Fast Running Blog

I noticed that our women for one reason or another have been exceptionally shy about posting on the forum. This one is meant to get Lybi going, I figure once you get the ring leader, everybody else joins as well. James - if she does not get to see it, make sure to show it to her and teach her how to post if she cannot figure it out.

So the question is about the piano. (Guys, if anybody can think of anything about the piano to ask Lybi, go ahead and do it on the forum, this will help her learn how to post).

I have been practicing Come Come Ye Saints, and can now get through about half of it fairly smoothly (at least it sounds right to Sarah) with both hands. I am on the verge of  being able to sight-read the alto/soprano parts for easier songs.  Sight reading both hands is a much bigger challenge - I have a very hard time having my right hand do something drastically different than my left at the same time.  There may be something that gets in the way of my sight reading practice - I memorize fairly fast, and then I'd rather practice what I memorized than learn sight-reading because it actually sounds like a tune I recognize.

Can you suggest some simple exercises that would help me improve my sight reading skills?

Sasha I'm no piano expert but I do love playing the piano. Like you I had troubles in the past with sight reading as when I was young and my sister tried to teach me using traditional methods I would always tend to rely on play-by-ear so I didn't develop good sight reading skills.

The only think that has helped me in my later years to improve is good 'ol practice, practice, practice. I'm still not a great sight reader but I'm much better than I used to be, which is a good things since a few years back I was called as one of the ward organists, a calling I still have. There is nothing worse than getting surprised by someone changing the hymn at the last minute to one that you haven't practiced and you butcher it during Sacrament meeting. I think avoiding this situation was the primary motivator in getting me to practice and improving my sight reading.

I forgot to get Lybi on the forum yesterday - I will try to remind her today and show her how to log in.  For my own two cents, I have always had the most success, whether sight reading or just learning a new piece, by starting out hands apart, learning each part, then putting them together.  The other thing I have learned (Lybi is a great piano teacher) is to not try to learn the entire piece at once.  Focus on a single part of the song - one page or one section - at a time, and move on once you have mastered that section.  Part of the key to sight reading is knowing key signatures and time signatures so that you can play the piece properly with any accidentals (sharps or flats) and get the proper rhythm.  My own rcommendation with sight reading is to work with easy pieces that will allow you to train your hands to play together.  That could mean getting some actual piano instruction books that don't deal with SATB, it could be working with the children's songbook or maybe getting a simplified hymn book.  I'll get Lybi to chime in this evening.

A piano question!  Hey, sorry it took me so long to notice it.  "Ring leader"?  Funny!

Here are my official suggestions Sasha:

1) To get better at sight reading, I usually recommend playing music that is about 2 levels easier than your recital literature--in your case, Hymns.   Easier hymns are level 4, so you would do well to play level 2 music for sight reading practice.  You guys probably have a level 2 book laying around, but if not, my all-time favorite level 2 book for Adults is "Accelerated Piano Adventures for the Older Beginner."  Many of these songs are just great!  (I don't like the 1st one, though--skip it!) You could also use the simplified hymns.  You should play several different songs from this book each day.  It is also still very helpful to play songs you have already learned.  You just want to avoid play one song exclusively for weeks and weeks. 

2) Another thing that will help you A LOT is downloading the game from pianoisfun.com.  I make all my students play this game every week, and it REALLY improves notereading skills.  It costs $25 and is worth EVERY PENNY!  Let me know when you get your bronze medallion.  It will really help your kids, too.  I don't like to use it until the kid has passed the primer level, though.  Primer level students should be encouraged to use directional reading and interval reading first.  I.e. is the note going up or down, and is it a step or a skip away from the last note.  Anyway, that is my theory and I have had GREAT results with it.

3) Get a level 2 technique book--probably Alfred --for some simple exercises.

Good luck, Sasha, and keep up the GREAT WORK. 

I've found that a good way to become a good sight reader is to be tone deaf. I've never been able to play by ear (unlike my wife and kids) so I have to be able to read the music.

The other key for me was lots of practice. I've never had formal piano training. I learned to read music in middle school band and then started teaching myself piano in Jr. High. I guess I didn't have much of a social life in Jr. High because I would spend hours sitting at the piano learning to play new songs. I got bored playing the same song too much so I was always trying new songs. I gradually reached the point where I would sit down and play through an entire songbook (the ones I could play). I still love to do that. When I have time I'll sit down and play song after song.

I learned to play some hymns for priesthood meeting before I left on my mission. On my mission in Spain there were very few piano players so I played in nearly every meeting I attended, often with very little warning. Sometimes I was lucky to just get out the melody or the top hand, but eventually got much better at sight reading the hymns. I think the chord structures of the hymns helped because my hands began to recognize familiar chords and they started feeling natural, almost automatic.

I now consider myself a pretty good sight reader. I have served as Primary pianist (my favorite church calling ever) and twice as accompanist to ward choirs. I can usually get through a new song pretty well sight reading it. My problem is that I never really get much better at it, no matter how much I practice. I really think having some theory and technique would help a lot. My children that have had some formal training, as well as sharing my love of sitting at the piano for hours, play much better than I do.

My three sisters all took piano lessons from the same mean old lady and they all hated it and none of them learned to play. I taught myself (using some of their books and flash cards) but learned to play because I loved it and spent hours and hours at it. I think the key is to find a good teacher (like Lybi) and mix that with learning to play songs you enjoy playing. Being out running and sitting at the piano playing song after song are two of my "happy places".

Paul I've known you for a while now but I never knew you played the piano. That's really cool. Music is my first love and if I had to choose between it and running it's probably the only hobby of mine where I would be willing to give up running before giving up music.

Wow, that is so cool that you both play piano, Tom Lee and Paul Thomas!  I actually learned in a very similar way to you, Paul...  I took a few piano lessons as a teeny kid, but I hated practicing, so I quit.  I learned to read music through band (at least treble clef and counting).  Then in Jr. High I took up piano on my own.  I played song after song just like you, for about an hour after every school day--just for fun!  Within a year I was playing for the Jr. High Choir concerts.  I was really good at sight reading, but could never seem to learn any song really well.  But I could play just about any song relatively crappy.   Sound familiar?  Good sightreaders often have this problem.   I've taken a lot of lessons since then from amazing pianists and have learned a lot more about technique and effective practice.  A book I would recommend to anyone with this issue is "Not Until You've Done Your Practice!".  You can read about some of the techniques in it and buy it on practicespot.com.

Here it is in a nutshell...if you want to learn a song REALLY well and know you won't mess up in performance situations, you have to alter the way you practice it and modify your technique a little.

1.  Do NOT sight read a song you wish to learn very well!  This will take a little bit of discipline.  There are really 2 kinds of practicing--sight reading and learning repertoire.  Never use them on the same piece of music! The way you play a song for the first 2 days determines the way you will play it for the rest of your life.  So if you start from the beginning and play through the whole thing hands together, you will absolutely reinforce mistakes.  For every time you play it wrong, you must pay it correctly 20 times to get it "solid" and reliable.  So it pays to...
2.  Use the same fingering every single time.  Write it in!  The 3 concert pianists I have met all write in every single finger number on every single note.  Thumbs are 1 and pinkys are 5.
3.  Play small sections (2-8 measures) of the piece SLOWLY and hands apart until you know you can't mess them up.  Make sure to do the phrasing/articuation/dynamics. Then play that section hands together.  Memorise the hands apart and then together. 
4.  Practice 2 sections at a time until they are all smooth.
5.  Play the whole thing.  Practice playing in front of at least one other person at least 10 times.  Now you are ready to perform! 

Sounds like a lot of work, huh?  It is, but it gets easier to do the more pieces you learn this way. And you build up some pieces you can whip out at any time, and they always sound fabulous.

Another principle of solid playing that has more to do with technique is to "play from the top of the keys".  This means that you don't want your fingering flying high and slamming down on the keys from a couple inches above the keyboard.  Your fingers have to lightly touch the top of the keys BEFORE you press them down.  It takes a zen-like concentration to still get powerful sound this way, but once you have practiced it, you get a much better tone AND MUCH MUCH MUCH better accuracy.   Good luck, Paul, and I can't wait to read your next race report!

Thank you, Lybi`. That may be the most helpful post I've yet read on this forum, and that's saying a lot. I have a horrible time trying to memorize songs and learn to play them well. There are two songs, two of the first I ever learned, that I can play from memory, "Close to You" and "Let Me Be There". It's interesting to me, now that I think about it, that I remember how to play them because of finger positions and patterns. Since I was new at piano playing, I had to learn them one hand at a time and consciously focus on where to put my fingers. Very interesting. I'll try to remember this the next time I have time to play. I will also look into getting "Not Until You've Done Your Practice!" Maybe I'll suggest it to my wife and kids as a possible Christmas present.

Since I've played through most of my music books dozens of times over the years, I may have to start over with new books. If I have to play each song 20 times correctly for each time I've played it wrong, it may take more years than I have left. I guess I'll have to go over the hundreds of songs I love to play and pick a few I want to learn really well. The rest I'll just keep playing with sustained mediocrity and continue to sing along with my equally mediocre voice.

Thank you for taking the time to reply, Lybi`, and explain this to me. I really appreciate it.

If you don't mind me asking, can you explain the backwards apostrophe at the end of your name? Is it a convention from a non-English language of which I'm not aware? or is it the result of something like when my niece legally changed her name from Jaime to Jme? or maybe a symbol similar to the artist formerly known as Prince? I think it's cool, I'm just curious.

I think it is a typo in the profile.

Paul, there is a guttural *click* at the end of my name...didn't you know that?  Just kidding.  It was a typo, and hopefully now it is fixed.  I couldn't figure out why Sasha did that...he he he.

Speaking of typos and completely off-topic I've noticed on the fastrunningblog.com home page there is one place where it says "Trainig Log" instead of "Training Log". Not that I'm losing sleep over this (actually I haven't been sleeping well so maybe I AM losing sleep over it) but since we got onto the 'typo' subject I thought now was a  good time to get this off my chest.

Lybi - the problem is that your name in the blog database in the User Options has ` at the end. It got imported into the forum database the first time you accessed the forum.

Tom - I have fixed the typo.

Good suggestions on learning to sight read. I have been incorporating them into my practice sessions.

lybi-i wish i lived by you..you would for sure be my piano teacher!

There IS a house for sale in my cul de sac, Marci!  ;)

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!

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!

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.   

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.