It's been a little while since my last blog post, and I felt the need share with my dedicated readers about all the progress I have made. I have been relentless on the keys, racking up a solid 4-5 hours over the past four days and have really seen myself become more comfortable on the piano. As of today I have concluded my 8th day of practice. Over the past week I have learned basic exercises, started learning how to read music and have even started learning riffs from songs. For example here is an exercise I recorded myself playing on Monday (5th day of practice) (this was the best possible place for the camera I could find):
As you can see I still have some things to work on, but slowly I am getting more comfortable. Throughout this week I have been working on things such as playing with two hands, finger speed and most importantly finger independence. Finger independence is essential to playing the piano. It is how well your fingers can play individual notes. The better you are at it, the more often you will play the right notes. For example this exercise focuses on it. As I continue to play more, these skills will begin to develop.
As I am playing the piano, for my first week, I am also learning how to read music. I started with "Every Good Boy Does Fine", an acronym that around 99.9% of us have heard before. I then began to learn the more important things that I never knew before such as how to know which part of the piano the notes is played, and that piano music has multiple staffs per line. I have also learned that there are different kinds of notes and all of them require you to play faster or slower. Reading music is an essential skill and I am beginning to develop an understanding of it, but only with practice will I begin to truly get better.
Throughout this first week, I have sadly not become a piano grand master yet. Despite not learning all of the secrets to playing the piano, I have learned some pretty important things thus far that I believe will be important for the rest of my playing. Stay tuned for my next post where I will be showcasing my talents on two riffs I have begun learning. I will also be sharing more of my information of what I have learned so far and how my goals have shifted.
My musical experience has been pretty weak through my first 15 years. Besides my completely amazing experience playing the recorder in 3rd grade, and my stint at trombone in 5th, I have never truly played an instrument before. Most of my time has been spent on school work and on a sports field. I also spend a considerable amount of time listening to music, and felt that learning to play this music would be a lot of fun. I took this project as an opportunity to explore something relatively new to me, and learn to play music on the piano.
By the end of the six weeks, I hope to be able to play intermediate level songs on the piano. This goal is going to take hard work to achieve. Due to my lack of musical experience, the difficulty of this goal is still unknown to me, and my journey may take me down a slightly different path than what I have in mind, but overall I hope to be able to play real songs in the end. In order to do this, I am going to have to work my way from the ground up.
Since I am starting from ground zero, I had a lot of questions about where to start. I researched and talked to people who play the piano, and they all agreed that my two weeks should be spent getting acquainted with the piano. This means my first two weeks will be spent doing two things. I will first start learning basic exercises. These help with building up finger independence, two hand coordination, getting a feel for the space between keys and many other skills that are needed once I begin playing songs. They will overall just help me start to get a feel for the piano. I also want to begin learning to read music. This will help tremendously with playing songs in the future and also is a necessary skill for almost all musicians.
Example of exercise I have started learning:
(Try in FireFox if its not playing; Also you can try the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfWMTC9aRx8&t=29s)
After I have the basic down, and feel comfortable on the piano, I am going to move on to playing easy songs. I am going to work on memorization and keeping tempo. These will be very important for when I attempt pieces that are more advanced. My plan is to work my way up from the easy songs and see what level I can reach by the 6th week. In order to be sure that I am making progress, I plan to keep a "diary", or record of what I do each day of practicing. This will allow me to see as I begin playing more advanced exercises/songs and will allow me to keep my learning organized.
Mixed in with the playing, I also hope to learn a lot about the history of the piano and the players that paved the way for the modern piano. These are people such as Mozart, Beethoven, Vladimir Horowitz and Art Tatum. I hope to learn about how they mastered their craft and even get into musical theory and learn about why what they played sounded so good.
(In order right to left: Tatum, Mozart, Horowitz, Beethoven)
For my six week adventure, I plan to absorb everything I can about the piano and I want to learn to play it to the best of my abilities. This is going to be something new to me, and I have little idea of where my learning will take me. I hope to progress quickly, but I also have begun to brace myself for the fact that this is likely to be very difficult and is going to take a lot of patience and persistence. It is also going to take flexibility, and my goals of playing intermediate music pieces and playing jazz may end up being a total fantasy. This means that I may end up having to adjust my goals which is something I am going to have to be ok with. As of now though, my motivation as well as my hopes are high, and I have designed my learning path to try to keep that motivation at a high level. I will continue to post videos of myself playing as well as everything I learn along the way. All I can say for now is that I am excited to see what becomes of my playing throughout the next 6 weeks.
