Viewing: piano - View all posts
Make Everyone Else Sound Good and You'll Sound Better
When my grandmother sent me to take the Dale Carnegie training, I didn’t have high expectations. She did it because she wanted me to be better at business. I couldn’t imagine what I had to learn.
But I did learn! Lots of things: How to talk to strangers; How to remember names. And the most important thing of all.
“If you just let someone tell you all about themselves, they’ll think you’re the smartest person in the world.”
In other words, people respond well to being listened to. So well, in fact, that they’ll think highly of you even if you never open your own mouth.
You can apply this to piano playing.
Table of Contents
The Paradox of the Jazz Solo
It took me thirty years before I realized that I was working too hard as a jazz musician,
I wanted so badly to be heard, liked, respected. I killed myself to get good at soloing, and I beat myself up each time I missed a note. I never felt like anyone really thought I was any good, least of all, me.
My friend Rick Saylor was a bass player and former road manager to the likes of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. He was also the host of a jazz jam in my neighborhood and for ten years I was his first choice for piano. Going to his house on a regular basis, I got the chance to try different ways of playing in a jazz ensemble.
I tried the “play really crazy” way. That didn’t turn anyone’s head. I tried the “be really modest” way. People wondered why I didn’t play more. I tried “being myself.” I stayed the same as I always was.
Change didn’t come until I started looking at the bass player’s fingers.
When I did that, I got the idea of playing in a way that would make the bass player sound good. Rick was immensely knowledgable, but he was insecure as a player, and I thought if my playing could make space for his talents, he’d appreciate it. That became my top priority.
What a difference that made!
Rick noticed. He felt the groove between us, and he remarked on it. Better yet, he responded, locking in and playing better.
And who got the compliment for improving? I did.
In retrospect it seems obvious that if you play in a way that makes one or more of the other players sound good, you will sound good, but we’re not taught to think that way. We generally believe we have to impress people with our knowledge, dexterity, or showmanship. In reality, all that does is rob everyone else of the opportunity to sound good.
If you’re the best player in the room and you show off, yes, everyone will notice. They may even talk about what an amazing talent you are. But after a while they’ll get tired of it, because they’ll either feel inferior all the time, or they’ll feel pushed out.
Even worse, they may feel ignored. And well they should. Have you ever been around an extremely clever or intelligent person who likes to talk but doesn’t really listen to you?
If you want people to think of you as the best player in the room, do whatever it takes to raise everyone else’s level. When a soloist is playing, think about how you can complement their efforts. How can a melodic phrase highlight their last solo line, and is an answer from you necessary at all, or should you just establish a kicking groove for them?
The better they think they sound, the more they’ll like you and your playing. And you’ll never have to show off or be a monster to get that respect. You’ll be prioritizing the right thing.
Accompanying
Many pianists don’t want to be accompanists but are forced to do it through degree requirements or financial pressures. They’d prefer to impress everyone with the Liszt B-minor Sonata rather than play figures from the accompaniment to Schubert’s “The Trout.” If they have to work hard, they want something back, dang it!
And so often they’ll treat accompaniments like solo opportunities, playing with every bit of virtuosity and showmanship. “It’s the singer’s job to keep up, right? I’m doing MY job.”
Well, getting a complement for your brilliant accompanying may be very satisfying, but if you’ve overshadowed the singer, or failed to follow their tempo or phrasing, you may not get hired again. Even if you are hired because you’re such a “hot player,” you won’t enjoy it. Making the piano part of “The Trout” into a showcase for your talent is a little like making a feast out of a bag of M&M’s.
Yes, the accompaniment to “The Trout” is a wonderfully written piano part, and there’s a lot you can do with it. And you should exercise your artistry there. But it must be in the service of supporting the singer.
If you can’t handle that, then think of it this way: What can you do to make the two of you sound great together? Because if you’re not doing that, then you’re doing exactly the opposite: Making one of you sound bad.
Chamber Music
Chamber music pianists aren’t exactly accompanists. But they aren’t exactly soloists either. They’re more like a jazz pianist, except that everything is written out.
They’re playing in a coordinated dance with other solo instruments. Any chamber pianist worth their salt knows they have to get all their notes right, get their rhythms right, play the phrasings and markings in the score. They also usually know they have to think about the tempo of the group and not insist on their own tempo.
But too often a chamber musician might consider that the score is the be-all and end-all. As long as you’re following that score, you’re “safe.” You can’t be blamed for anything.
In fact, the score is a composer’s attempt to convey music, not instructions. If you listen to a computer rendition of a chamber piece, it’s unlikely you’ll walk away thinking we no longer need live players. On the contrary, you’ll remark upon the perfect, yet sterile performance.
The rule applies here: Make the other musicians sound good. Whatever suggestion you are given in the score, modify it in real time to the sounds you are hearing, and to the sounds you believe you are likely to hear based on your rehearsals.
The better you make the other musicians sound, the better you will sound. Period. How can it be otherwise?
If the music you’re playing along to sounds good, you’ll sound good.
And so often this may mean deciding whether to push the tempo so the musicians can follow you, or whether to lag just a microsecond behind to add a nice tension to the mix. Or perhaps you’ll decide there’s a time and place to absolutely nail the tempo so everyone sounds like a single player. There are subtleties in playing with other people that have to be experienced to be understood, and these are things composers absolutely cannot notate, at least not with any precision.
Solo Playing
You could be forgiven for thinking that solo playing is the one place where you can show off. It seems like soloists, piano recitalists, concerto players, are meant to show off. And while that’s true, there is a place for the supportive-type thinking we’ve espoused in the previous sections.
Nic Peterson says this about sales: “The customer wants to know they’re understood, and they want to feel smart.” In other words, if you’re selling something to someone, first convince them that you understand their most pressing problem. Then make them feel smart for buying what you’re selling by educating them on the benefits.
We are salespeople of a sort, although music isn’t really a product per se. Nevertheless, we want our audience to “take” the music from us, not just sit there while it hits them. What do the best players do that set them apart from the garden-variety show-off?
In brief, they listen to their audience and make them feel intelligent.
Listening to your audience means taking them into account on some level when you play, incorporating their silence or lack of silence into your game plan. Are they engaged when you’re playing? If not, what do they need? More rubato? A quicker tempo? More movement in your body and face?
Remember, you’re not doing them a favor just by being on stage. They need something from you and you’ve pledged to give it to them. Who wants to be the salesperson who says “Well, I’ve offered them an encyclopedia and that’s what they’re getting, even though they’re starving for food.”
If you play in a way that brings them to some understanding, even if it’s a fleeting, emotional understanding, something that makes them believe they’ve shared in an experience, not just as a passive observer, but as a participant, if you bring them into the music so that they think, “I can see myself playing this music,” then you will have rabid fans.
Some pianists don’t want to give up the idea of creating a sense of awe in their viewers…awe of themselves. But ultimately people don’t return to see things that impress them unless those things also engage them. We go to see the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower because we can climb to the top!
The thing you want, to be loved, respected, will come out of your ability to forge a connection between you and other people. When the other people are musicians, make them sound good. When it’s the audience, make them feel good.
How Do You Manage Page Turns?
Three Times Perfect: How You'll Know When You're Ready
Five Practice Issues That Can Waste Your Time
How Much Do I Have to Practice Piano?
How Much Do I Have To Practice Piano?
Practice is the thing that turns a potential musician into a successful musician. But while most teachers show students how to play, very few teach them how to practice. Let’s take a look at what practicing is, and how to do it in a way that makes us better rather than just tired.
Table of Contents
How Often Should You Practice?
How Long Can You Go Without Practicing
#1 What Is Practicing?
Practicing is organized self-learning.
That’s got two parts to it: Organized - This means that in some sense the time you are spending at the piano is meaningful to you. You have organized your time to do something specific.
Self-learning: That means you’re directing the learning yourself. During a lesson, I’m directing the learning. When you get home, you have to be your own teacher and know what you want to learn for the day.
So if all you’re doing is running through a piece while you think about lunch, I’d be hard-pressed to call that practicing. It’s just pretending to practice…killing time…
Ideally, you should be paying attention to what happens when you run the piece, or doing parts of the piece instead of the whole piece. We’ll get to specifics later on. The important thing is you’re attempting to learn something, and you’re the one deciding what, and if, you’re learning.
#2 How Often Should You Practice?
Welcome to the hornet’s nest!
If I’m going to be taken to task for any part of this blog, it will be this one. Teachers have very different opinions about how much practice is necessary. I won’t pretend to have the definitive answer.
What I will have is one answer, and I’ll make the case for it the best I can.
If you are taking weekly lessons, you should practice as much as it takes to achieve your learning goal for the week. If you achieve your goal, that was the right amount of practicing. If you fail to achieve your goal, it may be that you practiced too little, or the goal may have been too difficult.
There are some teachers who subscribe to the belief that students should practice a fixed amount of time every day, no matter what. The rationale behind this idea is that students who practice a lot are able to move more quickly into the realm of “I can play.” They also develop a good work-ethic right from the start.
I believe asking students to practice a fixed amount of time no matter the goal or circumstances is not only asking for trouble, but is counterproductive. Few professionals practice a set amount of time. We practice according to how much time we have available to us, and what we have to get accomplished in the near term.
Learning how much you need to practice is actually part of the process of learning the piano. A good pianist knows how much to practice, when to keep going, when to stop. If you want to get better, you’ll have to learn that too.
Sadly, not all teachers offer information on how to practice, only that you “should.”
I do believe that it’s worthwhile to have a general guideline for practice: 20-30 minutes a day, six days a week is a great goal for most students over 7 years old. As a student, you should be keeping track in a journal of how much practicing you are doing, how many days a week, compared to that guideline. There may be lots of reasons you fall short.
If you are an adult student and you only have two or three days a week to practice, or if you are the parent of a 5-year old child who is not a piano prodigy, then you may prefer to adhere to shorter and fewer practice days for the time being. You can make meaningful progress accomplishing easier goals. It will just be slower progress. That is only a problem if you are impatient for results, in which case you should set harder goals and practice more!
But then the decision to practice more is your decision, and it comes out of a healthy desire to excel.
I will add that if you have more work than you enjoy, if you have a goal that takes 30 minutes and you would prefer a goal that takes 5 minutes, that you have a conversation with your teacher. Not all teachers can or will accommodate this request. You’ll have to find a teacher that cares more about the learning process than the attainment of learning milestones.
#3 How Long Can You Go Without Practicing?
Violinist Jascha Heifetz is crediting with saying about practice: “When I skip a day, I notice a difference in my playing. After two days, the critics notice, and after three days, so does the audience.”
It sounds like any day off for a musician is dangerous.
This is true if you are working to polish something to perfection. Perfecting a piece is like climbing a high mountain. Staying on top requires effort and focus. If you’re preparing for a performance, an audition or an exam, it’s best to do some kind of practicing every day, based on your goals.
In terms of developing your skills, the question is more nuanced.
When you’re first learning something, it’s somewhat fragile. Like memorizing vocabulary for a new language, it may be hard to keep everything in your head without lots of reinforcement.
After a while the thing you learn becomes a part of who you are. Most of us can count on still being able to walk after a week of lying in bed. Similarly, you can walk away from the piano for a week, or even several months, without losing your essential skills. Coming back after a long absence, you may find you’re a little rusty, but you’ll be able to get back to your original ability in less time than it took to attain it.
As a matter of fact, not practicing is an important part of practicing.
Rest should be a part of your practice routine: Small rests during practice sessions; Taking a day off every week; taking a couple of months in the summer to think about other things or play different music. These things not only feel good, they ultimately assist your brain to make you a better learner.
Watch this video to see what happens when you rest for just 10 seconds!
We needn’t be afraid of our skill rising and falling. Like the stock-market, we’re better off accepting the short-term rises and falls in favor of a slow, gradual increase in our ability. If we want huge short-term gains, there’s a time and a way to work for that, but it shouldn’t be our only way of thinking about learning.
I hope this blog has made you want to practice. Even more, I hope it’s made you want to study with me! Visit https://abetterpianoteacher.com to find out more about my approach to learning the piano!
Introducing A Better Piano Channel!
How to memorize a jazz tune in seconds
If you play it backwards, something amazing happens!
What Does It Mean to Be “Good” At Something?
Same As I Do / Louise, Louise - Adam at Eddie's Attic, Monday, March 11, 2024
Here's That Rainy Day
Why Piano Teachers are Safe From AI
Why Piano Teachers are Safe From AI
AI is eliminating industries so fast it’s making our collective heads spin. ChatGPT can write in any style (goodbye, professional writers), edit and clean up prose (goodbye, editors), create code (goodbye, programmers), describe a picture that can be rendered with DALL-2 (goodbye, graphic designers). The only people who will be left are the ones who sell ChatGPT’s services!
Except for piano teachers.
| TABLE OF CONTENTS |
| How Piano Teaching Actually Works |
| The Piano Teacher's Dilemma |
| What's the Alternative for Piano Teachers? |
| The Third and Best Reason |
It’s a terrifying time to try to find work. The old vision of robots doing the dirty jobs like housecleaning while humans write music and create art has flipped. Instead we find that robots are writing the music and creating the art, and humans have nothing left to do but the dirty jobs like housecleaning.
Artificial Intelligence is completely reforming the landscape of work, and it’s doing it fast! Everyone’s industry is at risk, from people who drive cars to people who draw them. Why would anyone pay a human a living wage when a computer can do it better and for nearly nothing?
But there is one industry that is surprisingly safe from automation, and you’re not going to believe it.
Piano lessons.
I know what you’re saying. “That’s ridiculous. Piano lessons have already been replaced by online courses. It’s only a matter of time before AI creates and hosts even better ways to teach piano.”
How Piano Teaching Actually Works
Let me explain to you how piano teaching actually works.
- Parents hire a piano teacher to teach their child.
- The piano teacher offers instruction in the lesson, and then tells the child to practice.
- The child goes home, and the struggle begins because they don’t want to practice.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The only way the child will practice is if the parents
- help them
- make them, or
- both.
Most parents don’t feel comfortable helping their child practice, and these days they don’t even feel comfortable making them practice!
That puts the piano teacher in an interesting place.
The Piano Teacher’s Dilemma
Piano teachers work for the parent. The parent hires the teacher, and the parent is the person who decides when the child will stop.
But if the piano teacher wants the child to practice, they have to put pressure on the parent because that’s where the impetus for practice will first come from.
But even though parents are the ones who actually have to solve the practice problem, the parents didn’t sign up to be the villain…they hired the piano teacher to take care of everything piano related, and usually they know nothing about music.
If you pressure the parent of a child who isn’t practicing, the parent is going to feel bad about themselves, or blame you for your incompetence as a teacher, or both, and either way they’re going to end the lessons.
A smart piano teacher must find a way to navigate this impossible situation: You need the parents to support the child’s practice without forcing them to do “your” job. There are lots of solutions to this problem.
- Be authoritarian. This will filter your client base so that you end up with mostly high-pressure parents who are more comfortable pressuring their children.
- Make the child’s happiness the highest priority. This will filter your client base so that you end up with mostly low-maintenance parents with children who are constantly following their own muse, with you playing catch-up.
While either of these solutions may be workable depending on your personality and business model, they both have liabilities. The first creates a very disciplinarian vibe which will teach the child that their joy will come from making the adults in their life happy.
Any intrinsic enjoyment will be pushed off for years or, in worse cases, indefinitely, resulting in high-level students who do not actually love making music.
The second creates a situation in which the child is in charge. Unfortunately, children lack the experience to know the benefits of sticking to a plan. When offered candy or green beans, they’ll pick candy every time.
Once you start down this road, it’s nearly impossible to convince the child to do what you say. Following the child’s path may lead you to some wonderful places, musically and otherwise, but it’s unlikely to create a situation where they can gather a set of related music experiences that they can build on.
The result will most likely be that the student will eventually get bored, and the parents will no longer want to pay for your babysitting services since you’re not getting anywhere.
AI can replicate both of these strategies. Eventually, we’ll have a virtual authoritarian piano instructor whose rules and procedures must be followed or the program will not continue to teach. We’ll also have a virtual “best friend” piano instructor that will have endless new directions to take the child whenever the child loses interest.
What’s the Alternative for Piano Teachers?
I have a third method that I’ve used successfully for years. It keeps my students practicing, and keeps them re-enrolling year after year. The best thing about this strategy is that AI really couldn’t do it.
The great hidden secret of piano instruction that nobody wants you to know is that students can get better week-to-week without practicing. This is such a terribly subversive truth that many piano teachers will instantly go on the offensive if anyone suggests that such a threat to the idea that practice makes perfect, and no pain no gain, has any merit.
Let me qualify the statement.
Students will get better faster if they practice. A lot faster. My students who practice six days a week are my studio-stars.
But my students who don’t practice, or who rarely practice, still get better each week, just very slowly. And if I can keep them in my studio for a year or more, they start to want to practice.
By then they’ve seen the progress they can make over time, they’re hearing themselves read and play music that sounds like something, and it all happened in the absence of any yelling or telling them how bad they are.
All that I have to do is keep them coming back to lessons long enough for that intrinsic love to kick in.
How do I do that?
I make the focus of my students’ practice routines the log. I tell them from the get-go that how much they practice is up to them, and that I will never yell at them about it.
On the other hand, I expect a complete log of how much practicing they’ve done that week, including the words “Did not practice” next to the dates they skip (even if that’s all seven days), and I will yell at them if they forget to log.
I make sure the parents hear all this. What’s wonderful about this method is that parents will put the pressure on their kids to log, or will log for them, because it’s such a neutral thing to keep a journal, and it’s in their skill set.
I can even browbeat the parents (with a smile) if the log isn’t there, and the teacher-parent relationship remains intact.
The log reflects the student’s work-ethic, but it’s not the work-ethic we’re insisting on. It’s only the idea that the student and parent must keep track of their work-ethic.
Whether they’re proud or ashamed of their practicing, all we as teachers will shame them for is failing to keep a record, which keeps them on the hook in a much less stressful manner.
Logging by itself isn’t sufficient. You have to discuss the log each week, in a neutral, non-judgemental way.
The log provides information to you about the student’s engagement with the material which you can use to tailor your next assignment.
If a student hasn’t practiced, half the time it’s because they were out of town or on a break. You can let that go, and encourage them to get back on the horse next week.
The other half the time, it’s because the assignment you gave was either too hard or too easy.
So you modify your assignment, make it harder or easier, week-by-week, depending on what the log tells you. If you’re seeing 2-3 days of practice regularly from a 7 year-old, that’s an indication that they’re reasonably engaged with the material given their age and ability.
If that number goes up or down, you can figure out why and act on that information.
The Third and Best Reason
Best of all, logging forces the child to engage in something called metacognitive thinking. If you keep their practice neutral, rather than shaming or positively reinforcing the behavior you are seeing, then they begin to understand that they are practicing for themselves and not for you.
They get in the habit of examining their own behavior dispassionately, and they relate the information they are logging with the results they are getting, rather than have you tell them how good or bad they are.
This is what professional musicians do: self-assess. Professionals have music to learn, and a certain amount of time to learn it, and they decide how much and what to practice each week. This is the skill that turns your students into real musicians who will partner with you for years.
AI is a very smart dummy. It makes guesses about what someone wants from what they say.
Then it spits out information stored in its endless gut that its algorithm suggests may be useful.
It’s not going to cross the line into understanding the user any time soon. It’s only going to get better and better at giving us what it thinks we want.
And given the market-mindset behind its growth, developers are going to push it that way, rather than towards genuine intelligence.
Our logging model requires a constant interaction, a real relationship, with the child and parent. We decide what to assign the child based on our experience as a player, and our knowledge of human nature.
Then we revise our knowledge based on what we learn, rather than simply add data to our stack.
So if you’re looking for a safe career, piano teaching may be it!
I’ve written a course for beginning piano teachers that outlines this logging method, plus ways to teach pianists, young and old, how to read music and to improvise.
These approaches are designed to be so easy they can’t fail, and yet generate sophisticated readers and improvisers who never have to be guilt-tripped into practicing. Want to see more?
Want to take piano lessons with me? You can contact me at adam@acole.net or find my number on my website.
Part Two of our interview with Richard Beauchamp
Here's the long-awaited Part Two of my interview with the astounding piano educator, Richard Beauchamp! https://youtu.be/BAH88ONOzTY?si=QAFytKbwZ3pJrvBM
#piano #pianotechnique
What is good piano technique?
In Part One of our Interview with Richard Beauchamp we explore the question of piano technique. Is there a "good one?" What does "good" mean? Is there one technique or many?
Richard Beauchamp is a pianist and educator who has studied with, among others, Ernest Empson. He performed on radio and television and appeared as soloist with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
Early in his training he became fascinated by the difficulty music teachers seem to have in explaining what they mean, and by the fact that what they did was very often different from what they said. This led to a lifelong interest in anatomy and the mechanics of movement.
In 1977 he joined the staff of St Mary's Music School in Edinburgh, where he has been Head of Keyboard for the majority of his years there until his retirement from the post in April, 2014. He continues to teach piano and accompany the students.
(Interviewer's note: The history of piano technique to which I refer in the interview is "Famous Pianists and Their Technique" by Reginald Gerig.)
https://lnkd.in/efh7CaeB
Interview with Matt Rollings, Part Three
In Part Three of his interview, Matt talks about the strange circumstances that led to his album, "Matt Rollings' Mosaic." It starts with the most unlikely meeting of all time!
https://youtu.be/34G0Zp8_zN4
Mastery, Innovation and Service - What it Means to be a Music Pro - Part 2 of our interview with Matt Rollings
Matt Rollings is a sought-after piano virtuoso whose performance discography spans thousands of recordings. These range from Eric Clapton, Lyle Lovett, Billy Joel, Johnny Cash, and Queen to Metallica, The Dixie Chicks, Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, Mavis Staples, Sheryl Crow, and more.
In Part Two, Matt discusses his professional music principles. Anyone wanting to be a professional musician must watch this video!
