Item — HN Reader

Practice reading sheet music, which does not mean playing what is on the page but reading the page and understanding the harmonic structure in both the vertical and the horizontal. Starting out this means sitting down with some sheet music and a pencil and marking up the pages. This will also help you learn the notes and more importantly the intervals. And play those scales, circles of fifths, triads, arpeggios through the 7ths, etc. Sing the note names as you play them, it will really beat it into your head both the staff position and the sound even if you are not good at singing them at proper pitch.

Flash cards are not great here since you loose context, you want to study both the vertical harmonic structure of chords and how that evolves through time in the horizontal structure. Just download a bunch of sheet music and print it out or buy a notebook/pad of staff paper and write it out.

1 comments

> Flash cards are not great here since you loose context

That's exactly why I staled and wrote here, the flashcard system felt off to me.

Thank you for your detailed feedback, it's really helpful. It's good to read that there is no secret sauce for theory either.

I really think it depends on what level you're at. If you're still struggling to identify notes on the staff, then flash cards are just fine. If you're struggling to identify the intervals or triads, also still fine. If you can do that easily, then forego the flash cards and start analyzing Bach chorales.

But I'll restate what I said elsewhere, I think ear training is much more important once you get past the basics. In that case, I'd learn the Nashville Number System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System).

I'm curious; why would you recommend the Nashville Number System over Roman Numerals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numeral_analysis)? Seems like the latter is much more widely used. Maybe I'm in a different bubble than you...

The Nashville Number System is faster to write down as you listen to a tune, has methods of indicating ryhthm associated with changes (underline means half a bar, diamond around a number means to play the note once and let it ring for a whole bar). It's just better all around for popular music. Roman Numerals are really only used in analyzing classical music as far as I know.

Part of my education, in commercial ear training class, we had to write number charts and get it right the first time through. It sounds hard, but with practice it's really quick.

The problem with flash cards is they don't actually help you with your problems which are remembering the theory and sight reading.

Sight reading is more than the note names, it is also the action of moving your fingers and not just finding the note on the keyboard but keeping your hands in the right position so your others fingers can do what they need to do. So you set your metronome nice and slow and play through your scales while singing the notes and get ear training thrown in for free. Flash cards will just add in an extra step here, you still have to learn those finger movements, sight reading and ear training. Just remember to speed up that metronome when things get easy. The Theory side is much the same.

The single best thing you can do is make practice a part of your daily routine, an hour a day every day. If you are doing that or close to doing that then you need to talk to your teacher about the lack of progress and possibly find a new teacher.

This is a super super super beginner question, but what's a good resource for learning the "correct" fingerings?

I took 9 years of piano lessons, but I was very young (I quit when I was 12, 25+ years ago), so I have a vague memory that there's a "right" way to do things, but no idea where to go to re-learn it.

I quit as soon as my parents would let me because I thought sight reading was supposed to be as easy as reading written words, and if I hadn't been able to master what I thought of as the most basic skill in 9 years, I must be hopeless.

Now I understand that sight reading is actually a much more advanced skill, so I probably wasn't hopeless after all.

Correct fingering is determined by context, where is that hand coming from and where is it going next on the keyboard? So you read/play through a few times and figure out the optimal fingering to make sure you are not tripping over your hands. Teachers tend not to explain this until the student points out that the correct fingering for that chord was different in another piece.

The annoying truth is that what the correct fingering is changes depending on your hand size. So the real thing to learn is “what’s the right way to hold your hand and body at a keyboard to not cause long term damage” and then see what fingerings come out from that for your hand size. Unfortunately, don’t have a good resource there.