Hi Tommy, excellent topic The problem I have is even when I have played a piece hundreds of times, I still can make mistakes and not necessarily in the same place. For example, I might play a run perfectly thirty times and then miss a note on the 31st. The problem all piano players face is that to play a piece correctly there can be Zero errors. That's the standard we are held to. If you listen to any type of music on the radio, there are no errors. Of course editing can take place in recordings but even one error of playing for someone else ruins the piece in our mind. Three errors and you look totally inept. Most of us are not professional pianists. The pianists and musicians we see and hear who play perfectly have been playing hours a day for 20 years at the minimum. Some have played much longer. We are hoodwinked when some pianist who has played his whole life has a " secret " for us on how to play in a certain style. . " Sound like jazz great with just five chords ". You've seen it. All baloney. Flowkey --> baloney Playing the piano well is HARD and takes YEARS and YEARS to get to the point where the piano is really just an extension of yourself and you are so comfortable playing that even if you make a mistake you know how to cover it up in a way nobody will notice. That's what all of us serious piano players have to learn the hard way. That's what we are all shooting for. Thanks for your honest videos. Keep up the good fight. We ARE getting better !!
I totally get you!! We are constantly bombarded with this idea of ‘perfection’ these days. Some of it is no doubt due to the fact recordings are edited and re-edited to get there. Yet, if you go to see a live band or singer, they are frequently out of tune - yet their records are perfect! So why should a pianist have no wrong notes? I like to inspire myself from people like Horowitz who was not afraid to play wrong notes and fairly frequently did! His view was that you need to take risks and sometimes those risks result in wrong notes. The equally great Rubinstein said that over-practicing something was a bad thing as for a performance to be inspiring, there needs to be some ‘fresh blood’ (his words). Clearly, if something sounds like a train wreck then this isn’t nice for the listener. However, unless it is someone who knows a piece really well, the odd wrong one here and there goes unnoticed by most. Virtually all of my recordings are edited yet still are never perfect. I edit to give those who take the time to listen something that is as pleasant as I can manage. I also edit my visuals to make it as visually appealing as I can.
Iv been segmenting for Liszt HR2 and it allows you to mix the tune up and basically play it back to front as you have many datum point at which to start making the piece more interesting so your less likely to lose interest
I think there are numerous advantages. As you say, it helps mix practice up and I also think supports memorization and providing focus where it is most needed. I have never learned the Hungarian Rhapsodies - I’ll take a look at the second :-)
Thanks for the suggestion. In fact, I have been pondering this very topic myself for some time as often when sight reading, what can cause is problems is ‘running out of fingers’. I do have a couple of videos on using chords for sight reading and also patterns in music. The first on chords is ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7h_Akv017Iw.html The one on patterns is ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qhtyvfi4U4o.html These should give you some sight reading in the meantime whilst I work out how to frame some advice on working out fingering on the spot.
@@TommysPianoCorner Hey, thanks for your reply a piece by sofiane pamart called "album" has the same kind of patterns on the right hand this caught my attention I'm glad you enjoyed learning this piece !
This a piece which I have not yet learned - but it is definitely on my list of things to learn. As soon as I have worked on it, I'll definitely create a tutorial.
Thank you for all your work on our behalf, Tommy. Whenever I hear one of these tutorials explaining the details of how to approach a piece of music to master its execution, I can't help but wonder how long it would take to approach a piece in that way... it seems like you could spend months if not a year to study a piece that way. How do you know if a piece is too far beyond your current level before you start investing the time it would take to approach it in this way?
Thanks for your kind words. For your first question, how long much depends on the piece. I have found that focusing in on the tiny details at the beginning actually makes things much faster. The hard part for me is ‘unlearning’ something I’ve been practising sloppily as those sloppy habits get engrained and correcting them afterwards is hard. I tend to pick things that will take me a month or two to learn. I’m not as quick a learner as I was in my teens and a couple of months for late intermediate/early advanced seems reasonable. For your second question, this is a complex topic. I know there is a school of thought that we should not learn things ‘above our level’. However, I don’t think it is as linear as that. We learn some things to make us better pianists and other things do that we have finished repertoire. However, for me, in either case I need to enjoy how something sounds (which is why I don’t use Hanon etc). Take for example the Chopin Études. These are all super complex pieces, yet we could approach them in a couple of different ways. We might, for example, decide to try to learn a single page rather than the entire thing. We could alternatively, decide to learn them ‘under tempo’ so that they are more manageable. Josh Wright said when he learned these Études in his teens, he played them much more slowly than he does now. In either case, and I can only speak for myself, doing this is something that I feel will both improve my skills and give me pleasure. It might be years before I could get them to a performance standard but I’m not going to practice them daily for years. I’ll set a goal (say, learn the first page), and once I’ve achieved it put the piece to one side. I might then come back to it a year later and look at another page. In the meantime, I also learn ‘performance pieces’ so that I also have repertoire I can play end to end.
