simply investigating ways to play faster - you aren't practicing over and over at this speed. I would go so far as to say that a metronome here is perfectly fine and can be quite useful in some instances, however I feel that in some other cases it's not required and a burden. In the case of scales, you are interested in exploring the fastest bursts of speed possible, because there is no limit for how fast you want to play scales. The principle of 'try to play as fast as you can' is fine on things like finger crossings. Mistakes are fine, because you barely repeat it and don't ingrain it. Mistakes are how you figure out what motions fail and what succeed. Then, once you've figured out some good approaches, you can bring in the metronome and try to make them fluid. You don't use the metronome at first because you can't - you need to solve more fundamental problems first. For things like rhythmic exercises, I will give you an example - the Long, Short, Long exercise. You can set a metronome if you want and say that the Long will be a triple dotted half note and the short a sixteenth, but you don't have to play it this way for the exercise to be effective. It doesn't matter how long the long is or how short the short is to a pretty lenient degree - the long just needs to be LONG and the short needs to be a burst of speed. Another important point is the value of the metronome based on rhythmic complexity. The Czerny Toccata I am studying is almost 95% sixteenth notes - it's a rhythmically uncomplicated study of double thirds, double fourths, double sixths, massive leaps, and all around awkward stretches and torture. Playing evenly in this context without a metronome is trivial and is not really the major difficulty here, and is also not needed right away when solving the other enormous difficulties in even one bar hands separately. Likewise, in the Fantasia in D, in the first place the notes in the cadenza are all sixteenths so playing them evenly is all technique not tempo, in the second place they are grouped irregularly so if you want to bring those contours out practicing with a metronome is fiercely impractical and practicing them WITH a metronome will be ingraining errors, and finally the sixteenths are supposed to be played 'somewhat' freely in time as the final result. If I was working on something with any rhythmical complexity at all, you wouldn't see me practicing it WITHOUT the metronome because I would never want to ingrain the rhythms improperly - I'm a score following fanatic (which is why I also can't stand playing at the wrong tempo, but anyway...) Which brings me to the final point about playing in all tempos on demand. I'm not sure I totally agree with this. Yes, if you practice outside of tempo too much, you might ingrain too much unevenness in your playing which is an enormous pitfall and must be checked. However, what is also an error is playing any piece in the tempo that is not the appropriate tempo. In other words, practicing an Allegro piece ultra slowly all the time is training your ear to hear it incorrectly and training yourself to play it at a gait which is not the actual gait of the piece. It is necessary to build your way towards playing it at higher speeds, but in its own way it's a kind of pitfall you can get sucked into. These cadenzas are an example of this - to really play them as they are, you have to practice and explore playing them freely while respecting the contours (groupings of notes) the fact that they are fast (therefore you really need to get on top of those motions and quickly) and the fact that evenness would be more easily achieved after you've mastered the technical hurdles. Trust me, I've tried tempo ramping these cadenzas and it fails every time and wastes tons of time. When I worked on them, I just drilled the small groups of notes that required finger crossings or anything that isn't a run of consecutive fingers. I used rhythmic exercises of accenting every sixteenth (which can be done with a metronome but is awkward), then I did Long, Short, Long exercises, and finally THEN I started using the metronome in combination with these methods to measure my progress to the desired bpm and to make sure things are fluid and even. Using all of these things together, I have been able to improve my scalar technique to these higher ranges (140-160bpm) in just a couple of months (ALMOST there, not quite super solid), whereas this is something that would take a normal student perhaps 3-5 years of practicing scales every day hands together with the tempo-ramping method. Playing scales this fast is a huge milestone for a pianist, believe me. There are many, many players who never ever get there because they follow intuitive methods - it's not something that's possible without the methods I've just discussed.
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Sep 10, 2013 21:06
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L. Ron Mexico posted:You sure write a whole lot of words and grandiose statements about the correct ways to practice for a guy who's played a grand total of one year Just sharing my thoughts, feel free to correct me. My methods are working for me, and if someone can't clearly explain why theirs are better, I won't accept it at face value. Warchicken posted:While talking to an instructor of music at a university who has a masters degree in music. I hate to just "pull rank" on someone like that but I don't know what else to say. If you don't see the value in being intimately familiar with every tempo, all I can say is that you will eventually mature a bit as a musician and leave it at that. There's nothing wrong with pulling rank. I respect your point of view regardless. I just brought up the fact that I don't use the metronome that much, and gave my reasons why when called out. It's as simple as that. I did that for a reason - a discussion with someone who knows more than me can help me clarify why I need to adjust my practice more. But I will strongly defend something if I think it's correct - if I don't, then I will be less likely to think it's wrong if someone gives me reason to think it's wrong later. quote:A piece that is straight sixteenths is exactly the type that must, must must be perfected with a metronome, because if there is any irregularity, it will be unbelievably obvious, and I don't mean rubato, I mean accidental unevenness or hesitation at more difficult sections. Maybe you think is "trivial" to do this but nobody else on the whole planet agrees with you except for other people who erroneously believe they have mastered playing even straight 8ths or 16ths after one year of playing. Personally I'm halfway through my dma and I would never say such a thing because my professor would probably laugh in my face. My point wasn't you learn the whole piece without the metronome and pray for evenness. The point was that evenness is one part of a massive structure that is this etude, and that maybe there are more primary concerns than playing at a steady tempo - at least in the near term. quote:"Mistakes are how you figure out what motions fail and what succeed." What? No,mistakes are you playing too quickly to use proper technique, and loving up as a result. If I make a mistake, I stop and slow down my metronome, get it right, and bring it up to tempo. That's what I said you should do, except I didn't articulate it very well. If you make a mistake, you don't keep making mistakes over and over and stay at the fast tempo. You slow back down and try to learn new motions from these experiments. However, if you try to play something faster and push your technique, mistakes will inevitably happen because you are doing something you haven't done before and these help you learn. If you bring the speed down every time you make a mistake and don't use it somehow, you won't ever discover faster ways of playing. I agree that you can incrementally increase the tempo of something to a point and stay totally accurate, but past a certain point it doesn't work very well because your old motions are no longer adequate. When you hit these speed walls, you need other methods than just increasing the tempo with the metronome. quote:"In the case of scales, you are interested in the fastest burst of speed possible.." NO! Absolutely not. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are interested in the smoothest, most accurate speed you can play them and not one click faster. You are looking to build your knowledge of the key. You are looking to ingrain technical patterns into your playing. Speed is useless. Nobody cares how fast you can play your scales. I can rip up and down my scales - all of them - as fast as you can set the metronome, but do I? Hell no, I go over them all daily at the fastest tempo at which I can play them smoothly and evenly and with my best tone. I might get drunk or high and gently caress around but that's not practicing, that's loving around. Taking what I said right out of context. I said in the grand scheme of things, you are interested in improving your scale technique to the fastest it's possible to humanly play, yes? The key to doing this is to solve the difficult areas of the scale. Consecutive fingers are easy. I can already play a consecutive downwards 5 finger pattern at 300bpm. If I can solve the problem of crossing the thumb over and under, boom, 300bpm scales (or something like that scales.) There's no downside to trying to push your technique here. If you aren't making mistakes over and over, you are fine. One of the advantages of doing these spurts is that it's a lot easier to play very small groups of notes (even just two notes forming an interval) very quickly. In fact there is a technique called chord attack where you play those notes as an interval, then slow down from 'infinite speed'! A technique that clearly doesn't use a metronome. With small spurts you can experiment with either no risk or extremely low risk of ingraining mistakes (and only if you do a bunch mindlessly in a row). quote:I really am not trying to sound like I am dismissing your views out of hand - I am not. But you are giving out bad advice that could honestly really do damage to students just beginning, and you really don't have the experience to back that advice up. This is great to say, but so far your arguments for your point of view have not been clear to me, because you haven't done a great job of directly addressing what I'm saying. Instead you keep taking things I say out of context and then attacking them which is great, but you aren't actually attacking my point. quote:This in particular is just so egregiously wrong. "The" correct tempo? Exactly how many pieces in the world do you believe have a single correct tempo? Maybe some - not all or even most - modern music might, but only those pieces with it exactly prescribed. Tempo markings like "andante" have relativistic meanings - all that word means is 'walking pace'. There is no prescribed speed for any such marking at all. I have played the same Beethoven symphony three times and all three times the tempos were different. I have played Mahler 5 and heard entirely different tempos from our orchestra, from Chicago Phil, from London symphony, et cetera. Mendellsohns violin concerto? Holy poo poo don't even get me started on these violinists and their loving tempos. So you don't play piano. The instruments and their mechanics are fairly different, and this may explain the gap in our understanding. quote:Plus, why would playing a fast piece slow somehow screw up my playing it fast? Why can't I just do both? If I decide to play a fast piece slow I will find a way to make it authentically expressive that I may or may not somehow use while playing it fast. But it is my choice as the performer to make - frankly, if the composer wants to come yell at me for not playing it exactly how he wanted me to then he can climb up out of his grave and tell me himself. If he wanted an exact tempo marking he should have added one Because you aren't playing the piece correctly. It's that simple. To learn to play the piece correctly, you have to learn it at the correct tempo. There are a wide range of interpretations, but the cadenzas marked "Presto" must be played Presto. Obviously, if you want flexibility in tempo, then you should learn to play it any tempo you wish. It's smart to do this anyway, in the sense that you don't just skip the intermediate stages. However, it IS a pitfall to practice too much at a slow speed. We have finite time on this earth and if our intention is to play the actual piece as it's composer intended we can't spend more time than is strictly necessary at the slower speeds. At least I can't. I started at 26 and I'm catching up with kids who are playing what I'm playing at 8 years old (although it's unmusical and robotic as poo poo, at least). quote:Please don't be offended by my words by the way. I have simply heard all this before, and everyone who says it - well, they aren't exactly winning auditions. It may be that you aren't familiar with the technique exercises I'm discussing. My piano teacher at school has a doctorate from Juliard and went there when she was 11 years old as a child prodigy. She's an incredible concert pianist and one of the best teachers in the region. She of course emphasizes the importance of slow practice and using the metronome, but she demonstrated certain exercises that don't use the metronome. The repertoire she has given me is so hard, that at first I couldn't even play one hand at 1/12th the tempo. I had to just struggle to get the notes under my fingers before I could even think about playing a metronome. In piano practice, especially hands together practice, things can be so hard that playing against a tempo is practically impossible - at least for some time. It would require something literally like 5pm, because it's THAT hard to put the notes together. No human brain can work this slow. My other private teacher with whom I do composition lessons mainly now knows dozens of classical musicians in the area and talks to them frequently about their habits, and when I was showing him how slow I practiced he said, "This tempo is too slow for a human brain. Most good classical musicians can't practice successfully this slowly. You have to speed it up." Then I said I couldn't, because it was too difficult. So he suggested playing it hands separately (something I mentioned already) and I could speed it up a bit however I was barely there. At this point I just need to get the notes and patterns more familiar. This is my life as a piano player most of the time. He believes practicing at 20bpm or slower is a waste of time, and practicing against a super slow beat can ingrain habits of missing the beat because the brain can't stay focused between vast gaps of time. Unfortunately, that's just how slow some of this poo poo is. The points I made mainly pertain to these situations, and also particular exercises. For everything else though, of course you need the metronome. When you are at the stage where you can comfortably play the piece at a reasonable tempo (40bpm or something), then yes, the basic method of playing for evenness and gradually increase the tempo is fine. That's the very LAST step of that massive bullet point list of practice methods I made in an earlier post which are notes directly from another highly successful concert pianist with whom I had one very expensive lesson. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 07:17
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I just try to learn what I'm being given to learn. I don't think I am being given these pieces without a reason - my progress has been very rapid as an adult learner. The only thing that hasn't caught up is my practice habits, but that's catching up too. Funding cuts have been made to our music program and I have limited semesters before I can no longer participate in it. I have to realistic about how much time I reasonably have before I would have to start pondering doing something else or attempt to play professionally or semi-professionally. This is why I take an intense interest in optimal practice methods. I've acknowledged here and elsewhere that gradual progress is by far the best and most efficient - provided there is time. I really appreciate the discussions and criticisms though. Classical musicians keep on truckin'
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Sep 12, 2013 06:57
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I wanted to share these as inspiration. My teacher, Lois Roberts, is rather enigmatic in the sense that she's super humanly talented at the piano but chooses to be low key. I recently found out that she played Gaspard de la Nuit and the Goldberg Variations in a college concert back in 1990 and that a friend of mine had taken the hard copies and converted them to mp3s. I've scrounged them up and they are, if not the best recordings of those pieces I've heard anywhere (live or otherwise), they are tied with the greats. Yet this woman is teaching at community college instead of being the female Hamelin. I reiterate how lucky again I am to be a part of this music program! I wish I had all of them but I will have to take more to dig up the rest. Lois Roberts Ravel Gaspard de la Nuit - Ondine https://soundcloud.com/cgobeille/33-track-33 Gaspard de la Nuit - Scarbo https://soundcloud.com/cgobeille/lois-roberts-ravel-gaspard-de Bach Goldberg Variations - Var. 1 https://soundcloud.com/cgobeille/lois-roberts-j-s-bach-goldberg Goldberg Variations - Aria https://soundcloud.com/cgobeille/lois-roberts-plays-bach
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Sep 15, 2013 07:44
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After conquering the whole repertoire and fully maturing as a pianist, Hamelin has now become a monster of live performance and a player of his own transcriptions. A modern-day Liszt! Infinite inspiration contained within. Gabriel Fauré http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-9ls5MCLlQ - Impromptu No.2, Op.31 & Barcarolle No.3 Op.42 Paul de Schlözer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJYuwhU0qZE - Etude in A flat, Op.1 No.2 Marc-André Hamelin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8memPmhpIA - Triple Etude, perf. Marc-André Hamelin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1przkk5tA - Variations on a theme by Paginini http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XLbOw6WLS0 - Chopin 'Minute Waltz" (hehe)
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Sep 21, 2013 06:08
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I actually agree with most of what you and warchicken are saying. In terms of making the piece solid, you need to use the tempo ramping method at some point - it's the only way to make it completely solid. In an earlier post I explained this was the final process in learning a piece: CowOnCrack posted:Here are examples of what I learned. Before playing any notes, prepare your hands to play the notes by raising your wrists (in this particular piece this is valid). Visualize the note on the key before you play it and exactly how the motion will look. Try to access your kinesthetic memory and experience how the motion will feel before doing it. If possible, try to hear the note or sing it before you play it. Use the score to know exactly what you play next. Reference the score for every single note in this method and develop a photographic memory of the score (if you do this a ton for every note anyone can get good at this). After doing all of this mental exercise, only when you are 100% certain that what you are playing next will be correct do you execute the motion to strike the note. Bring your fingers down, strike the key, and do not allow the finger to collapse. Then, after the keystroke, immediately consciously relax. Rinse and repeat. Do this for every single note. That way when you learn it, it will be 100% accurate plus you will be training the method for total accuracy. It takes forever, but it's not even close to being over. You can do this method except instead of playing one note, play two in a row and hold one for a very long time while making the other short (again this for a piece that is extremely fast and just groups of sixteenths). Then do 3 notes and 4 notes in row. If you do everything written above, it will be awhile before you can do 3 or 4 notes in a row because it requires intense concentration and the ability to visualize into the future before playing. I found when I first tried that I was totally mindfucked. However there are some steps to get there because playing in time is simply impossible or impractical for awhile. The concert pianist I was studying with (named Yana) never taught me to do any of these initial steps in the first paragraph with the metronome, but she did emphasize very strongly that once you can play the whole piece at a very slow basic tempo you are ready for the 1-click-at-a-time approach. So I have to continue to disagree with using the metronome for every single thing. You can use a metronome for any kind of playing, the question is whether you need to do so for the same results in some cases. I guess a good argument is - why not? I don't have a great answer, except that if I don't feel I strictly need it for what I'm doing I'd rather not use it, especially if it's less than practical. I still believe that sometimes what you are working on is so difficult that using a metronome is impractical for a period of time because below around 40bpm, you can't concentrate on the pulse long enough to not make mistakes, and at some point you can't use rhythmic subdivisions. I suppose with the Czerny Toccata, you could set the metronome to 60 and treat it as a 1/64th note and you'd get 2 seconds per beat, but that would still be too fast to learn the piece hands together. It takes me 10 seconds or more to pause and learn where to place my hands for the next sixteenth note. Why use a metronome until I can play the whole piece at a steady tempo, which would require building the piece first note by note, then bar by bar at a very slow tempo? It takes probably months just to get to that point and a metronome won't always be useful for every step. However, once I can play the whole piece through at say, sixteenth = 100 or so, then I would always use the method you describe. The other point is one I made earlier, in terms of discovering how to play faster. I still feel that learning to play faster is not simply a function of ramping up the tempo. When you have to switch gaits to a new speed, all of your previous experience at slower tempos won't help you, and you can't set the tempo faster because you won't be able to perform that motion. You have to step outside of the tempo for a moment and find a better motion. Then, like you said, you have to practice those motions in slow motion and then speed it up. I agree with this. But you need to find out what those motions are. No one knows them from birth. And you will make a few mistakes searching for them. Just don't repeat and ingrain the mistakes. I completely and totally agree with the "No Mistakes Ever Rule", just not really fully convinced of "All Metronome All Day Rule". A final point is I don't care how I rank in comparison to other musicians, I just know that I am starting late in life and have less time and an experience deficit. I have time, but not time to waste practicing inefficiently. If I'm not fully convinced in a practice method I won't use it. My experience with using a metronome when learning very difficult pieces for the first time is that it's pointless until the notes are basically there which takes a long while. My experience when doing these various drills is that there is no particular need to use it in many of them, although this thread has helped me to see how it could be used in more drills than I thought perhaps with better results. It isn't just that I'm too lazy to use the metronome and haven't tried it, it's that I have tried it and from experience I can say I waste time and don't achieve anything more than if I did not use it. However, I continue to push myself to use it more and use it in better ways because I'm always interested in expanding the uses of the tools at my disposal. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Sep 24, 2013 |
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Sep 24, 2013 05:57
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Thanks for all the advice. I readily admit that I'm a complete lazy bum when it comes to sight reading and my reading is miserably awful. It's just so painful. Right now I'm working through Bartok's Microkosmos which are so easy that no one can screw them up (I screw them up hands separate.) Because your reading can be god awful and still learn pieces of any difficulty (because you are working so slow anyway) you can really get sucked into the trap of having awful reading. It takes a lot of conscious effort to force yourself to learn it, but sight reading new music easily is by far the most useful and profitable skill for a musician. It has to be the most valuable skill to have in the music market. If your reading is godlike, you can be a studio musician where you come in, they give you a piece of music, and you play it on the first take. Then walk out with $$$. I need massive work there but now I don't practice without sight reading for 30 minutes.
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Sep 25, 2013 02:59
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I wanted to recommend the Joseffy Exercises, particularly the trills, to all pianists. They can be found here: http://imslp.org/wiki/School_of_Advanced_Piano_Playing_(Joseffy,_Rafael) The Trill exercises are #4, with ones for 12, 23, 34, and 45. They are on page 16 of the PDF. These exercises do so many different things it's difficult to list them all. If you can work through this whole book you'll be cracking advanced romantic repertoire in no time. Another excellent set of exercises are these: http://www.amazon.com/Little-Pischna-48-Practice-Pieces/dp/0793553121/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1380482249&sr=8-2&keywords=pischna http://www.amazon.com/Pischna-Techn...eywords=pischna Despite being called the "Little Pischna", the first one I listed is proving to be just fine for me. For scales, I practice them several ways: 1) 4 octaves, boring 2) In rhythmic groups of 1, 2s, 3s, 4s, and 5s, at the same tempo 3) Grand form - up two octaves parallel, two octaves contrary, up two octaves parallel, down two octaves parallel, two octaves contrary, down two octaves parallel. Looks and sounds cool, and lets you practice contrary and parallel in one go. 4) Rhythmic accents, short long, off beats, etc. 5) Very loud, very slow articulation 6) Musically - to practice dynamics, articulation, phrasing, tone color, rubato Arpeggios, more or less the same deal, although they are difficult to do as many things with as scales. Chords, play them all. It's fun to just play through triads, cadences, triads with the octave, dominants, diminished chords in all in versions and keys - just bang around for awhile and learn the topography. Maybe come up with some harmonic ideas for a composition, and solidify the various fingerings and comfortable hand positions for each configuration. For sight reading, I still suck at Mikrokosmos :/ For tortuous etude-ness, this one is hard to beat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_0u9dLCRRY Hope this helps. Oh, and use a metronome!
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Sep 29, 2013 20:25
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Definitely rest. You can only improve so much so fast anyway and if you're like me you hit your weekly point of rapidly diminishing returns in a few day. Also, practicing too much without proper rest and regeneration results in slower and more painful progress, not to mention strain and possible injury.
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Oct 8, 2013 17:46
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In addition to just sight reading music more, there is a very neglected point about how to read music better. It's to know the elements of music and how it's constructed and focus on them separately. Early on, when I was first learning how to sight read, even the simplest exercises and pieces were too hard for me. I was told to start at a slow enough tempo that I could play through without mistakes and keep going, but I would set the slowest tempo imaginable in my head and still gently caress up very quickly. It was a painful, boring and miserable chore that seemed to go nowhere and drained all of my concentration away. It also made me conclude that reading was loving impossible the way it was being taught to me and I was better off spending that time working from ear and muscle memory to make progress in whatever pieces were being thrown at me. Then I discovered that this approach is actually retarded. If you think about it, a piece of music no matter how simple is actually a lot of elements combined. Here's a possible list: 1) Reading the pitches on the clef very well. 2) Knowing and recognizing the many (but still practically finite!) rhythmic patterns that they fall into, both visually on the staff and how they feel / sound in your mind 3) There are potentially two lines going on at once in different clefs - it's like reading two sentences of English at once 4) Not just 'knowing' but actually fully comprehending the key and time signatures in terms of practically playing in them 5) The challenge of playing your instrument in real time while negotiating with technique and all of the other millions of issues that come with this, WHILE your brain is occupied with all that previous poo poo. And that's just to play it at all, let alone with any of the other markings on the score, and let alone in any realistic context at the right tempo on demand in a way that could actually be called making music. This is very loving hard to do, and I think trying to do it right off the bat is silly. Why they would have anyone start with a full piece of music, no matter how simple, is beyond me. I actually got better at reading by studying theory first. In first semester theory, we studied the elements of music (clefs, time signatures, pitch notation, keys and key signatures, melody, harmony, tempo, rhythm, etc.), ear training (which involved interval identification, melodic dictation, rhythmic dictation, sight singing, and rhythm reading), and basic harmonic theory involving SATB voice leading. It was a very vigorous and challenging class but actually, I found that whole class to be a lot easier and less painful then trying to sit through and sight read even one piece of easy / intermediate music, because it was being presented in manageable chunks and built from the ground up. And I could learn it all separate from the complications of instrumental technique. When I joined the Chorale, I couldn't sight sing for poo poo initially and I am still very terrible (because it still requires controlling an instrument that I had never used my whole life) and so I was tempted to fall into learning by ear and memory which I actually did for awhile. It was very stressful because I would spend hours and hours memorizing all of the music and if my memory ever failed me or I got tripped up on a transition or awkward next note, I would be hosed. Because of my hard work I was still able to be one of the better singers. However, what allowed me to improve was taking a sight singing class where before singing any melodies we drilled the hell out of scales and learning how to hear notes in relation to the scale, to the triad, and to the dominant chord. We also looked only at rhythms for a long time. So, instead of putting a Vivaldi movement in front of me (which is what Chorale did) I got focused practice on the elements that make up sight singing. Put all of this together, and with barely practicing sight reading at all for my instrument (piano), I can now sit down with a new piece of music and do much, much, much better. I can sight read right hand melodies from Bach's two-part inventions and randomly throw in the left hand where it's straight forward to do so. For homophonic pieces (chords + melody), I can sight read early / intermediate pieces at a slow tempo. With singing, I can see something and holy poo poo, I can actually sing along and get most of the notes right. Having never had sung in a choir and being alongside people who have been sight singing their whole lives, I'm was like LMAO this poo poo is so loving easy when you can just read the music. Step once into my nightmare world where I spend hours memorizing and you just sit here reading a page and hearing the notes already. How was it possible? Because I focused and worked on all of these disparate chunks one at a time, and now instead of figuring out 10 things at once when sight reading, 80% of it is worked out already and the other 20% is negotiating the technique of being able to put your hands here or there or tell your vocal chords to do this, which makes it realistic NOW to start learning to sight read easy pieces and exercises. So yeah. Just to even play simple music is, in my opinion, a ridiculous goal for a bad or new reader. Until you know all the basic rhythmic patterns, until you can tell the inversion of a triad on staff paper with just a glance, and until you can read music in terms of logical sentences and chunks instead of one note at a time, you will never even be able to START learning to sight read. And always, a complete musical education is a must, even if you just get a little dab of theory and this or that. You can't be a successful instrumentalist if all you do is just play an instrument. Seriously. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Oct 21, 2013 |
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Oct 19, 2013 07:22
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Don't worry, if you can conquer nerves in some situations you can do so in all situations! You just need to practice those situations as often as you can. Just be careful about auditioning for everything because you might get in! I've just started succeeding in working on my own nerve problems. It took some time to figure out what my main problem was while performing - staying focused. The solution I found is to keep my mind busy with planning the piece out and consciously thinking ahead of the music. If I let that inner dialog go silent, it's replaced by anxiety instead, which isn't very helpful for staying on task. This is similar to TheBandOffice and his tunes. I think this problem of not being focused comes from my 'unconscious practice playing habits' that I had before I switched to intensely focused practice which I describe in an earlier post. After doing this and thinking about some previous bad performances, the problem and it's solution became clear. Before in performances I had let muscle memory go and do it's thing, as in practice. Now I am thinking intensely about what I am playing all of the time. Where am I going next? Where are the trouble issues that I can take time on, and where are the parts where I can chill and shape the music more? Just by keeping my mind thinking about these things, I avoid having that space filled entirely by anxiety. Also, I really recommend thinking about the audience listening and being moved and motivated to make their experience as enjoyable as possible. When practicing for hours and hours, it's easy to get sucked into playing for yourself. Instead, always imagine there is some every day person (or perhaps someone you care deeply about) listening to your playing and try to make it as wonderful as you can for them. This also gives you something else wonderful to think about. For myself, it would have been nice to figure out these problems sooner, and I think if I were teaching a performance class I would have students perform every day so they can try more solutions and learn from mistakes. The Jazz combos for example around here are all very comfortable on stage because they perform dozens of times a semester, whereas a classical soloist performs just twice in class so there is this added pressure both of getting it right and knowing you have just one opportunity to work on performance anxiety.
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Nov 3, 2013 22:16
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BRAAAAAAAINS posted:Before reading the entirety of your post I was just about to suggest doing scales with a drone, but seeing as you are already doing that I guess my suggestion is to keep at it! I find that my own problem with intonation is that my pitch is strictly relative, I couldn't name a note I hear for the life of me, but I find it's relative intervals with a fairly decent accuracy while playing. I'm curious, is your pitch memory any good? I thought I couldn't improve my pitch skills until I gave it a try using the concept of melody triggers. I can remember tunes fairly well on key, and I try to have a tune for every note. With hours and hours of practice, I worked up to the point where I can hear a note, mirror it internally, look up the corresponding tune, and then know what note it is because I know the tune begins on that note. Of course, it's dependent entirely in pitch memory rather than some instant recognition or sensation, and no memory is infallible. I practiced it a poo poo ton and it was like doing a bunch of math in my brain, cross checking and verifying poo poo. Before I had a solid tune for every note, I would have to settle with knowing a few notes and using relative pitch skills to cross reference and check poo poo to come up with an answer, and I would be spectacularly wrong a lot of the time. But with practice, these skills and my pitch memory itself improved. After hours and hours of mental practice and using software, eventually I was able to get a tune for every note and reliably remember it, then I expanded from one octave to two, then the whole piano, and now going for multiple notes played at once. I have a CD of my tunes that I burned and listen to from time to time in my car to keep my brain 'tuned' and to keep these memory devices close at hand. Now I'm a bad rear end at identifying notes and I don't give a poo poo if something is out of tune, and can adjust my pitch skills relatively to whatever I want. For example, I'm not fixed at thinking one thing is an "A", I can take any tune I remember well and call it whatever I want. So I can tune myself to whatever temperament I want using the same methods. It's like the best of both worlds. Don't think I'll ever be as good as this one girl though who sees colors and poo poo for every note, but then again when stuff is out of tune it drives her crazy. It will probably take a lot of mental practice to maintain it but that's happening on it's own while I do music stuff for 14 hours a day. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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Nov 28, 2013 04:07
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A big part of nerves is not being totally comfortable with a piece, I've noticed. I aced my juries, mainly because I played the piece I've been playing since the summer before, and because I practiced playing it from start to finish with no stops like twenty times before performing it. The problem is that truly polishing a piece to perfection is rarely a luxury students enjoy, as most repertoire is beyond your level in order to improve your technique. I still wasn't totally, completely, and utterly polished with my jury piece for example, but about 80% there. Probably another two months and I would have considered it 'concert ready'. Of course even 80% of 'concert ready' means the piece is very far indeed. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Dec 17, 2013 |
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Dec 17, 2013 11:27
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BRAAAAAAAINS posted:I solved it. Congratulations musician! You have successfully navigated yet another hurdle on the road to infinite mastery! If it makes you feel better, I've been practicing these particular 4 bars for six months and I still can't play them to tempo. They do sound pretty bad rear end though - 3 voices connected totally legato in one hand with a different tone and dynamic shaping for each voice, with the soprano forming a duet with the tenor in the left hand. Made possible by insan-o stretches and finger substitutions, as well as a zealous dedication to Bach.
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Jan 7, 2014 06:44
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My teacher gave me a copy of her Julliard newsletter and there was an article about Alfred Schnittke being featured at the Focus festival. About time this stellar 20th century composer got some recognition. Here are some of my favorite inspirational keyboard works of his: Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) Piano Concerto (1960) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy2SY5H4AFQ Concerto for Piano and Strings (1979) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vyCc_jFidw Hard to decide between Shostakovich and Schnittke for my favorite 20th century composer, but probably Schnittke for his unique genius.
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Jan 30, 2014 06:23
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I got to perform in my first master class today. I used to feel great about my excuse that the pianos at my school suck, therefore I can't produce that great of a sound on them. Then a professional concert pianist sits down and sight reads the piece I just played at my class piano. The first phrase she plays sounds better than any phrase I've ever played on that piano or any piano. Learning is best when it is at its most brutal. 
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Feb 12, 2014 07:09
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ub posted:CowOnCrack: One of my lessons a few months ago my teacher borrowed my violin instead of getting hers out of her case to show me something. To see her perfectly demonstrate a technique I couldn't grasp at all on my own instrument was eye opening. No more "my bow is too heavy and sucks" or "my violin is kinda crap and honky sounding," the slate of excuses wiped clean and only I was left standing. My brain still cries for an excuse - I was thinking, well she's been playing forever! Then I thought, wow you're an idiot - your whole goal is to get good stupid, what kind of excuse is that? Then that competitive side got activated and I told myself, "hrmm, I think I've decided that in one year I will be able to play better than this lady who has been studying from age 5, and I started when I was 26. Mwahahhahahahh! *EVIL LAUGHS*" Yeah, my typical mental life as a musician. Besides the notes swimming around of course. Here's a little video of some cool poo poo I spend months practicing. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151926907267478&l=373758399148359722
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Feb 23, 2014 07:50
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Apparently uploading a video is the only way I've found to get a video off my phone. I don't have anything that can read tiny SD cards and I lost mine anyway. That's a bit surprising we share a friend since I don't have very many friends and don't prefer Facebook. My friends on there are almost entirely my singing group at school. Small world! Feel free to add me or whatever, but chances are I won't notice haha
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Feb 23, 2014 18:44
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If you're looking for his joyful, carefree stuff, I have two recommendations. I'm a fan of his Viennese Sonatina in C Major which is fairly simple and fun to play and accessible to beginners. For a more intermediate piece, I love Piano Sonata No. 13 in B-Flat. For a advanced piece, his C Minor Fantasia is a very complicated piece of great depth and beauty but it's difficult to play and interpret. I also have to mention that I played the Rondo in D Major, and it's a wonderful piece, but the headaches of various technical hangups really wounded me!
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Mar 14, 2014 04:27
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St. Patrick's Day Nocturne. Op. 15 No. 1 in F Major, the light green key of shamrocks and stuff. (I guess) Enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VHyouGRw3g
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Mar 18, 2014 08:07
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I've decided that I'm imposing (self-imposing) a ban on my own performances unless they are strictly necessary or forced on me as a student, or the music is actually ready to perform (see you in 10 years). No more playing on pianos where I can find them, no more performing casually, no more performing really at all unless I'm instructed to do so largely against my will. As Sorabji said after hearing the first performance of Pars Prima of his Opus Clavicembalisticum, "No performance at all is preferable to an utter travesty!" He then proceeded to ban all performances of his works until near the end of his life. This is my reaction to poor quality playing and allowing myself to be so disrespectful to the music I love. I've been suckered into the logic of, "well it's OK, yo're just learning, be realistic in your expectations, your performances are fine (from the viewpoint drastically lowered standards - I inserted this)." Never again! Now I'm going to focus exclusively on developing technique and if I'm forced to perform I'll pick something 10 levels below what is comfortable so I can actually make music. Being given repertoire way above my level just because I'm a gifted and quick learner, and then being asked to perform it, has almost crushed me as a musician. But I will rise above.
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Apr 16, 2014 16:41
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Honj Steak posted:I don't think this extreme approach could be beneficial. Playing publicly in itself is an important musical ability that has to be practiced systematically and with care. The only stage anxiety I've ever had has been from being forced to perform pieces that I'm not comfortable playing. If anything the opposite of what you are saying is true in my case. ub posted:Yeah, quite a bizarre attitude unless you consider yourself entirely bereft of performance anxiety. I know my own playing is affected by a degree of stage fright so any opportunity to practice performing can only be good. I feel like the current system's approach to this problem is pretty retarded. If I were running a class for applied musicians, I would have everyone perform something small and very manageable every day. Once you are on stage a million times you stop caring, as Rock and Jazz artists will attest to. Instead, classical soloists have massive stressful buildups to that ONE performance where everything hangs on a thin thread and the slightest mistake is the end of the world. The number of times they get to perform in a year are counted on one or two hands. No wonder stage anxiety crushes so many of us. quote:Being asked (required?) to perform material that you feel is beyond your current level or within too small a time-frame to be able to properly prepare is lovely though. Sounds like this is a talk you need to be having with your teacher. I dunno what your situation though - at a certain level putting in crazy hours and stressing the gently caress out kinda comes with the territory. Oddly enough, if anything I rise above what I can do in practice and wing it like crazy with these pieces but instead of a good feeling this is a lovely feeling. The reason I'm being given these pieces is because I'm improving so fast, and the performance failures are seen as a necessary consequence I guess. Actually, I have had more free reign that I have been exercising up to this point on this issue and now I have simply decided to exercise it for the preservation of my musical sanity.
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Apr 16, 2014 22:28
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Honj Steak posted:Training your performance skills is more than controlling nervousness. It's amongst others the ability to adapt to different room situations, to interact with the audience and to pace yourself over the course of a longer rehearsal. All these things are best learned just by doing it. You don't get to practice any aspects of performance if the pieces you are playing are too far above your level. You can't effectively learn these things at all. heap posted:Realistically, the only place where what you're describing happens is in the academic world, which is pretty unrepresentative of working life. That is what I was referring to, but was far from clear about it. My bad. quote:Also, you're a pianist, and if you know any piano accompanists worth their salt you know they have plenty of performances, playing pieces of all levels, shapes and sizes. Performance isn't always about "you" the player. I completely agree - performing isn't for you at all. That's why I despise performing poor quality work - only the audience and the music matters. I have too much respect for this to muck it up anymore. quote:Like Honj pointed out, you're trying to talk about the "current system" but really you're just talking about your own classes. Where I studied (and where everyone I know studied), we had weekly studio classes where everyone performed something, anything, in front of their peers. In my applied class, I got to perform twice in the semester. There were a handful of other opportunities that I took, but nothing I played was really ready for it and so I didn't learn much except how miserable it feels to muck up beautiful music. But they were necessary for other reasons so I accept those with much sadness. CowOnCrack fucked around with this message at 21:11 on May 4, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 23:26
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