Item — HN Reader

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.

1 comments

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.