Some wonderful books Ken Rushton Sept 2010How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons: what Music Is and How to Make It at Home Ward Cannel and Fred Marx Play Piano in a Flash! by Scott Huston Music Theory For Dummies - or was it Piano For Dummies? All three books present to the same conclusion that I came to when I researched music, and that's what motivated me to
start blogging about music: there is a simple underlying set of
principles that music works around, just like speech and therefore
reading is organized around syllables & phonetics.It's nice to know that the professionals agree. As
with reading, it's a great help if ones knows the underlying rules. Of
course some would say it is cheating; learning music requires hard work
and many visits to the instructor, right ? ... However, these books say it a lot better than I can, and save me the trouble of trying.They also pile on all sorts of techniques and tricks. With these to guide me, I know what each hand and digit will generally do: * Right hand: Fingers for melody (the treble clef stuff), Right Thumb for the pitch bend etc. effects. * Left hand: Fingers for chordal accompaniment: but ignore the Bass Clef; just have to learn how to make 3 chords,read a fake book, then embellish a bit , Left Thumb for the lower octaves: root and 5th, per the instructions given in the book. The jammer and the Axis are way, way better for this than the piano. It's much easier to just do what the books say than to explain it here. and on the larger field of Generalized learning tipsTips on how to learn, culled from David Levitin's work and N. Doidge's wonderful The Brain that changes itself. |
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