Just saying hi

[lettersquash]

Hi fellow pianists, this is just to introduce myself. Real name John, 59, and returning to studying and practising the piano after about 40 years. It was one of those curious twists life throws at us now and then. In the summer, my partner decided we should redecorate the living room, and the question of what to do with the piano came up. It was my mum's from at least when I was born, and possibly my grandmother's. They were both keen musicians (my grandma used to improvise over the silent movies), and then my older sister and I both took lessons. Mum died 15 years ago and I inherited it, a Squire & Longson upright overstrung, about 100 years old or more. I hardly ever played it, mainly because the wall between us and the neighbours is rubbish and any length of playing, particularly repetitive practice, made me anxious about the effect on that side. Over the years I'd taken up guitar, then flute, self-taught.

We gradually decided it would be good to have more space, but it had too much sentimental value to let go of easily. Long story slightly shorter, it ended up in the hallway, with the idea that I'd see if I played it - if not, we'd get rid. This was after asking all the family, especially my sister, if they wanted it, but they were too far away or had electronic keyboards, or also didn't have room. I was making enquiries whether it was worth thirty quid to anyone able to shift the enormous weight or if I'd have to give it away, even pay to have it removed...scrapped!?

I guess life would have gone on without it, but I'm so glad it's still there. I asked my sister what the gorgeous, sombre piece was I remember her and Mum both struggling over parts of and described it - the answer came back, Chopin Prelude in E-minor - and she sent a book of Chopin with that in. So I'm learning again. My great love is baroque, particularly Bach, and I'm working on a few Bach pieces too (from a book called Bach Gold or just downloaded stuff). The awkwardness I felt about disturbing people is gone, since there's now another internal wall between us!

Another thing I'm happy about is a big change in my attitude to practice and learning. It's not so much that I've finally developed some self-discipline, more that I've discovered a pleasure in doing the necessary work, or at least some of it, approximately. I don't have a routine, but I sat and played C-major scales for half an hour yesterday, just enjoying the gradual improvement (and trying to avoid the irritation when I seem to be going backwards again). I've had one temper tantrum with the Chopin, after a day when it was almost coming together and then the next when it was awful.

I've always been too lazy and able to play by ear, so in my lessons when I was young I just read as little as I needed to get a piece memorized and then winged it, and in my exams (which I think were 'junior' grades sub-Grade 1) the music was generally predictable enough to scrape through. Now, most of the advice I see here I'm pleased to say I've already internalized - to practice, to improve my weaker areas, etc. - and the gradual improvement is a big, continual payoff, hopefully with occasional highs when I can finally play something well and reliably. My biggest task is probably the reading and theory, fluency around scales and keys.

As well as the Chopin, I'm learning Bach's Prelude in C, Prelude in C-minor, Two-Part Invention Nos.1, 4 and 8, and a simplified version of the Largo from Concerto for Two Violins (most of the counterpoint is missing, which I'm thinking of adding some of myself in time). I toyed with Beethoven's you-know-what sonata, but might hold off until I can handle C#minor more comfortably - again, it's a great temptation to fail to read it.

Anyway, my other fault is blathering on endlessly, so I better stop. This looked like a really nice friendly forum and I was glad to see so much helpful advice, uploaded videos and mp3s, and no advertising.

This is my second post - I hope my first didn't sound rude. I was in a rush to register because I find the white-on-black theme pretty disturbing to my eyesight and it looked like a reverse one was available in people's profiles, so I forced myself to stop reading the riveting content, blinked a lot and registered, but now I don't see the option. So a pretty please to the admins if you see this - am I just being dumb or has it gone, and could it be reinstated please? It would make such a difference to my experience.

All the best everyone, many thanks for a great resource.
John

[dr-future]

Hi! 

[lettersquash]

Hi! 

Wow, hi. It only took 180 people reading my post for someone to say hi back. This is an odd forum. Or maybe it was 180 people who saw my text wall and retreated. Anyway, welcome, from a slightly less new member.

[quantum]

Hi and welcome.

Not exactly sure if you had a question, but hello nonetheless.  Realize that 180 views does not equate to 180 independent people. 

There is also an introduction thread here where new people say hi and introduce themselves. 

[lettersquash]

Hi and welcome.

Not exactly sure if you had a question, but hello nonetheless.  Realize that 180 views does not equate to 180 independent people. 

There is also an introduction thread here where new people say hi and introduce themselves.

Thanks quantum, I just found it now, as it happens, but it wasn't obvious that it existed, as it's just a thread not a sub-forum so doesn't show up on the index. I guess it would have made sense to look under "Anything but piano", but I didn't look there. Even if it's not 180 different people, I doubt many people clicked on it and came to read it more than once. It felt quite weird. I've been a member of a lot of forums and never found zero response to my first post saying hi before (until now, of course). While I'm having a little gripe, I also posted twice in fairly relevant places asking if there was any chance of getting a different theme, because I find the white on black disturbs my eyesight, again with no response. One of them was a thread announcing the new black-on-white theme, but it seems to have been removed again (or maybe I'm thick and can't find it). I then messaged nilsjohan about the same thing, and still nobody has acknowledged the question.

[quantum]

Maybe you could look into a browser extension that allows you to use custom themes. 

The inverted theme thread you posted in is from 2005.  A lot can happen with forum software updates as well as web standards in that frame of time. 

[lettersquash]

Sure, but changing my browser theme (or the other people who have also said they find it awkward) would be a relatively complicated workaround (I'm not sure such a thing exists, to be honest) if there were no simple solution to offer users a choice of theme. According to the Simple Machines Forums website, however:

SMF features a powerful Package Manager, allowing you to quickly apply any of the hundreds of modifications in our database, as well as a variety of custom themes that change the way your site looks.

https://www.simplemachines.org/
I would have to dig more to find out whether forum managers can offer different themes to users to choose their own, but I would be surprised if that wasn't the case; this is a very common feature.

But we're discussing the issue. My gripe was that with three attempts, including directly contacting the Piano Street Manager, nobody appeared to want to discuss the issue.

[lostinidlewonder]

Real name John, 59, and returning to studying and practising the piano after about 40 years. It was one of those curious twists life throws at us now and then.

It is not such an uncommon situation. I have taught a number of people who had been busy raising their family and/or working hard at their job and only after their nest is empty or retirement comes do they decide they might take up piano once more and other hobbies they didn't have time for previously.

We gradually decided it would be good to have more space, but it had too much sentimental value to let go of easily. Long story slightly shorter, it ended up in the hallway, with the idea that I'd see if I played it - if not, we'd get rid. This was after asking all the family, especially my sister, if they wanted it, but they were too far away or had electronic keyboards, or also didn't have room. I was making enquiries whether it was worth thirty quid to anyone able to shift the enormous weight or if I'd have to give it away, even pay to have it removed...scrapped!?

Some people do keep old rickerty instruments because of the sentimental value, I have one myself! If it brings back good memories why not keep it?

I guess life would have gone on without it, but I'm so glad it's still there. I asked my sister what the gorgeous, sombre piece was I remember her and Mum both struggling over parts of and described it - the answer came back, Chopin Prelude in E-minor - and she sent a book of Chopin with that in. So I'm learning again.

Yes you should keep the old instrument since it has a lot of memories for you. I have this irrational notion that pianos can capture peoples energy when they have owned it and played it for long periods of time. As weird as this sounds there is certainly microscopic DNA of your family members still inside the piano somewhere, so in a weird way it is part of your family. 

My great love is baroque, particularly Bach, and I'm working on a few Bach pieces too (from a book called Bach Gold or just downloaded stuff). The awkwardness I felt about disturbing people is gone, since there's now another internal wall between us!

I feel your situation when it comes to others listening in on your practice sessions. I remember when I taught at a music school during my break I would practice but because there were so many people around who could listen to me I would often simply practice things I was already good at! Only when I was alone would I ever practice things which I really should work on. I guess that's a natural reaction. Even now when I practice at church I always feel forced to play something which wont wreck the ears of those who might wander in.

As well as the Chopin, I'm learning Bach's Prelude in C, Prelude in C-minor, Two-Part Invention Nos.1, 4 and 8, and a simplified version of the Largo from Concerto for Two Violins (most of the counterpoint is missing, which I'm thinking of adding some of myself in time). I toyed with Beethoven's you-know-what sonata, but might hold off until I can handle C#minor more comfortably - again, it's a great temptation to fail to read it.

That is a lot of work can you manage it? How long would it take you to play all of these from start to finish? It is generally a good idea not to set yourself up with a mountain of work until your practice method is strong or at least you should be working with music you can efficiently solve.

Anyway, my other fault is blathering on endlessly, so I better stop. This looked like a really nice friendly forum and I was glad to see so much helpful advice, uploaded videos and mp3s, and no advertising.

It has quietened down considerably over the years but you still can get some good responses especially from the long term members who all have a lot of experience and knowledge to share.

[lettersquash]

Thank you for that encouraging and interesting response, lostinidlewonder.

It is not such an uncommon situation. I have taught a number of people who had been busy raising their family and/or working hard at their job and only after their nest is empty or retirement comes do they decide they might take up piano once more and other hobbies they didn't have time for previously.

Yes, I'm sure it is quite common to return to music later in life. I didn't have kids to raise and didn't work hard at my jobs either. I got into rock music and worked (but not hard enough) in bands, so a keyboard was never that far away, although I mainly played guitar.

I feel your situation when it comes to others listening in on your practice sessions.

That was so helpful to read, thanks. I thought maybe I was just a bit odd (well, er....).   I think I have a double-whammy of this though. When I play something well, I start worrying that people can hear it and are judging me as a show-off. I can't win either way, either I'm rubbish and driving them nuts with my repeated bum notes and should give up or I think far too much of myself!

That is a lot of work can you manage it? How long would it take you to play all of these from start to finish? It is generally a good idea not to set yourself up with a mountain of work until your practice method is strong or at least you should be working with music you can efficiently solve.

I try to keep a balance between too much and too little. I've put some of those on hold for now (inventions 4 & 8 and the Two Violins thing), but I get too bored if I keep coming back to practise the same pieces. One big weakness is my reading, so I need a good dose of new material, and I learn more that way. Adding hopeful sessions on the Goldberg Aria has stretched me enormously, but I've made big strides. I started that because I found performances of it online and fell in love, which I think is a good motivator. On the down side, I have recently got really frustrated that the simpler pieces (like Prelude in C) are taking so long to get into my old brain. I think that one is mostly because there are lots of very similar chord changes, but with various inversions etc. I recently got a lot of help on that in this forum and I've got a good game plan to help (mainly, I'm playing too fast for my reading skill - I'm also going to dissect pieces more, work on difficult chunks, etc.).

It has quietened down considerably over the years but you still can get some good responses especially from the long term members who all have a lot of experience and knowledge to share.

Indeed, I've already got a lot of help, which I badly needed. Social media has impacted forums on everything.
ATB, John

[lostinidlewonder]

I think I have a double-whammy of this though. When I play something well, I start worrying that people can hear it and are judging me as a show-off. I can't win either way, either I'm rubbish and driving them nuts with my repeated bum notes and should give up or I think far too much of myself!

We've had discussion about showing off, https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=38790

I try to keep a balance between too much and too little.

What do you mean?

I've put some of those on hold for now (inventions 4 & 8 and the Two Violins thing), but I get too bored if I keep coming back to practise the same pieces.

It is always a good idea to complete works so you don't have like a whole lot of things on your "to do" list or have a hundred "work in progress" signs all over the place. That sort of journey can leave you feeling fairly stressed out and getting accustomed to having unsolvable problems facing you for years on end. You obviously have experienced the joy of progressing and noticeable improvement, you can certainly enjoy that from training your skills with easier works and build up from there. Certainly get into a routine of mastering pieces in quick time even if that means playing simpler works.

One big weakness is my reading, so I need a good dose of new material, and I learn more that way.

Think about hundreds of pieces a month and you will be on a good track for your sight reading training. It is important to do it successfully so again it requires studying very simple works and building up. It is a loaded answer because finding appropriate works to study can be a challenge.

[brogers70]

One big weakness is my reading, so I need a good dose of new material, and I learn more that way.

Me too. There are a couple of things that have helped. Try having a look at this video from Josh Wright. The basic idea is to work on reading very slowly without allowing yourself to look at your hands, so that you get a physical feel of where and how far apart the notes are on the keyboard. It's frustrating at first, but it really really helps. I saw a noticeable improvement in just a couple of weeks of doing it 20 minutes a day.

Then I'll make a recommendation that will likely provoke some negative comments. There's a book called Sight Reading and Harmony by Cory Hall, who goes by the internet name BachScholar - personally I find him quite pretentious and irritating. But... in this book he's taken the first line of 150 Bach 4 part chorales and made five arrangements in progressive order of difficulty for each one. The easiest is the Soprano and Bass line reduced to just the quarter or half notes with all the melodic passing notes removed. Then things are added back progressively until you get to Bach's original version. Anybody could have done it. But it must have been damn tedious, so I'm glad he did it. The book is overpriced and I thought that 4 part chorales are such a specialized for that it would not be much general use. But I started working on it (again, without looking at the keys) and I found it really helpful.

I'm guessing that you, like me, are not looking to sight read chamber music at tempo from scratch to play with others, but simply to get to a point where you can learn pieces faster because the first stage of decoding everything is quicker. For that, these two resources I mentioned have been very helpful.

[lettersquash]

We've had discussion about showing off, https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=38790

I'll have a read, cheers.

What do you mean?

(about the balance between too many pieces and too few)...
Just so we're clear, I'm talking about pieces I want to learn and reckon I can do, rather than ones I use as reading practice, which might be just about anything. You already know the downside of having too many on my plate - I'm spreading my time thinly, possibly going to confuse myself more, and less likely to ever finish anything. If I have too few, there's a danger I get bored, because I work on the same piece more often. After some time has passed, even a fairly simple piece engages my mind and sounds reasonably fresh. Some pieces arouse powerful emotions, like the Chopin Prelude in E Minor, but not if you play it five times a day every day. I don't want familiarity to breed contempt. Your suggestion to learn simpler pieces I can complete in short order is a good one.

Think about hundreds of pieces a month and you will be on a good track for your sight reading training.

Blimey, that's a lot. Hundreds, plural. So you're talking about maybe six pieces a day! Presumably not different ones each time!

Me too. There are a couple of things that have helped. Try having a look at this video from Josh Wright. The basic idea is to work on reading very slowly without allowing yourself to look at your hands, so that you get a physical feel of where and how far apart the notes are on the keyboard. It's frustrating at first, but it really really helps. I saw a noticeable improvement in just a couple of weeks of doing it 20 minutes a day.

Thanks brogers70, that helped a lot too - I've been doing that where possible (in practising the pieces I'm learning), but I might work on it more, even for some bigger jumps, so it trains that spatial awareness, and it might be even better to do some of that with completely new bits for pure sight-reading practice.

What would be great, maybe, is an app that presents random notes and waits for you to play them, using the mic to get the note (as a tuning app must be doing). I've used Vivace, which is okay for pure recognition of the note, but you just tap on a virtual keyboard of one octave on the device, which isn't training that spatial memory of the piano. I'll have another look on Play Store, there might be one. It'll only cope with one note at a time, but that could be another good way to improve.

I've seen Cory Hall and had a brief conversation in the comments on one of his videos. The books sounds good and yeah he's put a lot of work into that, but I'm not about to splash out that much - it's on amazon for $50.

I'm guessing that you, like me, are not looking to sight read chamber music at tempo from scratch to play with others, but simply to get to a point where you can learn pieces faster because the first stage of decoding everything is quicker. For that, these two resources I mentioned have been very helpful.

That's right.
Thanks guys.

[lostinidlewonder]

(about the balance between too many pieces and too few)...
Just so we're clear, I'm talking about pieces I want to learn and reckon I can do, rather than ones I use as reading practice, which might be just about anything.

Sight reading practice predominantly is done with pieces much easier than your playing capabilities. This is because there is usually a wide gap between the two for the vast majority of pianists. You can study sight reading with very difficult works but you would apply some constraints to it such as making the tempo extremely slow, neglecting rhythm etc.

I'm spreading my time thinly, possibly going to confuse myself more, and less likely to ever finish anything. If I have too few, there's a danger I get bored, because I work on the same piece more often.

Yes if you play very few pieces and stick to those for an extended period of time it will get rather boring. That is why learning pieces which you can complete quickly is a good idea.

Blimey, that's a lot. Hundreds, plural. So you're talking about maybe six pieces a day! Presumably not different ones each time!

It seems like a lot if your idea of what consitutes a piece is not thinking small enough. For example you could go through this set: https://michaelkravchuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/354-Reading-Exercises-in-C-Position-Full-Score.pdf
Of course if this kind of level is far too easy for you look for harder material but doing things which are too easy successfully is far better than struggling through works which are too difficult and this is especially true with sight reading.

[lettersquash]

Sight reading practice predominantly is done with pieces much easier than your playing capabilities. This is because there is usually a wide gap between the two for the vast majority of pianists. You can study sight reading with very difficult works but you would apply some constraints to it such as making the tempo extremely slow, neglecting rhythm etc.

Oh, yes, perhaps I forgot to clarify that. I mean, I might look at a moderately complicated piece (say a four-part fugue), but I'll just read the top note. Alternatively, as you say, I might figure out a lot of a piece, but ignore the rhythm. I've figured out most of the Aria from Goldberg Variations, which has some interesting timing complicated further by ornaments, but it sounds lovely nice and slow anyway, so it went from "here's some note-reading fodder I won't be able to play in a month of sundays" to "oh, okay, this might be doable before too long". I probably would struggle a lot more if it wasn't for all the videos on the web.

Yes if you play very few pieces and stick to those for an extended period of time it will get rather boring. That is why learning pieces which you can complete quickly is a good idea.
It seems like a lot if your idea of what consitutes a piece is not thinking small enough. For example you could go through this set: https://michaelkravchuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/354-Reading-Exercises-in-C-Position-Full-Score.pdf
Of course if this kind of level is far too easy for you look for harder material but doing things which are too easy successfully is far better than struggling through works which are too difficult and this is especially true with sight reading.

Wow, thanks, those actually look great - and make sense of the large number of pieces you suggested. They're just in the C 'position' (key?) though, so they wouldn't give much practice in the different key signatures. However, at the moment I am still slow on basic note recognition, so I'll benefit from this a lot, and I look forward to starting (I bashed my knuckle a few days ago so I'm taking a short break). Many thanks.

Incidentally - re what I said about apps that provide random notes to play and listen via mic to the piano, there are a lot more than I expected, and they're cleverer than I expected, apparently giving you whole pieces to sight-read and (supposedly) giving feedback on accuracy, but they look (from descriptions and reviews) like they've got too clever for a serious student. I can see all sorts of problems with that guitar-hero approach, like encouraging you to run through whole pieces instead of practising chunks and analysing, etc., fingering considerations...and there are a lot of reports of them failing to 'hear' correctly played passages or chords. I was imaginging a simpler tool for single-note play, but across the whole of the keyboard. Maybe some of these can do that, but I've not found any.