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I looked around the thread and saw no mentions of this book which is surprising, so I'll tell you guys all about it. http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book/en/chapter_1 Fundamentals of Piano Practice by Chuan C Chang This is probably the only book you'll ever really need if you want to become excellent at piano. I've been playing for about 11 years, and it's safe to say that the methods in this (free) book will put you miles above most players. From everything to practicing to picking the right piano, this book has it all. Once you consciously apply his ideas diligently your playing will sky rocket. Please, if none of you have read this, make sure to read it from front to back. 3 times. Absorb it as much as possible. The most important idea here to learn is mental play. He emphasizes it a lot and for good reason. Most accomplished musicians have either consciously or unconsciously come across the ability to be able to practice in their heads. It's not as hard as it actually sounds. Once you've gotten a good grip on this technique, you can practice pieces before you ever even play them. I've always been told I'm an excellent sight reader, but that's partly because I have time to go over the piece mentally by looking at the sheet music for a few moments before hand. Learn most of what this book preaches and you'll be playing Prokofiev before you know it. Also, another thing I recommend, which is what I did but I'm not sure if it would work for other people, is to attempt to sight read as much as possible. I spent 2 years of my life going through tons of classical repertoire and (attempting to) sight read it. Balance this with learning pieces to the best of your ability (which I should have done in hindsight) and you'll have not only excellent piano abilities but incredible musicianship skills in general.
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Jun 29, 2009 08:38
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Elephunk posted:Looking for advice of turning an admittedly purist / square / nerd classical pianist of 6+ years into someone with a solid enough foundation to do improv, jam sessions, jazz solos etc. If you really want to understand jazz, try to find other people to play with. Often times the voicings that you end up using depend on the instrumentation. If you have a bassist, which you normally do, you won't be hitting the bass register as much, unless it's for an intended effect. If you've got any kind of instrument playing in the lower middle frequencies, you'll have to open up your chords to avoid muddiness and the like. I find improvising comes out best when you are truly just listening to the other musicians and going off their cues. It's hard to describe how it works exactly, but if you play and listen to other (good) musicians improvising, you will quickly get a good idea of what it is exactly you're supposed to do. Try listening to lots of recordings. Listen to Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, etc. If you want to make the fastest progress, trying transcribing their solos. That will give you a better idea of the mindset that goes on behind the improvising.
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Dec 2, 2009 16:42
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CowOnCrack posted:This free online pdf book has a lot of useful information in it: Everyone needs to read this book if they care at all about playing piano better. The last time I recommended this book no one paid attention, and it seriously depressed me because, for being a free book, it has some of the most golden advice you'll ever come across. A lot of the information goes against common sense, some of it is plain confusing (not sure about the whole flat finger stuff he mentions), but the majority of the rest of his advice is pure loving gold. I say this as a pianist who was sight reading Liszt pieces 6 years ago and could have gone to Eastman School of Music if I wasn't more interested in contemporary music. If you want to be able to learn pieces in half the time it normally takes you, read this book. If you want to skyrocket your technique, again, read this book. Now obviously this book isn't some sort of cure-all band aid that will make you play like Hamelin when you wake up the next day. However, it does throw out a lot of the bad advice you hear regurgitated everywhere because it's so mainstream and common, and most people don't know any better. You can get the most up to date version here: http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book The only other book I'd recommend just as much is Sandor's On Piano Playing, although that's more about tone production, color, arm weight, and stuff like that, but it's all pretty drat good as well.
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May 15, 2011 21:59
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I'm gonna go against what most people say, and tell you to not even bother practicing Czerny, and especially not Hanon. Practicing exercises like those trains you to play like a mechanical robot, and nothing more. If you want to improve your speed, practice playing pieces you like that are fast. Find a section that gives you trouble velocity wise, and just practice it hands separately. I remember reading somewhere that a couple of pianists, I think one of them might have been Rubinstein (I might also be pulling this out of my rear end) compiled his own exercises which were really just difficult excerpts from songs that he was having trouble with. If you keep practicing Czerny, great. You'll be able to play Czerny real well. But is that really what you want? Getting a good fast technique is something that develops overtime, and is really not that hard to attain once you've been at this for a couple of years. Not many pieces out there demand such velocity, and if they do, it's not so conveniently fingered and easily written so that it falls naturally into your fingers. It's gonna be much more demanding, challenging, and different, so really, playing those exercises won't be of too much service. I know Czerny wrote some exercises to help people playing Beethoven sonatas, but really, why bother? Just learn the sonatas themselves. This is honestly how I got to my level of playing skill, even when I was just a beginner who couldn't play at all. I'd throw myself at a couple of pieces that might be beyond my skill level, and sort of brute forced myself into trying to play some parts. Eventually, your brain will quickly realize what it needs to do to jump to the next level, and before you know it, your technique will sky rocket. You'll stop caring about technical prowess at some point and care more about interpretation, or at least I hope you do, because that is where the true difficulty of playing piano lies. Don't just take this from me though, if you go online you'll read hundreds of other people telling you to avoid Hanon and Czerny. My old piano teacher, who went to Jacobs School of Music and took lessons from a pupil of Claudio Arrau (who was a student of Martin Krause who studied under Liszt who studied under blah blah blah) never even mentioned Hanon, except to tell me that it wasn't worth doing. I've never done Hanon in my life, and I did a tiny bit of Czerny for about a month back when I was just beginning, and I have to say it did not contribute much at all to my development. Focus on playing real pieces that you want to play, and the technique will come naturally. The only real technical work you should ever do is to practice scales/arpeggios, and when you practice those, try to make them as musical as possible. Edit: From the book that I was ranting and raving in my previous post about : http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book/en/1.III.7.8 reversefungi fucked around with this message at 09:13 on May 16, 2011 |
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May 16, 2011 09:05
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Can anyone recommend some advanced piano technique books? I've read CC Chang's Fundamentals of Piano Practice and parts of On Piano Playing by Gyorgy Sandor, and plan to reread those, just to brush up on my fundamentals. Want to start seriously learning some classical pieces again, currently working my way through Chopin's Etude Op 25 No 2, and I want to make my practicing a little less sloppy and disorganized. Anyone have any books they can recommend?
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Mar 1, 2013 21:26
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Olive Lover posted:Are you sure? That piece is very difficult. It's nowhere near as hard as some of his other Etudes, I already have the first page and a half down in only a couple of days practicing. It doesn't sound exactly like what I want it to, but the technique is there. For reference, I learned his Op. 10 No. 4 about 6 years ago, and I played his Op. 10 No. 3 for an audition to music college. I'm looking for something similar to Sandor's or Chang's book, one that presents different methods of practicing, piano technique in so far as proper way of using your body and arm weight for playing things like octaves, arpeggios, or what not. I generally consider myself to be a pretty good pianist, but I've picked up a lot of bad habits over the years due to lazy practicing habits, which I want to slowly start to undo by just learning smaller pieces using as proper technique as possible, no shortcuts or anything. Not really looking for exercises, I've never believed in them, and they never really helped me out at all to be honest (besides arpeggios and scales, but I don't count those as exercises.) reversefungi fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Mar 2, 2013 |
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Mar 2, 2013 01:32
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Not sure how  scorser is, but that's an awesome resource, and so imslp.org. Between those two I almost never need anything else.Anyone have any recommendations for short but somewhat flashy pieces? I'm thinking of anything along the lines of Etincelles by Moszkowski, for example.
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Mar 13, 2013 06:24
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Ah, that's a fun piece, I learned it a couple of years back along with the fugue it's associated with, very fun to play, and there's deceptively large amount of depth to both pieces, despite both of them having a pretty constant texture throughout the length of each piece. Definitely looking for pieces along that line. The Solfeggietto is fun but it's a little too easy/light in terms of what I'm talking about. I'd like something arguably pretty technically challenging, but without it being Feux Follets or a Toccata either.
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Mar 13, 2013 22:15
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Annies Boobs posted:I don't know who you're trying to impress with "flashiness" for a short piece. But you'd never impress me with Prelude in c minor. It's very easy. Even at a blistering tempo (which is kind of ridiciulous) I'd much prefer to listen to other "difficult" music. I've also played that piece for a recital a while ago! I'm currently working through the Black Keys Etude now, and I'm almost done with Op. 25 No. 2 as I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately the keyboard I've been practicing on is just terrible, but hopefully I'll be getting a new instrument this weekend, and then I will be able to fully flesh out some of these pieces I've been working on. Anyways, the point of my original post was to possibly unearth some more obscure virtuosic pieces that aren't too large. I'm not really trying to impress anybody, I just like challenging pieces. My attention span is all over the place, and when I try to learn something larger like say, a Chopin ballade, I just end up getting distracted half way through and start working on something else. Some of the shorter Etudes like the ones I mentioned at the beginning of my post work really nicely, they have one straightforward technical challenge and have a lot of material that repeat, so learning them is a matter of simply working on that one technique for a couple of weeks till you get it down. That's not including the interpretative aspect of the work which obviously takes a much longer time, but that's an entirely separate issue. Edit: Alkan might be a potential contender. I honestly don't know much about his music outside of his Etudes, so if there are any other smaller works he wrote that aren't inhumanly difficult to play, that could be a pretty good fit. reversefungi fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Mar 15, 2013 |
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Mar 15, 2013 09:24
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No idea if this is the best place to post this question, but do any of you guys have any experiences with using a tablet for sheet music? I'm getting tired of weak Dover editions that fall apart and whose pages flip on me in the middle of playing. However, things like the iPad air look a little too tiny. Are there any things you guys would recommend?
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Dec 2, 2013 23:33
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Thanks guys! Managed to check out some sheet music on a friend's iPad and was pretty impressed at how readable it was. Looking forward to grabbing one soon!
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Dec 16, 2013 05:13
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Alternatively you could use the middle pedal like some sort of crazy person but sometimes it's ok to be crazy
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Jan 31, 2014 05:16
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What is your budget? The low end ones you'll probably hate, but they make some amazing digital pianos these days. I own an AvantGrand N2 which feels and plays exactly like a Yamaha grand piano to an absolutely staggering degree, but it's gonna run you in the very very high 4 digit category. However, if you're willing to spend some where in the low to middle 4 digit category, Kawaii, Roland, Yamaha, and other brands make some really fantastic pianos that will probably keep you very happy. Best way to find out is to start shopping! Go out to some piano stores and start playing around, see what strikes you and what doesn't. Make sure to go in with a budget in mind so you don't fall in love with something you can't afford.
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Feb 18, 2014 06:49
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You'll be surprised how quickly you can work up to learning the third movement, just work on your arpeggios for a while and you'll get there, that's honestly like 90% of the piece. Yeah it sounds really flashy, and there's definitely some tricky spots, but if you're already playing the first movement, you're only a couple of years away from getting to the third assuming you keep up a healthy practice regimen. Then again I might be a super optimist, but really the whole piece is based off one technique, more or less. Don't get discouraged by it or scared away, you guys can definitely make it!
reversefungi fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Mar 6, 2014 |
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Mar 6, 2014 05:13
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