First post. Sweet. I mostly scan the boards and just read a lot of information, but I had a few interesting questions to pose so I decided to register. Anywho, I've been playing the piano for a good 2 years now and have completed regular pieces like Beethoven (Full), Solfeigatto(sp), Moonlight Sonata, and some other nice pieces.

As a Pianist, I have no tutor. I look at the piano sheet, decipher the notes, and play from there, but I feel as if my tactic is causing my progress to hinder. So here are a few questions, and if you have ANY tips, please feel free to give some.

1.) Is labeling your keys/fingering good or bad when playing a piece? Why?

2.) Is playing a piano piece without making labeling the paper common? For example, I have a friend who labels every single note in his piano pieces before he attempts to play. I feel that it hinders sight-reading, but he always seems to advance faster than me if we're both playing the same song.

3.) Should I practice playing the treble (left hand) part of the song, and then practice playing the bass (right hand) part of the song and eventually bring the two together, or..

4.) Should I practice playing measure by measure, perfecting each as I move along?

5.) Do you really have to go through all those boring books that force you to play boring piece after piece?

Ugh, I had a butt load of questions I wanted to ask but they slipped my mind. For those of you who can't answer any of my questions, it'd be greatly appreciated if you could just offer any great piano training strategies. Right now, I'm currently playing Naruto - Sadness and Sorrow and Nobou Uematsu - Aerith's Theme. If you've played either of these two pieces, some advice on playing those would be cool as well.

Thanks!

hm...okay to answer your questions:

1: Labelling keys is not efficient in my opinion because your wasting too much time, only label the really weird ones, like either VERY LOW that's like 5 leger lines below or 5 leger lines above the staff lines. Labelling fingering ONLY when there are finger twisty parts in a piece. Other than that, don't try to label anything on your sheet music.

2: Different pianists have different strategies of approaching a new piece. To me i never label anything on my piece. First: Time consuming, second: yes it is not good for improving your sight-reading skill. Because my former teacher focus more on sight-reading, she force me to play a new piece everyday so that i can improve my sight-reading skill. Right now i can grab any pieces of music and try to play it without stopping, once you get through the whole piece, then work little by little. That is how i tackle a new piece of music

3: It is best to try and play both hands at first, because you can improve your sight-reading skill. IF you really can't go on playing both hands, then practice them seperately.

4: um...playing piano is mainly about playing as a whole and not perfecting each measures. Instead of working measures by measures, i recommend you to practice PHRASES by PHRASES. Music is written in sentences (just like how we speak), we can't perfect WORD by WORD. we have to look at it as a whole sentence, or a whole paragraph, music wise, will be dividing it into big chucks of sections and work sections by sections.

5: If you really want to improve your piano skill. Then YES you have to play studies so that your fingers can manage harder pieces, therefore the range of songs you can play will increase. Study pieces such as Czerny or Sonatas by Mozart are all pretty good

Hope i answered your question :heh:

The teacher has spoken ;) And I second that about labelling pieces - it sucks reading pieces that are all two or three leger lines above or below the staff, so it's okay to label those till you get more proficient at reading them, but I would follow Neerolyte's recommendation about for the most part working WITHOUT note letters or fingerings. This encourages you to adopt natural hand positions while reading a piece instead of going "wah, is number three on the A?" As well as that, note letters hinder your recognition of "this note on the stave = this key" as you're looking at the letters instead of the notation.

With regard to practising left and right separately... I think everyone does it differently - I practise the right hand first and then bring the left hand in slowly once I've mastered the right hand (I don't practise the left hand separately, I just sightread it while playing the right hand which I've usually memorised by then). Again, I would recommend following Neerolyte's recommendation because through my method it usually means that my dynamics suck big time, and playing both hands together straight off encourages you to master the dynamics faster so your left and right hand sound better together.

Working on phrases is a good idea - master one phrase reasonably well and then try and link it together with the next so you're practised in moving from phrase to phrase without stopping and starting. Also once you're finished with your practise have a shot at playing the whole piece through as far as you can in order to retain your complete impression of the music, as focusing on individual phrases can lead to you losing the overall feel of the music.

Regarding books... I would at the very least attempt to master a book of scales and arpeggios as they really help with fluid finger movement, crossing over from one hand to another and shifting up and down the octaves - they're really good for learning suitable fingering positions for different notes and the contrary scales assist in mastering independent left hand and right hand movement. It also makes it easier for you to recognise increasingly complex key signatures :)

Only two years and you got through Beethoven? You're either a prodigy, you do a buttload of work, or those pieces were arranged.^^ This is roughly my eighth year playing.

1) Don't label! Unless, as was previously said, the notes are really weird ones never played. It doesn't help you at all to label common notes. It might be a good idea to label a piece in a tricky key.

2) Labeling is not common among serious pianists. It does hinder the ability to read music and doesn't allow as much room for growth. Heh, my teachers always had my butt for labeling the music. Bad idea. Trust me.

3)Hands together?...I usally try it a few times together, then practice separately if I find something troublesome...the order you practice isn't really important, but for me I usually do right hand first so I can train it to sound stronger when I put the two together. I'm a leftie, so I tend to put more pressure on the harmony.

4)Measure by measure? Not necessarily...it won't help you make the peice flow. If you feel you need to take the peice step by step because it's tricky, it might be better to go bar by bar.

5)Boring books? Yes, you should probably try some standard theory books, but if you don't have someone to check that you did it right I don't know how much good it will do. You probably won't need to go into elaborate theories...I stopped theory books this year, but my teacher is careful to point out mistakes I make with timing and so forth, so I guess that's really up to you. (Well, all of it is, really... :sweatdrop: )

Well if you can play those pieces then you definitely learn fast! yer learn, not just play scales because the hard pieces have lots of those and if you know them it would be eisier to sightread.

Sightreading itself is just practising under pressure. I recommend joining a group ensemble because this forces you to sightread. Don't think anyof the others have done that but I found thats really the quick fix way of improving sightreading. Cant think of anything else to say at the moment...

oops yer thought of something already! dont label stuff if you want to improve your sightreading.

Haha. Trust me; I'm no prodigy. My first year playing the piano, I dedicated myself to Beethoven's work. However, since I didn't have a teacher to train me, I went at the process all wrong. I basically took a piece that was way above my level of playing, studied the fingering, evaluated the best order to place each finger on each note to gain the easiest access to the rest of the keys, and practiced my butt off. Lol, I still remember going "Every Good Boy Does Fine" and "All Cows Eat Grass" etc, etc to remember which note was which on the scales.

After getting past Fur Elise (2nd movement) with the tricky fingering (using two hands at once to place two different melodies), playing any piece became just a matter of practice and not finger development. I believe it would have been easier to tackle these pieces if I worked on the basics to strengthen my left hand, but going the hard way is still a way in itself. I play a lot of video games and can type 110+ words per minutes on a decent day, so my fingers weren't strangers to odd manuevering as with the piano. Until I get a teacher to help me develop a better training structure, I simply use the principles of repetition.

So if you haven't noticed, the key to my technique is based on mimicing. I rely too heavily on memorization of the proper keys to play so although I may be able to play a certain piece well, my improvisation skills are at the max low rate. I'm fine with that since I'm not interested in coming up with my own piece any time soon. It's an honor just to play a piece that grabbed my heart and alters my mood. If I could mimic that, I could do the same for others that those original composers did for me and that's a reward in itself.

Technically, mimicking and memorisation is how you actually get good at pieces, unless you're a prodigy, so you're obviously going right somewhere ^_^. Yer back to basics. If you can play scales without thinking you can do anything....I think :blink: ......^_^

In the beginning, it's good if you have mimicing skill....but i'm not too sure about memorization...memorization shouldn't go into a habit if you want to something harder. Try to rely on figuring out notes, so when you look at the score, you know exactly where you are, where you play wrong, and what did you do wrong. To be able to know notes on the back of your head meaning that you can figure out what you play wrong instantly.

So i prefer mimicking in the beginning but not memorization.

If you want a teacher, you HAVE to get rid of heavily relying of memorization, because every week you'll have new pieces, not 1 but maybe couple pieces. Memorization will just take too long. It will drag down your improvement thus wasting money AND time, so i still stronly suggest improving your sight reading skill

I don't think you can really justify it. when I meant memory (and what I think he meant) was when you can read a piece witout thinking of where to put your fingers. Oh wait, that also takes time. Um...everything takes time! It still does help you improve cos if you've mastered the technique of that piece then it'll help in others.

I take it your teaching system is different from my country. If you can teach yourself those hard pieces I wouldn't waste my money on a teacher. Just rely on the advice that others give you unless you really want one.

My view of the 5 points that you pointed out:
1) I've never labelled the music because I think it distracts me.
2) Well, I don't think many people label their music...
3) Isn't treble the right hand and bass the left? Whatever :) I usually play both hands together when I try a new song
4) I play through the whole song to get a feel of how the song should sound like. Then I just play the whole song over again and again. If there is a part that is especially hard, then I practice that part specifically until it's acceptible.
5) Eheheheh, I personally don't go through those boring books, but they're good for practicing.

i am a self taught pianist and i've been playing for a goold ol 4 months. First piece was Sadness and Sorrow and I labeled ALL of the notes.. then my next few songs I labelled them all, then as I played more songs, I stopped labeling most of them except for the bass, which im working on. I always tend to memorize what I play so I dont need to look at the music a second time

Well, I don't really play much piano anymore these days, but here's what I have to say...

1. It might be helpful to do so as a beginner, but make sure you don't become too dependent on it, and fail to develop your sight-reading skills.

2. I'd recommend you to just label the notes that you keep messing up on, at most; if you depend on looking at fingerings too much, you'll never really develop an intuitive sense on how you want to finger things(often times different fingerings work better for different individuals).

4. As Neerolyte said, work on phrases rather than measures (unless it's a super-hard cadenza measure or something like that ;)).

3./5. You want to eventually develop you technique so that you no longer think of your hands as "two hands with five fingers, but one hand with ten fingers", to quote from Lizst; try to develop a sense of autonomy for each for you hands (and later, individual fingers) so that you can play pieces which have many non-parallel voices. As for books, Hanon is one to check out. Actually, here's some sheet music for it: http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/single_li...m?composer_id=7 (http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/single_listing.cfm?composer_id=7). They are simple, but very effective when practiced religiously.