Vivisectus learns to play Piano, a tragedy in endless pieces

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

Thanks to a minor accident progress is 0% I am afraid. It seems I have hurt my back again, so it is bedrest and lots of drugs for me, probably for another week. Tramadol and diphene and diazapam, oh my!

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think you're supposed to exercise with a piano by lifting it. Anyway, take care, and let us know as soon as you start playing.

[Sock Puppet]

Originally Posted by JoeP

Did the negros hurt your back?

Listen to the Vivisectus scream!

But seriously, feel better soon.

[Dingfod]

Originally Posted by Sock Puppet

Listen to the Vivisectus scream!

But seriously, feel better soon.

I don't know about Vivisectus, but Scott Joplin hurts my back, because I want to play longer than 30 minutes when I am tickling the ragtime ivories. Thanks, Obama.

[thedoc]

Scott Joplin hurts my pride, I used to play "The Entertainer", but when I picked the music up again after 40 some years, I couldn't play it. Very frustrating.

[Vivisectus]

Heheh before I ended up flat on my back, I was idiotically pleased with myself to be able to play a two-tone for the left hand, simple melody with the right - version of "snowman". Badly.

Joplin, that aint!

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

Heheh before I ended up flat on my back, I was idiotically pleased with myself to be able to play a two-tone for the left hand, simple melody with the right - version of "snowman". Badly.

Joplin, that aint!

I was trying to find sheet music for that piece, but none of the ones I found were exactly the same as what I was listening to on youtube. So I bought several versions and now will need to pick and choose from them, and rewrite the music, to get something a bit closer to what I was listening to.

[Vivisectus]

Right - the ole back is, well, back. Time to get back to it.

First off - good god my left hand is useless! What a fecking freeloader, just sitting there lazily the whole time not doing shit! It is uncoordinated, it cannot do anything independently, it lacks both strength and stamina - what the hell! An entire limb on my body is basically that lazy brother-in-law that sleeps on your couch for 5 years and eats your food and then expects praise for taking out the garbage once a fortnight!

Well, this shit ends today. Mr lefty can fecking start earning his keep. Lazy rebellious teen hand bootcamp for you!

Does anyone know any good tricks to quickly improve left-hand coordination? I would also love some really good bluesy / ragtimey left hand exercises for the piano that I can start running through.

[Dingfod]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

First off - good god my left hand is useless! What a fecking freeloader, just sitting there lazily the whole time not doing shit! It is uncoordinated, it cannot do anything independently, it lacks both strength and stamina - what the hell! An entire limb on my body is basically that lazy brother-in-law that sleeps on your couch for 5 years and eats your food and then expects praise for taking out the garbage once a fortnight!

Well, this shit ends today. Mr lefty can fecking start earning his keep. Lazy rebellious teen hand bootcamp for you!

Does anyone know any good tricks to quickly improve left-hand coordination? I would also love some really good bluesy / ragtimey left hand exercises for the piano that I can start running through.

No. My sinister hand is uncoordinated as hell, especially the nearly useless far left two fingers. What are they even there for except to get slammed in car doors or hung up in some random hole or gap in a handrail? i fail to understand why I can type... er, keyboard fairly competently with my left hand, even those two near alien digits, and yet, even after years of piano playing, they are weak, weak, weak, and seem disconnected from my brain. More practice? Actually I would recommend playing two-handed scales over and over again until you can play them rapidly without thinking about it.

[thedoc]

A good book for scales is "Scales, Chords & Arpeggios" by James Bastien. Just start sight reading at first, and if you want to memorize the chords by name, it will help later if you ever work from a Fake Book.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

Does anyone know any good tricks to quickly improve left-hand coordination?

Cyborg implant. Genetic modification.
Actually fiddling with things can help. No not that, er ok maybe. Twirling pencils, rolling baoding balls, opening and closing things like a zippo or pocket knife. Besides building up hand strength and fine motor control, doing something else with your right hand that you can do easily do while you fiddle can help to learn to better delink left and right.

Your left hand often seems like a slow dumb brick because your right hand gets so much more practice doing fine motor skills and your left gets regulated to being a cludgy claw or meat hammer. Also expect to suck at whatever you're doing, many people can learn to do things like write left handed, but after the first few unreadable letters they get pissed off and give up.

[ceptimus]

Your piano sessions should be fairly short, but very regular. Scales are good but are boring so you also need to play some tunes you enjoy.

When starting scales just remember the pattern - so for a normal major scale it's 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 counting black and white notes the same (i.e. after the start key, skip a key, skip a key, don't skip, skip, skip, skip, don't). Once you learn the C scales (major, minor, sevenths, ...) you can copy the patterns starting on any note. Once you don't have to think about F and G scales, move on to A and so on.. learn the ones with the fewest sharps and flats first and build up...

But like I say, scales are boring... try to spend maybe 5 minutes on them as a sort of warm-up and then play the pieces you like. I find it's best to learn a few pieces properly so I can usually play them without any mistakes before moving on to others - of course if you get bored with a piece before you get it right then by all means abandon it - but you'll improve faster by learning to play maybe three pieces at a time well, than thirty pieces with lots of mistakes.

What works best for me is maybe a 5:20:5 split - five minutes on scales, 20 minutes learning my 'good' pieces, and then 5 minutes fooling around or trying out some new pieces to choose one that will be next on the list of 'good' ones. If I want to spend more than half an hour, then I start over, but I find it's better not to spend too long without a break.

If it's a day where you can only play when you're tired then still try to spend a few minutes on scales and stuff - but don't be too hard on yourself that you're not playing them very well.

[thedoc]

There is an exercise you can do that will help with the strength and dexterity in your hands, and you can do it between the times you are practicing the piano. If you have a fireplace, good, otherwise you can just use a wastepaper can. Take a piece of paper or a wide strip of newspaper and crumple it up into a ball with one hand.. If you use 2 hands they will work together and you will not get much of a workout, but using one hand will improve the strength and dexterity of that hand, but do it with both hands. My father told me that professional wrestlers would do this exercise sitting in front of a fireplace and throwing the crumpled up paper into the fire.

[Vivisectus]

I found some good sites that give you scales + the proper fingering. Don't look up proper fingering on the internet BTW.

Amazing - I struggle with a simple 2 -octave c-scale using the right fingers. I don't have a hope of doing them with both hands at the same time yet even...





It is both daunting and really cool to be such a neophyte. I really enjoy practicing though - even just doing scales. So I guess I will just beaver away.

Does anyone have a good suggestion for a really simple song to start learning? I have made some abortive attempts so far but I keep running into stuff I just cannot do yet.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

Does anyone have a good suggestion for a really simple song to start learning? I have made some abortive attempts so far but I keep running into stuff I just cannot do yet.

I like "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", and you only need to shift your hands one key through the song. The left hand is arpeggios of quarter notes and the right hand is half notes with a whole note at the end of each line. Break the song up into 6 lines and use the arpeggios C, E, G, E, as 1. - C, F, A, F, as 2. - and B, D, f, D, as 3. The left hand is the arpeggios 1. 1. 2. 1. - 3, 1, 3, 1, - 1, 2, 1, 3, - 1, 2, 1, 3, - 1, 1, 2, 1, - 3, 1, 3, 1. with each line of the melody with a line of the left hand. If you have little ones around they will get a kick out of you playing one of "their" songs. Good Luck.

[thedoc]

You could also learn to play "Chop Sticks" and I have seen players on YouTube playing it with 2 fingers only, but I would recommend that you use 4 fingers on each hand except that you don't use 3 on your right hand till you get to the variations.

[Dingfod]

Scales are a good way to train the less talented fingers. Yes, I'm talking to you Ring Finger and Pinky.

[thedoc]

A couple of 5 finger warm up exercises for you,
1. - C, E, G, F, E, F, D, E, 'C'.
2. - G, E, F, D, E, C, D, F, 'G'.
The last key either finishes the exercise or starts it over again.
Once you learn to play it with each hand, put each exercise together and then play it with both hands together. Then play it with the one hand going the opposite way of the other, In other words use the same fingers in 2 hands together but the exercise going the opposite direction in the 2 hands. I used to start all my lessons with these exercises. They are 2 separate exercises and are not played together.

[Vivisectus]

ill try that this evening.

[thedoc]

I'm retired so I can schedule my day as I like, so I try to Play/practice later in the morning, or in the afternoon, After I've had some time to wake up but before I get too tired. I believe that if I'm making too many mistakes playing I should not practice mistakes, so I stop playing till I'm ready. I also start a piece slowly so that I can get all the notes right and not practice them incorrectly, speed will come with familiarity.

I should note, I never learned to "sight read" music but if you can, it would be good for you to learn. Your practice should have several elements, exercises and scales, sight reading, and learning pieces to play. Scales and chords are fundamental to all genres of music.

[Vivisectus]

I spent a while on a failed attempt to learn "The heart asks pleasure first" by Michael Nyman, one of my favorite composers, but I had to give up - it requires my hands to do too much stuff that I find counter-intuitive as of yet, and while i can JUST play the very first few lines of it, it is just beyond me for the moment. But I will be back!

So now my new plan is to attack something simpler, and at the same time practice my scales. The idea is to find simple pieces in a scale, and learn the scale and the piece together. So yesterday I embarked on the Minuet in G major, by not-bach-but-petzhold. It is much more my speed, and yet more than enough of a challenge for my poor untrained fingers!

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

I spent a while on a failed attempt to learn "The heart asks pleasure first" by Michael Nyman, one of my favorite composers, but I had to give up - it requires my hands to do too much stuff that I find counter-intuitive as of yet, and while i can JUST play the very first few lines of it, it is just beyond me for the moment. But I will be back!

So now my new plan is to attack something simpler, and at the same time practice my scales. The idea is to find simple pieces in a scale, and learn the scale and the piece together. So yesterday I embarked on the Minuet in G major, by not-bach-but-petzhold. It is much more my speed, and yet more than enough of a challenge for my poor untrained fingers!

What does your teacher think of your selections?

[wildernesse]

After we learned our scales, we got to work with Czerny exercises. I had a book, but it looks like you can just print from online. I have never noticed that my left handed fingers are weaker than my right, but I did take many long years of piano lessons despite not very much musical talent.

I am thinking about getting a piano for home soon.