Upbeat Piano School

26/10/2024

Did you do any improvisation with your piano teacher when you were first learning the piano? Perhaps not, but I am a big fan of this. There are many advantages to learning to improvise. The first could simply be to impress your friends with being able to sit down and play something without needing any music, or getting stuck when you can’t remember the ‘tricky bit’! Added advantages of improvisation also include a deep understanding of key signatures, scales and modes - this will help you with playing from notated music also composed in these keys. It also will mean that you understand harmonisation and chord progressions - when you are listening to pop music on the radio you’ll suddenly be able to hear the structure so much more clearly! Perhaps a grasp of improvisation will lead to a future of composition? It will certainly mean that you will understand music theory much more deeply.

28/05/2024

Practice routines

Have you ever thought about where to start when deciding how to practise your new instrument? Have you thought about what the thing with number 1 importance is? I think it’s getting a regular practice time settled in your routine. Once you have this you can think about how to use that time most effectively; but if you don’t have a regular routine you can’t start at all! Helping a child to build a routine is important as they may not be able to schedule this into their week without your help. There is reward too for all this effective practice. When you practise effectively, you will see an improvement in your own playing - the better you become at your instrument, the more you enjoy practising it, and the more you will practise.

03/04/2024

Singing in piano lessons

I sing in piano lessons all the time. It has so many advantages, and it helps my students with their piano playing - but how does singing help with the piano? Think about singing a song with some fun or meaningful words - there’s a rhythm contained in the words, and it can help to sing those to yourself to memorise a tricky rhythm in your piece of music. When I sing along with my students they feel much more confident in their playing - that’s because they are getting feedback that they are playing the correct notes! If they hear that I am singing a different note, or a different rhythm, they will realise and self-correct in a relaxed way, with no need for me to say anything.

It’s wonderful when my students sing along with me as they play - and quite a few do when their music has words. It gives an instant connection - like when you play a duet, accompany someone else, or play in a band. Students singing helps with their general musicianship, including when singing in exam aural tests. Of course, if my students don’t like to sing, whistling or humming is just as fun and useful.

15/02/2024

Method book choice
There are so many method books out there for new piano beginners…but I have a favourite! I have recently been recommending “Piano Safari” for my brand new beginners. It’s so versatile. We:
- play fun songs,
- get lots of practice with initial piano techniques through rote pieces and improvisation (so my students can look at their fingers to see what they’re doing - so important!),
- and get to grips with some finger coordination before reading notation gets too hard. Notation reading is initially intervalic, which me and my students find really logical, and there’s lots of opportunity for my students to use their own creativity. It’s not the only material I use with my new students, but we’re certainly enjoying it 🙂

19/12/2023

Happy Xmas!

Lots of my students have been finishing Xmas compositions with me this week. It’s wonderful to hear so much creativity, and it helps with their music theory knowledge too. I have been so happy to hear some magical sounding melodies which really sing out the spirit of the season. My beginners are putting into practice their knowledge of notation picked up over the past few months, and taking it even further in order to notate down exactly what they have imagined the spirit of Xmas music sounds like to them. We’ve been using knowledge of note names, note values, rest values, practising getting their note stems just right, as well as all the other notation language they need to write into their composition, like tempo, dynamics and other musical language to ensure they can share their ideas with anyone who wishes to play their tunes. For my slightly more experienced students we are using knowledge of harmonisation to create music which is rich and full. I wish everyone my best greetings of the season, and hope that you experience some magical music this Xmas, just like I have.

04/11/2023

Scales and understanding keys

I like to teach my beginner piano students pentascales. These are something not everyone has heard of so why do I do this? I’ll explain what pentascales are. They are the first 5 notes of the usual scales we are familiar with learning. This might be anything from C major to G minor. Pentascales are easier to learn than the full scale, and we certainly learn the whole 7 notes of each scale in good time, but for an early beginner, knowing your pentascales has many benefits. The pentascale contains 3 very important components of the key of that scale - the tonic, the mediant and the dominant note. These 3 notes make up the tonic triad and much of the music notation we read is made up of combinations of these 3 notes. Knowing these 3 notes in the most important and most used keys, makes understanding the structure of the music my students are reading easier, and therefore easier for them to learn.

07/10/2023

Landmark notes and intervalic reading
I wonder how those of you who read music notation were first taught…and I wonder how you read music now? I hope you agree these are important questions when deciding what may be the best approach for today’s students. Many of us learnt notation reading for piano starting at middle C and moving outwards 1 note name at a time. Of course it worked for us, but was it the easiest way of learning, or the fastest? Is this my method of reading now - just by note names - no it’s not! When looking at a piece of music we look at the contour (shape) of the line, and the intervals between notes, as well as deciphering the note names as we read. That makes our sight reading so much faster.

When teaching notation reading to my students we concentrate on finding some landmark notes to anchor us (you can work out the names of any notes on the stave using these first guide notes), then read by following the contour of the melody, and the intervals between the notes. I teach my students to read the way experienced musicians read right from the start, and it pays dividends in terms of their fluency when sight-reading, and ability to transpose to different keys as they progress.

07/09/2023

I hope you’ve all had a fantastic summer and managed to catch some of the BBC Proms. The finale is this Saturday, and the programme this year has included some incredible pianists. I recommend catching up if you haven’t managed to watch or listen to their performances.
A particular highlight was Yuja Wang playing Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody (prom 27-televised). Some other highlights included:
Benjamin Grosvenor playing Debussy, Ravel and Liszt (prom 3)
Stephen Hough playing Rachmaninov (prom 6)
Isata Kanneh-Mason playing Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev (prom 22-televised)
Alim Baisembayev playing Rachmaninov (prom 30-televised)
Andras Schiff playing Schumann (prom 37-televised)
Martin Helmchen playing Brahms (prom 40)
Alexandre Kantorow playing Beethoven (prom 41)
Seong-Jin Cho playing Chopin (prom 42)
Not piano but another keyboard instrument and very special - Anna Lapwood playing the great Royal Albert Hall organ on 25th July (prom 15)
There’s also another piano performance tonight…

26/07/2023

How much do you know about the history of the piano?

Instruments such as the harpsichord and clavichord pre-date the development of the instrument we think of today as the piano.
Around 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori, whilst working for the famous Medici family in Florence, tried to bring together the best elements of these predecessors of the piano into an instrument initially named a ‘gravicembalo col piano e forte’.
The aim was to produce an instrument where the sound was made by striking the string, like a clavichord, but allowing the string to resonate like in a harpsichord. This new instrument allowed both soft and loud dynamics, using a sophisticated hammer action with escapement mechanism, as well as dampers.
The new instrument was smaller than today’s modern pianos with around 54 keys rather than our 88, and it was not initially able to match the full volume available from a harpsichord at that time.
This meant that the new piano, therefore, did not become popular until much later, almost a century later, when the volume of the instrument was improved by piano makers across the world including the UK, Austria, France and the USA.

If you’re interested and would like to read more there are some great articles:
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cris/hd_cris.htm
http://www.piano.instruments.edu.pl/en/history/gravicembalo-col-piano-e-forte

07/06/2023

I’ve just been reading about a recent study conducted by psychologists at the University of Bath. They conducted a randomised controlled trial to see what effects learning to play music for just a few weeks had on cognitive abilities.

The 31 adults in the study, who had no prior musical training, had either piano lessons for 1 hour per week for 11 weeks, assigned music listening (to listen to the same music the first group learnt to play), or were put into a control group to complete ‘homework’. The group who had the lessons reported significant improvements in recognising audio-visual changes in the environment (improved audio-visual synchrony perception).

Dr Petrini (co-author) from the University of Bath explained: “Learning to play an instrument like the piano is a complex task: it requires a musician to read a score, generate movements and monitor the auditory and tactile feedback to adjust their further actions. In scientific terms, the process couples visual with auditory cues and results in a multi-sensory training for individuals. The findings from our study suggest that this has a significant, positive impact on how the brain processes audio-visual information even in adulthood when brain plasticity is reduced.”

I think this is really interesting as this study has been conducted in adults. The Royal Conservatory of Music in Canada has previously published data on the positive effects of music learning in children, and I hope that the team at Bath can conduct and publish some more research in this area.

The published article can be found at:

Music involves different senses and is emotional in nature, and musicians show enhanced detection of audio-visual temporal discrepancies and emotion recognition compared to non-musicians. However, whether musical training produces these enhanced abilities or if they are innate within musicians remai...

04/05/2023

It is so important to practise your instrument so that you can improve and develop as a musician. But what should practising look like? Do you know what strategies you can utilise to help you?

I help my students to understand what quality practice looks like. Together, we work out in the lesson what will be the most effective use of their practice time, to get the best results, and be able to play those pieces they enjoy!

We don’t just think about what needs to be practised, and in what way, but also how to make that practice time more fun, with board games and action cards to help learn how to practise effectively. Vibrant music teaching resources add colour into all aspects of learning the piano with me.