Piano Question

[Cody Draper]

Lybi, this is great!  now do you have a job for Jon?

Jon can mow the lawn.  The hours are GREAT!  Lots of time to train!

[Lybi]

It's the little details like that that always get in the way of my grand schemes, Marci.  If Jon did want to mow the lawn, though, he'd have all the time in the world to train.  We like to keep our lawn half-dead, so it doesn't need mowing very often.   What does Jon do, I mean when he's not running, commuting, or lancing his blood blisters? 

[Cody Draper]

It's the little details like that that always get in the way of my grand schemes, Marci.  If Jon did want to mow the lawn, though, he'd have all the time in the world to train.  We like to keep our lawn half-dead, so it doesn't need mowing very often.   What does Jon do, I mean when he's not running, commuting, or lancing his blood blisters? 

He is working on joining the ultimate frisbee semi-pro league.  I hear they pay $25 a game!

[M@r(!]

he wishes he could work full time for ultimate frisbee but hs has a boring engineering job.  Something about the space rocket!  i never know i don't speak engineer...its a whole different language!

[Steve Morrin]

I think that sight reading to some extent is sort of something some people are born naturally with. I've taken piano for ten years, and I've always been able to sight read very well without much practice at it. I know that what my teacher would do to help me improve my sight reading was have me try and play difficult pieces that I had never seen before. That helped me improve from the challenge of the things that I tried to play.

[Shauna]

I'm not sure if sight-reading comes easier to some people or if it's a learned skill.  I started piano lessons when I was 7 and continued until I was 17.  I had a good foundation that made it easy to sight read.  Lybi is right about sight-reading vs repertoire, though.  I can still play flawlessly the songs I learned with my teacher 15+ years ago.  But, I've been lazier with anything I've learned on my own since then, because I rely on my sight-reading skills and am too impatient to really apply the technique I learned.  I must say, though: piano is a great foundation for learning other instruments or learning to sing.  I picked up the flute fingering very quickly (and promptly lost interest because I couldn't breathe correctly), and piano really helped with sight-reading for choir in high school.  I rocked all my regional and state auditions because of it.

One downside to classical training: it makes it really hard to improvise.  I can't play anything on the piano by ear beyond the simple melody line.  The same happens with singing: I get asked to lead worship at church in the traditional service where we sing hymns, but I rarely get asked to help lead in the more contemporary service, because the songs are more modern and require some improvisation skills.  I can't do that stuff!

[Steve Morrin]

I do agree on the classical training thing. I did classical music the whole time, and I can't play anything
by ear. I most certainly can't improvise my own music either.

[Susannah Hurst]

I know that what my teacher would do to help me improve my sight reading was have me try and play difficult pieces that I had never seen before.

That has been helpful to me as well.  My dad has taught me piano but never really in lessons, he will give me a hard song and see how well I can do it.  Then to help me sight read he would give me an easy book of duets and see how well I could keep up with him for how long.  I think after trying the harder stuff and then going easier is a good technique.   

[Lybi]

Thinking back to how I learned to sight-read....

Hmmm.  I think what helped me the most was being forced to play songs I didn't know in front of an audience on a regular basis.    "Oops!  The relief society pianist didn't show up, go drag Lybi out of young women's."   Or "Lybi, will you go play prelude...it's getting too loud in here..."  I think the most important thing about sight reading is to keep the music going without missing a beat.  Playing with someone singing is a great way to hone this skill. You can drop non-essential notes here and there, simplify chords, drop the tenor line (sorry tenors) and no one will notice as long as you keep the melody mistake-free and the rhythm steady.  Playing duets with a more experienced pianist is also a GREAT idea, Susannah.  I used to do that with my sisters.  Sightreading is actually a LOT more fun to practice than the early stages of a difficult repertoire piece, IMHO.

About improvising...experience with Jazz is very useful.  If you took 10 years of ballet, you wouldn't expect to be perfect at hip hop or jazz dancing unless you had practiced it, right?  But almost all dancers have experience in ballet because it is such a good foundation for all the other kinds of dance.  Most pianist start with a classical background too. 

A good jumping off point is to get used to a chord structure that is really easy like C, Am, F, G  then back to C in the left hand (think "Heart and Souls") and then try to experiment with your right hand and see what pleases your ear.  Eventually little motifs (little patterns) start popping up, and you can experiment with shifting it up and down the keyboard and turning it upside down and stuff.  It's fun, too.