Piano Lesson Strategies

A “Chord Method” for Piano Learning

One of the interests I’ve had since I was a very young child is how it works to “play by ear.” When I was a child, I thought that it was, basically, a “magical gift” that spontaneously appeared in some people. Then, I learned music theory in college and realized that it was possible to label the music that one heard, and “playing by ear” became something that was, in theory, doable.

I’ve thought for many years that it would be appropriate to teach a “chord method” in addition to a traditional piano method – which would support learning to “play by ear” –but I never found one that was appealing. A few months ago I ran across Meridee Winters’ books – and I finally have a method that is teaching the pattern part that is used both to play by ear and to play written pieces with facility

Here are Meridee Winters’ chord piano method books and more information about the method:

Chord Books

Practicing: frequency, scheduling, and duration

Yes, it does need to be discussed — how long should a student practice, how frequently, and how does it become a good habit? I’ll answer all of these questions.

Unfortunately, I cannot simply give a pat answer here — there is no “silver bullet” music practice regimen. However, from my own study of music and twenty years of teaching others, I’ve learned a few things over the years about practicing music.

The weekly goal of practice sessions should be 5-6 times per week. Life happens, and not all of our intentions pan out — with a goal of 5-6 times per week, the student should end up with no fewer than 4 practice sessions per week. My experience has shown that a student that regularly practices fewer than 4 times per week (one time per day) will not make meaningful progress from week to week.

For this reason, I generally provide students with practice records, outlining what needs to be covered in practice and how to do it, with room to mark off each day that it is done. This helps facilitate communication about practice between student and teacher. Also, as a teacher, if a student comes to lesson and clearly has not learned something from the prior week that was included in the practice sheet I need to know whether or not this lack stems from (a) lack of understanding of the material or (b) has simply not practiced sufficiently to master the concept. How I address the issue as a teacher differs greatly depending upon the underlying problem.

This brings up another issue — frequency of practice. As a general rule, it is crucial to practice either the next day after the lesson, or at most the second day after the lesson. This is because the student needs to be able to remember what was covered in the lesson in order to practice it effectively. Yes, a practice sheet helps, but it doesn’t completely solve this problem. Practicing the very next day or the second day after a lesson should be worked into the student’s general schedule.

Which leads us to scheduling. It is important to schedule music practice into your day. If it is left as a “I’ll practice when I get around to it” — most likely, the student will not regularly get around to it. This is the same for children and adults, irrespective of how much enjoyment they derive from music practice. Young children will require a parent to help work music practice into the household schedule, and may require support from the parent to practice effectively. Plan for this. Older children may still need a parent to help add practice into their schedule, to prompt for practice, and perhaps even work rewards for music practice into the usual schedule. For students of any age, it works best if music practice comes regularly after or before other scheduled activity — such as, music practice starts about 20 minutes after getting home from school, once a snack has been eaten or 30 minutes after returning home for work. After music practice, another enjoyable activity starts such as video games or dinner.

Last, we get to duration of music practice. Generally, attempt to get to all of the assigned practice, within the limitations of the student’s attention span. A very young child (age 6 and under) may only practice for 10 – 15 minutes. Some kids with short attention spans may be benefitted by two 10-minute practice sessions daily. Older students and adults will have the attention span that is longer. A half an hour of daily practice can be expected, with a lot of personal variation. Some students may breeze through most assignments, and require little time. Some students may struggle through most assignments, and need a break after 30 minutes. (And the same student may fit into both of these categories on different weeks!) Some students may enjoy improvising or “playing around on the piano” after completing assignments, or reviewing past pieces — other will not. All of this is normal. I suggest focusing on quality of practice sessions — was all of the material covered? were all of the steps followed? — rather than on quantity of practice sessions. Practice records can facilitate parents in following up with their children on what was practiced.

Beginning students: piano or musical keyboard?

Ah, the age old question. I will elaborate.

Learning to play piano on a musical keyboard has significant drawbacks.

1) The full name for the piano is “pianoforte.” In Italian, this means, literally, “soft loud.” The precursor instrument to the piano was the harpsichord. On a harpsichord, no matter how hard or lightly the player depressed the keys, the volume that emerged from the instrument was unchanged. This was not ideal. To get around this there were double-keyboard harpsichords invented — play one keyboard and one string was plucked, play the second keyboard and two strings were plucked, resulting in a louder sound. The piano was an amazing invention because one could control the volume of the keys played by the pressure exerted by the fingers when playing — hence, it was called a “soft loud.” Most muscal keyboards do not increase/decrease volume according to the pressure used on the keys. This means that the student cannot learn one of the key components of piano playing with a musical keyboard. This is a large drawback which can be partially overcome by using a keyboard with “touch sensitivity” or “touch response” (or one of several other monikers.) However, the feel in the hand of such keyboards and the way it responds is markedly different than how it works on a piano, and does not translate well.

2) The tactile sensation of playing a keyboard is more similar to the tactile sensation of playing an organ, rather than that of playing a piano. Going between the two is something that has to be learned, and adjusted for. This is just one more thing for the beginning piano student to need to learn, and I don’t recommend it.

3) Most keyboards do not have pedals. Pianos generally have at least two pedals, and the damper pedal is used frequently — it is often introduced in the first level of piano playing. There are “keyboard damper pedals” and many keyboards have an input for these pedals. The less costly of these pedals work in the opposite way that an actual piano damper works — which is not helpful for a beginning piano student. It is possible (for most keyboards with inputs for damper pedals) to purchase a damper pedal unit that looks like and mimics the damper pedal of an actual piano — I do recommend this for use with either a keyboard or digital piano.

Acoustic pianos are beautiful and (can) sound wonderful –they can be purchased new or used. However, they are not good for people who need the piano on anything other than a first level of a building, who have stairs that a piano would need to be moved up or down, who live in small homes, who move frequently, or who need the piano practicing to not be heard throughout the house, clashing with other household activities. Figure in about $100/year to tune an acoustic piano. Do not get an acoustic piano from someone other than a dealer (or someone that knows pianos and that you can trust) without have a qualified tuner check it out first — old pianos that have not been maintained are sometimes wonderful and just need a little tuning — but sometimes they need a lot of expensive work and are not worth it. Most piano tuners do simple repairs and will be be able to advise you whether or not a used piano is a worthwhile purchase.

Digital pianos are an excellent option when an acoustic piano is not ideal. On the low end, the starting price is lower than the cost of a well-working acoustic piano. They are portable, can be used with headphones, and never need tuning. Digital pianos do a good job of mimicking the tactile sensation of playing a real piano, and it is possible to move with ease between a digital piano and acoustic piano. (There is still some variability — but for that matter, there is variability between different types of acoustic pianos.) Digital pianos often come with various “bells and whistles”: metronome, different voices, rhythms, ability to play midi files, ability to “record” (to midi) what is played and later manipulate it, and much, much more.

Ultimately, I recommend getting any beginning piano student an actual piano to play on — either acoustic or digital. Musical keyboards have a place — and for a parent that is wondering whether or not a child is “serious” about learning to play piano, an inexpensive musical keyboard can be a good way to get the student started, to see if the desire to play piano is a passing fancy, or a desire that will see the student through the effort required to learn to play piano. If a piano student continues beyond the first month or two — get a real piano.

Teaching kids to identify left from right

Very often, as adults, we learned to tell our left from our right so long ago that we do it reflexively, with hardly a though for it. For some young students learning to tell left from right is quite a challenge. Here are some ideas for teaching young children to identify left and right hands.

Find other areas in the child’s life where there are differences between what is on the left and right, for example:

In many homes dinner place settings are done a specific way, with fork to the left of the plate, knife, spoon, and cup to the left. Discuss at dinner how the fork is on the left, the knife, spoon and cup on right. Ask the child to set the table, or help set the table, placing all of the forks to the left of the plates, etc.
When in the car, you can talk about things that are on the right of the car, and on the left of the car.
When greeting, we use our right hand to shake hands. Practice shaking right hands with your child, and identifying it as the right hand.
Play dance games with your child that identify the right side and the left side of the body, such as The Hokey Pokey or Looby Loo.
When facing the front door of your home, is the door handle on the right or on the left? Is the doorbell on the right or the left?
When using the sink or tub, identify that the cold is the knob on the right, hot is the knob on the left.
If your child is showing clear “handedness” (preference for right or left hand when writing) point this out to your child, that they use the right (left) hand to write/draw, and not the left (right.)

Here are some strategies you can use in the meantime to help your child play piano until they have developed the skill of identify left from right:

Write LH and RH on your child’s hands at the beginning of piano practice sessions.
Print out small drawings of right hands and left hands and have your child glue or tape them into the book when RH or LH is indicated. (It is better that the child glue or tape them down, because this is part of the learning process.) Then the child can match their actual hand to the drawing.
If your child is confident in drawing an “L” correctly, then show your child how the LH thumb and pointer finger naturally create a correctly shaped L, and how the RH thumb and pointer finger make a backwards L. (This method works well for some kids, but not for all.)

What does “polishing” mean?

There are two main parts of learning to play a piece:(1) Basic mechanics — understanding which fingers play which notes, how long notes are held, how to follow the notes on the page, and so forth.(2) Polishing!
Polishing is when you put all of the pieces together and combine them so that the piano playing sounds musical. This step can be difficult to grasp when you don’t know how the final musical piece (or musical exercise) should sound. With some experience, piano students will develop a good sense of “how it is supposed to sound” just by working on the mechanics, without hearing the finished piece played, — but in beginning students that sense is undeveloped.
When the student has figured out the basic mechanics, it can be helpful to listen to a recording of how the musical piece is supposed to sound. There are many examples on https://youtube.com of people playing songs from the Piano Adventures book. With knowledge of how it is supposed to sound, now the student can use the mechanics and put all of the pieces together — polishing — so that they can play the piece as it is intended to be played.

Group Piano – My child is moving faster than the class

(This post relates specifically to Piano Adventures Level 1 beginning group piano class.)

One of the challenges of doing group piano is that everyone moves at a little bit different pace, and in a classroom setting everyone needs to be kept at about the same place to facilitate group instruction.
If your child is ready to move along faster than the class, here are some options for you:

Switch to private lessons.
Let your child attempt the next song in the book.
Purchase supplemental materials and have your child play a few songs from some of these — there are flashcards, Performance book, Christmas songbook, etc. If you have a beginning book from a different piano method there may be some comparable songs that your child can play.
Towards the bottom of many of the pages in the books are “extra” activities that can be done with the songs. For example, Lesson Book p. 15 suggests creating clock chimes after playing The Old Clock, p. 16 suggests playing the hands together, rather than one after the other, and p. 17 suggests playing Tightrope Walker on the white keys.
Let your child create “tone poems” on the piano. Choose a story (it could be from a familiar book) or let the child make up a story and then see if they can use the piano to create the “background” music for the story — or, try to tell the story with music that they create on the piano. (This is similar to the activity on pp. 4-5 of the Theory book.)

Strategies for Teaching Kids to Read Notes on the Staff

Finding it difficult to read the notes on the staff and translate them to the piano keys is a very common hurdle that must be overcome. Here are some tried and true methods for helping kids with this.

Ensure the child has a thorough understanding of the letter names of the white keys. If this is not secure, adding the secondary layer of reading notes on the staff is very difficult.
Ensure the child understands what a step and skip are on the white keys and on the staff. (Step: one white key to a neighbor key, space note to line note on staff; Skip: from one white key skip over the neighbor white key to the next white key, on the staff line note to next line note or space note to next space note.)
Play steps on the piano – ask the child to identify if it is a step up or step down. Allow the child to see your hands.
Play skips on the piano – ask the child to identify if it is a skip up or skip down. Allow the child to see your hands.
Play steps and skips on the piano – ask the child to identify whether it is up or down and a step or a skip.
Call out “step” or “skip”; “up” or “down” and have the child play this on the piano.
Use manuscript (i.e. staff) paper to draw out notes that are steps/skips, and or use flashcards with steps/skips, or point to steps/skips in the child’s music. Have the child identify whether it is a step or a skip and whether it goes up or down. (There may also be “repeats” i.e. repeated notes.)
Practice saying the music alphabet forwards and backwards, at least twice in a row so the child becomes accustomed with A following G going up and G following A coming back down. Start on letters other than G and A. Practicing backwards is very important, as it is likely the child has never practiced thinking the alphabet backwards before. Practice “skipping through” the music alphabet, for example, speaking: “A, C, E, G, B, D, F, A” and “A, F, D, B, G, E, C, A.” Lettered flashcards can be used – the child picks a card and then is asked to name the note that is a step/skip, up/down.
Quiz the child first on the guide notes (Middle C, Treble G, Bass F) on the staff and then the other notes learned. It is helpful to start with notes that are either a step or skip from the guide notes. If the child does not know the note, have the child identify the nearest guide note, and then count up/down by steps to find the note name. Flash cards can be purchased that have the notes on them.
Before playing a (new) piece, have the child point to each of the notes and identify the letters. DO NOT WRITE ALL OF THE LETTER NAMES in to the music. You may write in: letter for starting note in each hand and any other notes that the child is especially struggling to read. DO NOT generally write in letter names of guide notes, unless they are the starting note for either hand. Guide notes need to be memorized. (I recommend against mnemonics such as “Every Good Boy Does Fine” – this brings extra things to remember into the process and I’ve seen too many kids struggling to remember the mnemonic, or whether it is supposed to go up or down, or whether it is for the treble or bass clef, etc. Actual music notation has an internal logic that is based in how it developed over centuries of use. Once the child understands the internal logic, no mnemonics are needed and the child will always be able to find their way around the grand staff.)
Before playing a (new) piece, have the child point to each note and identify if the subsequent note is “a step up,” “a step down,” “a repeat,” “a skip up,” “a skip down,” or “a LEAP up/down.” (The term “leap” can be used for any interval that is larger than a skip/3^rd.)