Piano Tips and Musical Composition

Tips to Memorize Piano Music

2006-10-17T06:53:00.000-07:00

Although there are a lot of sources that claim to have the secret to memory, most people would agree that a good way to memorize something is to associate it with as many of your five senses as possible. Music is a great opportunity to practice your memorizing skills in this way. When most people learn a musical piece, they are only taught to read the music and play it, nothing else. This is the wrong way to learn about music, because if you can only visually read music, you never get to experience the true value of music. Music is an aural medium. It’s sound. It’s made up of vibrations of air, which in turn vibrate your eardrum, alerting the parts of your inner ear, signalling to your brain that you’ve heard a sound. Am I making myself clear? Music is meant to be heard, not just seen.

The best way to memorize music is to use all three of the senses you use for music. Apart from visually memorizing sheet music, listen to several recordings of the piano piece you’re trying to learn. I say you should listen to several recordings so that you don’t have a biased “view” of the piece. Try to find an efficient fingering to play the piece, and use that same fingering every time you play the piece so that you can develop a good muscular memory in your hands. Once you’ve memorized the muscular movements of the piece, you can play it blindfolded fairly easily.

This will give you a way to memorize a piano piece using three if your five senses. If you have a fairly good sense of smell or taste, and you’re able to associate certain smells or tastes with music, do that if it works for you.

Improvisation Tips

2006-10-13T07:37:00.000-07:00

If you want to compose music, you might want to spend some time improvising music. Many websites claim that they can teach you to “Improvize blues/jazz/gospel/what-have-you in 12 days… even if you’ve never touched a piano before! Buy our free e-book for $299.99!” That is because they are scams. Yeah, there are probably some good ones, but there are probably hundreds or thousands of courses on the internet that make impossible claims like this. I’m a real cheapskate, so I say if it’s not free, it’s not worth the trouble.

Before you can improvise very well, you have to know a bit about how to play the piano. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try improvising before you’ve reached pianistic enlightenment, but you should learn some practical piano pieces and some music theory as well as learning how to improvise so that you have all areas up to about an equal skill level. If you’re at level 1 (RCM standards) in playing the piano, you’ll probably only be able to improvise at about a grade 1 level, which is okay. If you’ve played the piano for years, and you’ve been improvising all that time as well as playing, you’ll be at a higher improvisation skill level.

If you want to just hit random keys on the piano and see how they sound, go ahead, no one should really stop you. Ideally, you will eventually figure out some interesting techniques on your own.

If you want a bit of a head start, though, I can give you a few tips:

-Know some, if not all, major and minor keys. This is part of musical theory, but it can also help you in improvisation. Knowing music theory isn’t necessary to be good at improvisation, but knowing key signatures can give you a bit of a guide to choosing a melody and chords as you go along.

-Know basic major and minor chords and their inversions. These are the chords you’ll be using most of the time, or at least they’re the chords I use most of the time.

-When practicing improvisation, don’t worry about making it sound perfect or even fitting it with any musical form. If you hit a strange, awkward sounding chord, no one will ever know, so just keep going. Even if you are performing in front of an audience, they probably won’t notice if you just keep going.

-When practicing, record your improvisation sessions on tape, incase you come up with some interesting sounding chords or melodies for more structured musical compositions. For this reason, try to get a higher quality sound recorder than I got (I got a not-very-good tape recorder that always changes the key of a musical piece by a whole tone or so when you play it back) so that you can listen to each individual note in each chord.

-Use this as an opportunity to finally practice scales and arpeggios. Try experimenting by playing different chords on different hands, playing scales in different directions, or playing arpeggios with scales. Do whatever you want.

-Listen to a lot of piano music in your favourite musical genre. For example, I like bold romantic-era music like Franz Liszt, so I listen to a lot of that kind of music. So, my improvisations, annoyingly, sound a lot like that.

Improvising on the piano, however, is something you learn best by doing, so these tips are jut some guidelines and suggestions. Find out what works out best for you.

Your Learning Style

2006-10-09T09:50:00.000-07:00

When practicing a new piece on your particular musical instrument, it is important to know how you learn things best. It will help you make more efficient use of your practicing time.

For example, being a male, I learn best in a linear way, focusing on one thing at a time. Over the past week, I’ve been teaching myself to play “Waltz in F Minor” by Chopin. To be fair, this is a relatively easy piece for a person of my skill level. However, I’ve been focusing on learning this one new piece instead of a bunch of new pieces. To break it down even further, I’ve focused on learning this piece hands separately before learning it hands together. Actually, I played it all the way through hands together the first time just to hear how it sounds, and since then I’ve been practicing it hands separately. I’m starting to see why a lot of other people I know, who play the piano, don’t get the chance to play pieces by ear: it’s really easy to play the music by reading the sheet music if you don’t care how it sounds. By focusing on these separate things, I could probably play the piece hands together fairly easily.

I learn in many different ways, though. For example, my piano teacher is teaching me to play four-octave scales and chromatic scales. In my practice sessions, I always make sure to do some improvisation (which I record on a tape) and, in this improvization, I’ve put in a few cool-sounding chromatic scale-like things. So, I’m learning a very boring concept in a way that interests me.

So, take your learning style into consideration when learning new pieces or concepts.

Why Compose Music?

2006-10-05T07:37:00.001-07:00

Yes, I’m still procrastinating from actually teaching you HOW to compose music. However, in this particular post, I will tell you my top ten reasons WHY you should compose music if you play a musical instrument.

1 – Composing music for a particular instrument allows you to explore the limits of your abilities on that instrument. For example, I found out that I have no sense of counterpoint, but I’m pretty good at playing big, sweeping arpeggios.

2 – Composing music requires you to use your musical ear. Needless to say, this is very good ear training.

3 – When you can only play music, not compose it, you see there being lowly musical performers such as yourself, vs great musical composers like Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok, Bizet, Bellini, Berlioz, and Rimsky-Korsakoff. When you can both play and compose music, this border between “you” and “them” begins to blur, as you put up with the same challenges that they might have had to put up with.

4 – Along with the border between “you” and “them” blurring, you now have the choice to compose your own music instead of/as well as playing music that everyone’s already heard. If there’s a musical piece you want to hear, but it hasn’t been written yet, you have to compose it yourself.

5 – You get to use that musical theory I’m sure you’ve all spent years studying. Finally, it’s good for something.

6 – Composing music is something you learn throughout your entire life: even at the end of J.S. Bach’s life, he was still experimenting with the possibilities of counterpoint.

7 – Like me, you get to complain about there not being enough musical composition blogs on the internet.

8 – Being able to write a sheet music score also improves your ability to read sheet music scores.

9 – Composing music allows you to take advantage of the interesting techniques used in pieces you’re learning/have learned how to play.

10 – Composing music improves your concentration, especially if you can write music without using an instrument.

The End of the Challenge

2006-10-01T10:27:00.001-07:00

Just today, I finished my final (fifteenth) composition in my personal challenge to compose fifteen musical pieces in thirty days. I must say, I’m glad that’s over. By the end, I really didn’t care about my compositions, and I decided to make them a minimum of one line long each. Overall, I don’t think it was a successful way to force myself to compose quality music.

However, I did compose some music, so it wasn’t a complete waste. It’s my philosophy that nothing anyone ever does can possibly be a COMPLETE waste to the universe. The results may not be, in a subjective point of view, “positive”, but the universe is always changing.

Still, I think I’ll take a break from composing music for a while, and start planning for NaNoWriMo. I enjoy composing music, but too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. A good plan would be to compose music every second day, to give my brain a rest. It’s like how I update my blogs every second day. I write one post for this blog, then I proofread it and post it the next day. On the third day, I write a post for my journal blog, and on the fourth day, I edit that post. On the fifth day, I start the cycle again, and that seems to keep my mind always refreshed and eager to start on the next blog post.

A good amount of time for me to compose music each day, I think, would be half an hour to a whole hour. It wouldn’t be too hard to find half an hour to and hour each day when it’s quiet and I can focus entirely on the music. If I get tires of working on one piece, I could conitnue by working on another piece for the rest of the hour, composing for a certain amount of time each day rather than for a certain quantity of music.

Day 12 of the Challenge

2006-09-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

It’s day 12 of my Musical Composition Challenge, and I’m still going strong. Well, as far as quantity of music goes. The quality of the musical pieces, as well as my enthusiasm, are going down, but I’ve composed 11 pieces already, only missing one day. So, I’ve almost finished the challenge.

I’ve come to a conclusion, though: composing one musical piece every two days for a month (that was my original goal) may have its challenges, but it’s not the best way to compose music in the long run. Composing 15 pieces of music in a month isn’t like NaNoWriMo’s idea of writing a novel in a month. Most people know how to read text in their own language very well, but if you’re a composer, you might not be able to sight read your own music perfectly and quickly. That’s working with the theory that most musicians fall into two categories: those who can sightread and play very well without knowing a lot aobut ear training and improvisation, or those who know how to improvise and play very well by ear but can’t sight read very quickly. I think that most composers like myself fall into the latter category.

Although perhaps filling one page of sheet music per day isn’t the best way to compose music, perhaps working for a certain amount of time each day is good. For example, one hour per day is perfect. It gives you a chance to allow yourself to get focused on the music, and if you get bored of working on one piece, you can always move onto the next. Working for a certain amount of time rather than aiming for a certain quantity of music would be less rushed than feeling like you have to compose a certain amount each day, but oddly enough, it might actually be more productive.

Trying Out Different Practicing Methods

2006-09-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

Franz Liszt claimed that, for many years, he was sure he had never practiced the piano for less than 10 hours every day. As superhuman as that sounds, it does make sense that Liszt would spend most of his waking life playing the piano. After all, his “Transcendental Etudes” were so difficult when he first composed them that he realized that he was the only one who could possibly play them. He wrote simpler versions of them, and the simpler versions are still among the most difficult piano pieces ever composed.

Most of us aren’t Franz Liszt. Most of us couldn’t compose a set of some of the most difficult etudes of all time at the age of 15 (being 14 years old now, I suddenly feel as if all my time on Earth so far has been wasted). And most of us don’t have ten free hours during the day to practice the piano. In fact, I’m probably lucky that I have the opportunity to practice several times a week, for (I think) a little over an hour each time. But then, I enjoy playing the piano. I don’t procrastinate playing the piano and choose to do something fun: for me, playing the piano IS something fun.

I think that’s the main reason that I’m so relatively good at playing the piano: it’s because I have fun doing it. Of course, my skills are not completely unsurpassed. In fact, I might be in the top ten percent of the piano-playing population as far as practical playing goes, which may sound good, but there are a LOT of people in the world who play the piano. I always get a bit jealous when I hear about child prodigies who were able to, like, memorize entire concertos by Rachmaninoff at the age of six. How is it even physically possible for a six-year-old child to play a concerto by Rachmaninoff? Rachmaninoff’s hands were huge, he composed music with chords that were about 9 whole steps wide (that’s about from a C to the next E on a piano). There’s no way a six-year-old could have fingers long enough to play that.

But enough of my immature complaining about people who are better than be at something. My practice methods, to put it simply, are wrong, but I’m trying to make them better, one step at a time. For one, they say it’s not a good idea to practice every single day. Like weight training, you should take a day to let your mind rest. My current schedule is practicing Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. I have my piano lessons on Tuesday, but we basically just cover musical theory during those classes, since they’re only about half an hour long and the total time duration of the pieces I’m learning totals to over an hour.

Although a lot of people don’t like having to practice the piano all the time (I didn’t always like it either) I’m now at a skill level at which it’s easy, and I can progress fairly quickly. It took me years to get to this skill level, and I still have a lot to learn, but now that I enjoy learning new pieces and composing music, the rest of the journey (if there’s even an end to it, which I know there isn’t) should be much easier and much more fun.

My typical practice session consists of playing the few songs I’m trying to learn all the way through from beginning to end. They say, though, that one shouldn’t just practice a piano piece all the way through, and that they should learn the most difficult parts first. I haven’t actually tried this method: I usually just play a piano piece from beginning to end over and over again until I memorize it at the right speed with the right notes and the right dynamics. But hey, this new system of learning the difficult parts first might be worth a shot.

Another thing to try out is piano exercises. One could just do scale and arpeggio exercises, or one could by a book of piano exercises on sheet music. Me, I think most of those books are too cutesie, so I’m trying to learn Chopin’s Etudes (second in difficulty only to Liszt’s). How am I doing so far, you ask? Not great, but I am trying to get into the habit of reading and following the fingering mentioned in the book. Chopin knows best, I say.

So, that’s what I’m trying out. I’m not saying anything is right or wrong, but you should try out different practicing methods and see what works best for you. I will make a mental note to write about practicing methods in more detail in the future.

Musical Composition Challenge Update (Beginning of Day 5)

2006-09-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

Well, my personal musical composition challenge seems to be going well. I’ve been using my spare block at school to write music as I went along. The writing is somewhat improvised, so this isn’t the way I plan to composemusic for the rest of my life. Still, my goal for this month is quantity, not quality, and I’ve already composed four musical pieces in the four days I’ve given myself so far. We’ll see if I keep this up, though, sine I have 11 pieces left to do.

This isn’t to say that composing without an instrument is a COMPLETE waste of time. I suppose it’s a good way to train my mental ear to create and hear more precise tones. Hearing more than one tone at a time and remembering the chords of an entire piece, as you might imagine, trains my concentration and memory. Still, if I had access to a piano all the time, I would use it to help me compose music.

However, another important part of music is planning. I have very little time to do that this month, because as I explained, I’m writing this music as I go along. This is great for simple ideas, but unless you’re Mozart or something, composing an entire fugue or canon inside your head is next to impossible. If I wanted to compose difficult pieces like fugues or canons, though, I’d change my goal from “Compose 15 pieces of music in 30 days” to “Compose one fugue in 30 days”. I don’t think I could even do THAT.

One thing I am trying to do to improve my mental ear is to pick a chord, memorize it, and make sure to fit it in to my next piano piece somehow. Other than the standard major/minor chords, I’ve tried a seventh chord and a few “add” chords, although “add” chords are pretty basic.

For those of you who want to compose music but don’t have the correct blank sheet music to do it, I remind you that the official “Piano Tips and Musical Composition” sheet music can be found in my first post.

Musical Composition Challenge (AKA: No, I didn't steal this idea from "February Album Writing Month")

2006-09-15T07:30:00.000-07:00

Alright, I have a confession to make. In my first post, if I remember correctly, I advised any composers like yourself to fill one page of sheet music each day. However, I haven’t been doing that recently, what with school starting again and other various projects.

So, for the next 30 days, I intend to compose fifteen complete piano pieces. This means, basically, one complete piece every two days. The thirty days will be from September 15th to October 14th. Normally I would make it an even month, but November is NaNoWriMo, so I’d like to have a chance to relax after this challenge before trying another one.

Since, like NaNoWriMo, this is really a sort of spur-of-the-moment sort of thing that only morons like me would even attempt, I invite any other plucky, naïve composers like myself to join me in this attempt. At the end of the thirty days, I’ll make MIDI files of the best pieces and post them here. If anyonw else is insane enough to try this with me, they can post links to MIDI files or sheet music scores of their compositions

And, I will start… now. If I ever do this again, though, I will give you all a bit of warning incase you’re late to read this post and still want to do it.

How to Play "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum from Children's Corner" by Claude Debussy

2006-09-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

Months ago, when I was posting on my journal blog about how I learned to play “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum from Children’s Corner” by Claude Debussy, a lot of people came to the blog through Google searches just to see if I had any tips on how to play it. Well, I do now. Only it’s not on my journal blog. Whatever.

First of all, you need a copy of the sheet music. I printed mine out after downloading it from the Sheet Music Archive (look up Debussy and "Children's Corner" to find "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum") and I was able to memorize it after a few months. It’s in the form of a PDF file, so you’ll need Acrobat Reader to view it, but you can easily download Acrobat Reader off the internet for free.

However, as you may or may not have realized already, I’m a big fan of playing by ear, so to use my method of playing the piece, you’ll want to find a recording, or at least a MIDI file, of the piece. I used the MP3 from The Sims (it's at the bottom of the page) but that’s played a bit too fast, so consider doing a Google search for Debussy MIDI or Debussy recordings. The reason the Google search might not work is that, if you look up Debussy MIDI, you may just end up finding a link to some information about his “Prelude a L’apres Midi d’un Faune” without an actual MIDI sound file.

Now, you’ll also need to know how to read sheet music. “Doctor Gradus,” for the most part, happens to be in a good, easy key signature that doesn’t require a lot of memorization of accidentals. In order to play this piece, you’ll probably want to have played the piano for a while. Who knows, though, you might be an indiscovered piano genius like Debussy himself.

Note: My way of learning pieces is by no means the right way. In fact, it’s probably the wrong way. I don’t use the “correct” fingering, and it takes a long time to learn a piece using my method, but at least I had fun learning it. If you want to know how to play it “right”, go somewhere else. If you enjoy playing piano music, this is the place to be.

The first thing I do when learning a piece is learn to play the notes in the right order. I worry about the duration of the notes second, and dynamics third. However, in this post, I will mention all three aspects at once and leave it up to you to arrange my thoughts. To make it easier for you, though, I will break the piece down by bars. Have the sheet music handy to refer to reading this post. For this purpose, you might want to take a pencil to number the bars/measures. I assume that you know that a measure contains the notes between one vertical line (bar line) and the next.

Bars 1 – 2 : On the left hand, you have a C note octave, the first note in the octave being a grace note. This means that you only play it briefly before quickly switching to the higher note in the octave. After this octave is played, hold the C note down in the left hand while, on the right hand, you play a barrage of sixteenth notes. If this is your first time trying to play this piece, or any piece like it, then just worry about getting the notes right, don’t try to play them too quickly just yet. Eventually, you’ll memorize each individual finger movement in the entire piece, and be able to play the whole thing in 75 seconds like me.

Although there are a lot of sixteenth notes in this piece, notice when listening to a recording/MIDI of it that you mainly just hear the first note in each set of four sixteenth notes. The notes you hear make up the melody line. Notice the melody line is gradually rising, and yet there are many notes in the background that you don’t hear as loudly as the rest. This is an interesting method to experiment when composing music for the piano. Make sure, though, that you play each of the sixteenth note individually throughout the piece.

As far as dynamics go, just notice that it says “P”at the beginning of the piece, meaning “pianissimo”, which means that you should play quietly. The curved horizontal lines going across the top and bottom of the staves mean that you should use your piano pedals to make those notes blend into each other. The damper padal does this, and it’s on the far right of most pianos and keyboards. Use this pedal lightly and lift it between bars, though, because you don’t want the notes to blend into a horrible mess. Use this pedal technique throughout the piece.

Bars 3 – 6 : Now both the left and right hands get a bit harder, but if you managed to get past the first two bars, this will only be a small stretch. In the left hand, you now have a middle C playing on top for bars 3 and 4 while you also play quarter notes on the same hand. Hold the whole note down while playing these quarter notes.

In the right hand, you still have a bunch of sixteenth notes, but in bar 3, notice that each group of sixteenth notes has an eighth note at the beginning. Eighth notes, as I’m sure you all know, sound as long as two sixteenth notes. In bar 5 and 6, each group of sixteenth notes has a quarter note at the beginning. Logically, a quarter note sounds as long as four sixteenth notes, so that’s how long you should hold it when you start to work on the duration of the note in the piece.

Bars 7 – 10 : Now we still have constant sixteenth notes, but they’re a bit easier to play than before because they’re now being played in a big sweeping motion. Although the sheet music says you should play the top note of each sweeping set of notes with your left hand, I prefer to play the first four and last three notes in each of the bars 7 – 10 with my left hand, and leave the rest to my right. This makes for an easier, faster sweeping motion.

Notice now that at the beginning of each of the bars, it says “PP”. This means play very quietly, even quieter than with “P”. Notice also, however, that at the bottom of bars 7 and 9, there are sets of musical symbols that look like elongated “less than” and “greater than” signs. Actually, these signs are “crescendo” and “decrescendo” respectively, meaning to gradually get louder (in this case until you reach the top note in the bar) and to then get gradually quieter.

Also, notice that each of the bars starts with a whole note at the bottom, meaning to keep that note held down for the whole bar while you continue to play the rest of the notes.

In bars 9 and 10, you have your first accidentals in the piece. These accidentals, however, are just an Ab in bar 9 and an Ab and Bb in bar 10 (the b represents a flat symbol).

Bars 11 – 12 – In bar 11, you see some more accidentals. Just notice that the G in this bar is always sharp (#). I play the bottom two notes in each arpeggio with my left hand, and the top two with my right hand. Notice that the melody line is gradually rising in pitch until you get to bar 12, when it suddenly stops at an E natural right above middle C. Since this E is a whole note, you’re supposed to hold it for the whole bar (four beats).

Bars 13 – 21 : The E natural whole note you held down in bar 12 leads into the first E natural eighth note in bar 13. Notice that you’re supposed to hold down eighth notes with your left hand, not quarter notes, so you will have an eighth rest in the left hand after each note.

On the right hand, you still have sixteenth notes, but now there are only groups of three sixteenth notes, since the groups start with eighth notes In bar pairs 13 -14 and 15-16, notice that it says to gradually make the notes louder near the end of bars 13 and 15, and quieter again through bars 14 and 16. Also, in bars 17 and 19, there are the same “decrescendo” signs at the end of every second group of one eighth note and three sixteenth notes.

Throughout this section of the piece, see the P signs. Think of them as a reminder to keep the notes quiet.

Bars 22 – 23 – This part starts out similar to the first two bars of the piece, but takes an interesting turn in bar 23. Because of this, just try to remember what I told you to do in bars 1 – 2, and apply the same wisdom here.

Bars 24 – 30 – This part can be difficult if you don’t use the sort of fingering that feels right for you. Some say you should learn different sorts of fingering to exercise the muscles in your hands, but I say that no matter how you play this piece, you’ll get a good work out from it.

In this section of the piece, you continue the pattern of almost constant sixteenth notes in the right hand. However, at the highest note in each arpeggio, there is an eighth note instead of a sixteenth note. So, hold down the eighth note while playing the rest of the notes.

In bars 28 - 29, it’s kind of up to you which treble clef notes you want to play with your right hand, and which you want to play with your left hand. Try to figure this out on your own, finding a relatively easy way to make sure all the notes eventually get played in the correct order for the correct amount of time and at the right volume (remember to keep looking for the crescendo and decrescendo signs and play accordingly).

Bars 31 – 32 – Bar 30 leads into this descending F major scale, and you eventually will want to try to get one bar to lead into the next seamlessly. In this descending F major scale, I like to play the first two runs of sixteenth notes with my right hand, and the rest with my left hand. I also play the three quarter notes in the lower bass clef with my left hand, and the top quarter note + sixteenth note arpeggios with my right hand. Notice that, for most of bar 32, there is a decrescendo (“gradually getting quieter”) sign. If you want my advice, you might also want to play bar 32 while gradually getting slower, to lead to the next part of the piece.

Bars 33 – 36 – This is a very slow part of this piece. It’s certainly slow COMPARED to the rest of the piece. Also notice that the key signature has changed. If you don’t know how key signatues work, you’re probably not at hight enough a skill level to play this piece yet, but if you still want to, try looking up “Key Signatures” on Wikipedia.

Anyway, while you hold down the double whole note, you will also play eighth notes and quarter notes on the right hand. Remember, however, that while you hold the quarter note down, you’re still supposed to keep laying the eighth notes. I play all the eighth notes, as well as the chord in bars 35 – 36, with my right hand, and play the other notes in the lower bass clef with my left hand, including the perfect fourth interval notes in bars 35 – 36.

Bars 37 – 44 – Much in the same sort of hand movements as before, except there’s an even trickier key signature to read (just force yourself to read it) and you have some tricky cross-hand positions in bars 38 – 40. Just keep playing the eighth notes on your right hand while crossing your left hand over to play the major and minor third intervals. This may require a bit of practice, so consider starting out by practicing this section hands separately.

Notice that, in bars 38 and 40, the word “expressif” is printed. Just like it sounds, the word means “expressive,” so try to put a bit of emotion into the piece to make it sound more interesting. In bars 41 – 44, notice the crescendo and decrescendo signs, and play the notes accordingly.

As for the high whole note in bar 43, I play it with my left hand and then continue to play the eighth notes while going into bar 44, which is pretty straight forward. In bar 44, you just continue to play the eighth notes with your right hand as well as the two half notes with your left hand.

45 – 54 – This part is exactly the same as bars 1 – 11, except in bars 45 - 47, there is a low G octave instead of a C octave, and in bar 47, you suddenly have a perfect fifth interval in the left hand (with a low C instead of a low G) but this only matters for one beat (the length of one quarter note, since this piece is in 4/4 time). The rest is the same as the first part of the piece, so refer there for advice.

Bar 55 - 56 – This is must like an elongated version of bar 11 that goes even higher on the piano, except instead of an E major arpeggio series, it has a series of C augmented chord arpeggios, which leads into the dramatic climax of the piece.

Bars 57 – 64 – This is my favourite part of the piece. Once again, we have constant sixteenth notes, although we also have quarter notes at the bottom of each arpeggio. As usual, hold down the quarter note while playing the rest of the sixteenth notes in each group of four notes. Notice that now the melody line seems to be going down in pitch. I suggest adding to this effect by playing bars 61 – 64 a bit quieter than bars 57 – 60. In fact, the piece tells you to play a bit quieter (remember: “descrescendo”) in bars 60 and 64.

Bars 65 – 66 – Although you might not be able to tell by looking at the sheet music, this part sounds a bit like bars 57 and 61, which you just played. However, instead of using your left hand for the two bottom notes and your right hand for the two top notes in each group of four notes, you now use your left hand to play the quarter and half notes on the bottom staff while playing all of the sixteenth notes with your right hand. Basically, bars 65 and 66 are the same, except bar 66 is played one octave higher than bar 65.

Bars 67 – 70 – Bars 67 – 68 and 69 – 70 are exactly the same. Notice that it says to play “Tres Anime”, or “Very animated”. Play the perfect fifths with your left hand, as well as the eighth notes in the lower clef. Notice that the lower note in the perfect fifth is a half note. Play the sixteenth notes with your right hand.

Note the crescendos (two in bars 67 and 67, one in bar 68 and 70).

Bars 71 – 72 – This part is pretty straight forward. Play the descending perfect fifths with your left hand, remembering to note the half notes in bar 71. Continue to play the sixteenth notes in your right hand. Also note the crescendo in bar 72.

Bars 73 – 76 – Finally, you actually have a chance to slow down before the end. Play the lower perfect third interval with your left hand, and the higher one with your right hand in bar 73. In bar 74, simply move two fingers on your right hand in a way that plays the two half notes in the correct positions, and In bar 75, play the original perfect third interval on your right hand for one beat, while playing the mentiond perfect fifth interval with your left hand, also for one beat. To close the piece, play a low C interval. The sheet music says to play it with your right hand playing the top note and your left hand playing the bottom note. However, I like to just use my left hand to play the octave. And that’s the end.

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Practice this piece at least once each day. Make a mental note of places that you have a bit of difficulty with, and practice those parts more than the rest. In my opinion, this is a difficult, but rewarding piece to learn. If you keep at it, it will become easier and easier for you to play the many sixteenth notes in this piece, until eventually you’ll be able to play the whole thing blindfolded.

Adding Chords to a Piece

2006-09-05T13:44:00.000-07:00

Now what you know how to compose a melody, you can learn how to back up that melody with a bass line.

For this example, though I won’t be using my own melody. I’m too lazy to do that. Instead, I will choose a melody from a musical piece that’s in the public domain. How about Ode to Joy? What’s Beethoven going to do about it, haunt me in my dreams?

Click here to hear the melody line to Ode to Joy

Alright. The melody line is done (I know there was more to Beethoven‘s ninth symphony, but as far as we care, the melody is done). However, it’s not very interesting. What we need to do now is figure out which chords go best with the melody.

Some say that, in order to find chords to go with a piece, you should know the key of the piece (for convenience, the key of this piece, the way I’ve arranged it, is C major / A minor, so there are not sharps or flats). This is somewhat true. The best chords which will take up most of the piece are those you will find that use the same notes as the key signature of your piece contains. I think, though, that while it is usually necessary to use some sort of key structure whan thinking about chords, if is also necessary to remember that a piece usually sounds most interesting in the parts that deviate from the original chosen key.

I’ve added a few chords to this piece. They may not be the correct chords, and you may not like them, but I think they’re fine. If you want to add your own chords to Ode to Joy, feel free to do so and e-mail the sheet music and/or sound file to me. I’m really lonely. I knew I should have started this blog in the year 1998 so that I would’ve had some readers.

Click here to hear Ode to Joy with chords

Notice that I wrote down the names of the chords at certain parts of the piece. These are all major chords. As I’ve mentioned before, major chords usually sound happy, hence the name of this piece, “Ode to Joy”. Also notice that all these chords share the same notes as the C major key signature.

The reason I added the names of the chords was because 1) This allows people reading the nusical piece to use different inversions of the chords, playing arpeggios if they wish, and still allowing the piece to sound somewhat the same, and 2) Melody Assistant isn’t that great at writing the actual musical scores, so I had to write in the chords to make them clearer. Anyway, now that we have some chords, we can add the chords into the piece in any way we want.

Click here to hear the complete version of Ode to Joy

As you can see, I’ve added come arpeggios in the bass cleff. I’ve also made the treble cleff a bit bolder by putting in chords instread of just individual notes. For something I composed (or arranged) in about an hour on one Sunday morning, I think this is actually pretty good.

Notice that all the notes I added (except for some of the original melody line) are parts of the chords mentioned above the bars. The melody line is okay, though, because the key sinature of the chords and the melody stays the same throughout the piece.

The way I used the chords, though, is actually very simple. The piece basically contains constant arpeggios on the left hand, and chords on the right. You can do a lot more with chords, but this is a start. Keep composing music and you will eventually come up with more creative ideas for the harmony of a musical piece.

Hearing Music inside your Head

2006-09-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, one of the most important things a good composer must be able to is to be able to hear music in their mind’s ear. Of course, in order to listen to music in your head, you must listen to a lot of music in real life. I listen to a lot of music by Liszt, Beethoven and Nobuo Uematsu. This is a strange combination, but if you want to combine several different genres, that’s you’re right as a composer.

Anyway, as I was saying, you must listen to a lot of music in your preferred genre(s). I happen to be lucky in that I like classical piano music, most of which was composed more than a hundred years ago, so some recordings and MIDI files of such pieces are available to the public for free. You might not be so lucky, but that’s your problem if you don’t like classical music. I listen to this classical music most of the time, and whenever I have a spare moment in the day, if I’m not listening to or playing music, I’m thinking about it. This isn’t a conscious choice: I almost always have a tune stuck in my head. I don’t mind this, unless I’m trying to get to sleep. Usually, I do a lot of reading before going to bed, to focus my attention away from music. But that’s another topic entirely.

Composers are luckier than writers in this way, because if you look at books and articles on writing, they all say that, in order to be a writer, you must also be a reader. Luckily for us, it’s possible to just relax and listen to music passively: you don’t have to put fourth a lot of energy to hear music. On the other hand, reading does take a bit of mental energy and concentration (if you’ve ever read the gibberish I write in this blog before, you know what I mean.)

When listening to a piece of music, enjoy it. Don’t try to analyze the music, at least not yet. Listen the the piece over and over again until it’s stuck in your head.

However, don’t memorize every single individual note in the music. That would just be monotonous and probably not worth it in the end. Memorizing the melody of a musical piece you like is relatively easy, so that with that. Think of the emotions you associate with certain points in the melody. Think about the speed and general feel of the piece. The rest of the notes and chords should come to you when taking the time to play a musical piece in your head. If not, listen to it a few more times out lout before trying to play it in your head again.

If you want to play that musical piece by ear, no matter what instrument(s) the piece is meant for, refer back to the tune and the emotions you associated with it. With some focus, you may be able to take the tune and build on it with chords inside your head. Learn to mentally separate pieces in your head into the basic notes when playing them by ear. For example, if a song contains a C major chord, but you don’t know that, you can mentally slow down the musical piece and play each note in the chord separately, hearing in your head C, E and G.

This exercise may be difficult at first, but with practice, you will get better at it. When doing something that doesn`t require a lot of mental work, like doing chores around the house, play a tune in your head, even if you can only remember the melody line. If we want to compare this to weight training: playing a few notes in your head is like lifting a five pound weight. If you`re fairly weak, lifting this weight will give you a bit of a workout. However, once that`s easy for you, you can move on to lifting a ten pound weight (say, playing the complete melody line of a song in your head). At that point, you will still have the ability to lift a five pound weight. It’s just that lifting a five pound weight won`t give you as much of a work out any more. However, because lifting a five pound weight is easy, you can do it over and over again without getting tired. This built up strength will serve you on your way to lifting a three hundred pound weight (composing a perfected four-part fugue inside your head without having to write it down to remember it).

Obviously, learning to remember music and play it in your head is a helpful skill for any musician who wants to compose, improvise or transcribe music.

Ear Training: Basic Chords

2006-09-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

Alright, I’ve taught you about musical intervals. To review, musical intervals are sets of two notes that can be played either in succession or at the same time for musical effect. Now I think you’re all old enough to learn about a musical concept even cooler than intervals: chords.

Chords are basically three or more notes played at the same time or in succession, meant to add a sort of emotional effect to the music. For example, a major chord usually sounds happy, and a minor chord usually sounds sad or angry. A large part of a musical piece, however, depends on the order the chords are played in. I can’t really help you with that just yet: chord progressions are really up to the individual to experiment with (aka: I have no idea what chord progressions are). Also, I don’t entirely know how to use scale degrees, so I’ll be describing the chords by the intervals they use. Most musicians need this sort of ear training anyway

I’ll start with some basic chords. The tonic note of all the following chords is C, but I will tell you the invervals of each chord so that you can play them in any key. The intervals will all be from the tonic note.

If you’re a visual learner, refer to this keyboard to what each chord would look like on a piano. If you’re an aural learner (which most musicians are) then you can click on the name of each chord to hear it played on your computer speakers.

Major Chord

Tonic Note – Major Third – Perfect Fifth
E.g.: C – E – G

The major chord, as I mentioned, usually sounds happy, or at least creates a positive emotion in the listener. This is one of the first chords people learn.

Minor Chord

Tonic Note – Minor Third – Perfect Fifth
E.g.: C – Eb – G

This has a one note difference from the major chord, but sounds much sadder or angrier, depending on how it’s played.

Augmented

Tonic Note – Major Third – Minor Sixth
E.g.: C – E – G#

This chord has a harsh, scary sound to it.

Seventh

Tonic Note – Major Third – Perfect Fifth – Minor Seventh
E.g.: C – E – G – Bb

This is like a major chord with an extra note added on top.

Minor Seventh (Chord)

Tonic Note – Minor Third – Perfect Fifth – Minor Seventh
E.g.: C – Eb – G – Bb

This is a bit like the Seventh, but sadder. Try not to get the minor seventh chord confused with the minor seventh interval. Remember, a chord is made up of three or more notes, but an interval is made up of two notes.

Diminished

Tonic Note – Minor Third – Diminished Fifth – Major Sixth
E.g.: C – Eb – Gb – A

This chord sounds kind of scary, like the kind of piano chord you’d expect to see in those old black-and-white movies when the leading lady is tied to the railroad tracks and the train is coming.

Well, this has been an introduction to chords. I will add more chords in the future, but you’ll actually be using the chords listed above most often.

If you want to see what these chords look like on a piano keyboard and find out more information about them, you can use this chord finder.

Coming Up with a Melody Line

2006-08-29T14:24:00.000-07:00

Although I don’t know a lot of composers in person, I do know myself fairly well. I know that I sometimes have some trouble coming up with a decent melody line for a musical composition. In most musical compositions, you will want to come up with a meldoy line first, then the bass line to complement it. Of course, that isn’t to say that starting with a basic idea of a bass line isn’t an equally good idea, but don’t expect to be able to come up with a great bass line on the first time through.

Here are some tricks that seem to have worked for me:

Hum a tune aloud: This can be replaced with “whistle a tune” or “come up with a random tune in your head”, but thr results of humming a random tune, if you know how to hum decently, are often quite surprising. Try to remember this tune and write it down. Once you have the first part of a melody, it’s much easier to think of a way to continue it.

Think about something you like: If you think about something you like, especially if it’s part of your surroundings, ideas for a tune, or at least a beat, should come into your head. Try to attach an emotion to the subject. For example, if it’s raining outside, and you like rain, you might want to compose a sort of jumpy (to simpulate raindrops), somewhat happy, somewhat sad musical piece.

Borrow ideas from another piece: You won’t want to steal an entire melody (maybe a part of it which you could add on to) but rather the general timing and beat of a piece. Just take a few bars from a piece you like, and think of another way that same beat could be used to create a slightly different emotion in the listener.

Come up with a bass line first: As I mentioned earlier, if you come up with an interesting bass line, you will eventually think of a good melody line to accompany it.

Practice improvisation: This isn’t a method I use a lot, but once you know of some interesting chords as well as theemotional effects of the chords if you listen to them in a certain order, you can become very good at improvisation. I will elaborate on the ideas of improvisation in the future. However, if you want to use this method, I suggest you record your piano playing on tape or a disc, or whatever you have handy (a phonograph, if that’s all you have, would even suffice). This is because, if you’re like me, you’re likely to forget everything you played shortly after playing it.

Once you have the melody of your piece completed, you can go on to do the bass line. I will probably cover this in the future. Maybe.

Ear Training: Musical Intervals

2006-08-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

To be a good musical composer, you must have a good musical ear, or at least a good musical brain. You should be able to hear music in your head as you compose, or during the day whenever you think of music. Beethoven was deaf for most of his musical career. However, even those pieces he composed while he was deaf sounded good because he could hear music in his head, and he had perfect pitch. In fact, I think the fact that he became deaf after learning the basics of music may have freed up a lot of energy for his brain, allowing him to focus even more on hearing music in his head.

Most of us don’t have perfect pitch. There are courses on the internet that can claim to teach it, but I really don’t see the point in even trying to gain perfect pitch, especially if these courses actually cost money. For those of you who don’t know, perfect pitch is the ability to hear a note and to be able to name which note it is without using a reference note. My older brother has perfect pitch, which can sometimes be useful when I want to know the key to a piece I’m listening to. So, if I play, for example, a G note on the piano without him seeing which key I’m pressing, he would be able to tell me that it’s a G. He might even be able to tell me which octave it is, and he could definitely tell me if the note was a bit sharp or flat (in other words, if the piano needed tuning).

Some say that, although perfect pitch in itself is a rarity, perfect pitch combined with musical talent in a person is even rarer. Actually, if you look in the past, composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Liszt, Chopin and Rimsky-Korsakoff had perfect pitch, but those are just five I can name offhand, and there have been other composers tho didn’t have perfect pitch and still composed some beautiful music.

In other words, if you have perfect pitch, that may help you in your compositions, but really, perfect pitch is only the ability to understand a very technical part of music. Know that music is more than just a technical thing, and so as helpful as perfect pitch may be, even if you compose a really bad piece in a really good key, it will still be really bad piece.

If you don’t have perfect pitch, don’t worry about trying to develop it. Focus more of your energy on developing relative pitch. This is the ability to be able to tell what a note is relative to a reference note. In order to develop relative pitch, you must know about intervals between notes.

Because there are only 12 basic notes on most musical scales, there are 12 possible intervals with any one note as the base. In these 12 intervals, I’m counting the perfect octave, which is like a C followed by a C an octave higher or an octave lower.

Note: I will mention “whole steps” and “half steps” between the two notes in each interval. A whole step is equal to a Major Second interval, a half step is equal to a Minor Second interval. You kind of just have to know what those two are, but they weren’t very hard for me to memorize in my old music class.

I’ve drawn a keyboard to illustrate a piano key for you so that you can see visually what the intervals would look like. Just count the number of steps it takes to get from one key to the next, using both white and black notes:

Click on the names of the intervals to hear them on your computer.

Minor Second: This is one half step between any two notes (for example, C to C#/Db). I remember this as sounding like the two notes in the beginning of the Jaws theme.

Major Second: This is one whole step between any two noted (for example, C to D). I remember this interval as being the first two notes in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Minor Third: This is one whole and one half step, or just three half steps, between any two notes (for example, C to D#/Eb). I remember this as the first two notes in the main part of “O, Canada”. If you don’t know what “O, Canada” sounds like, get out there and learn more about the culture of other countries. If you live in Canada and don’t know what “O, Canada” sounds like, may I ask why?

Major Third: This is two whole steps or four half steps between any two notes (for example, C to E). I remember this interval as being the first two notes in “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”.

Perfect Fourth: This is two whole steps and a half step, or five half steps, between any two notes (for example, C to F). I remember this interval as being made up of the first two notes in the famous wedding march, to which one great poet wrote the lyrics “Here comes the bride/All dressed in white/Slipped on a banana peel/And went for a ride”. Ah, now that’s good songwriting.

Augmented Fourth/Diminished Fifth: This is three whole steps, or six half steps, between any two notes (for example, C to F#/Gb).

Perfect Fifth: This is three whole steps and one half step, or seven half steps, between any two notes (for example, C to G). This should sound like the first notes to the opening theme to Star Wars.

Minor Sixth: This is four whole steps, or eight half steps, between any two notes (for example, C to G#/Ab).

Major Sixth: This is four whole steps and a half step, or nine half steps, between any two notes (for example, C to A). This interval sounds like the first two notes in “My Body Lies over the Ocean”.

Minor Seventh: This is five whole steps, or ten half steps, between any two notes (for example, C to A#/Bb).

Major Seventh: This is five whole steps and one half step, or eleven half steps, between any two notes (for example, C to B).

Perfect Octave: This is six whole steps or twelve half steps between any two notes, or just a note followed by the same note an octave higher (for example, middle C to the next C). This interval sounds like the first two notes to the main part of “Somewhere over the Rainbow”.

You can associate each interval with whichever song you want, but the fact that I could only think of songs to associate with certain intervals shows that you might not need to memorize all of these intervals.

Each interval can also be inverted. Going from a C to the G above it is a Perfect Fifth interval, for example, but going from a G to the C above is makes a Perfect Fourth interval. The following lists goes from Original -> Inversion -> Original.

Minor Second -> Major Seventh -> Minor Second
Major Second -> Minor Seventh -> Major Second
Minor Third -> Major Sixth -> Minor Third
Major Third -> Minor Sixth -> Major Third
Perfect Fourth -> Perfect Fifth -> Perfect Fourth
Augmented Fourth/Diminished Fifth -> Augmented Fourth/Diminished Fifth -> Augmented Fourth/Diminished Fifth (This is basically the middle)
Perfect Fifth -> Perfect Fourth -> Perfect Fifth
Minor Sixth -> Major Third -> Minor Sixth
Major Sixth -> Minor Third -> Major Sixth
Minor Seventh -> Major Second -> Minor Seventh
Major Seventh -> Minor Second -> Major Seventh

Because the perfect octave is simply the same note at different pitches, it can’t really be inverted.

Once you know these intervals, whenever you listen to music in daily life, even if you only listen to the music on TV commercials, try to notice intervals in the tune and name those intervals in your head. Once you’ve somewhat memorized the intervals in a song, you will be able to play the tune on whichever instrument you play with less use of trial and error. Also, knowing intervals like this will allow you to write down music more quickly after you’ve heard it in your head.

First Lesson

2006-08-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

This is the first post of my new blog on musical composition and playing the piano. As the title of the blog suggests, I intend to make regular posts with tips on playing the piano and composing music. I specialize in composing for the piano, but I hope that my methods can also be used when composing for other instruments or orchestras.

Why am I doing this, you ask? I’ve looked all over the internet for a blog with tips on how to compose music, but I haven’t found one. I know, however, that there are at least some people on the internet who want to compose music, so I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to make one myself if I want such a blog to exist. If you think I’m not “qualified” to tell people how to compose music just because I’m 14 years old and not a student at some musical conservatory, start your own blog and make it better than mine.

I play the piano a lot in real life, and I do some musical composition as well. However, I’m not fully experienced in either area just yet, so this blog will be as much of a learning experience for me as for you. I do, however, have quite a bit of experience playing the piano, and composing music, at least enough that I should be able to teach you some things.

Before I go too far, though, I should tell you what you’ll need in order to take full advantage of my lessons and become a composer. You’ll need everything on the following list:

A pencil
A thin black pen (preferably not a ballpoint, but if that’s all you can get, it shouldn’t be too bad)
Blank sheet music paper (I made some quick sheet music paper on my computer which you can find below, download and print out, although it might be a bit small and hard to write in)
A scorewriting program (I like Melody Assistant, but if you can find a better one that’s free, e-mail me about it)
A musical instrument (preferably a piano or keyboard of some sort)
Some basic knowledge of music theory (how to read notes and rests, time signatures, key signatures, etc)
Computer speakers and/or headphones
Patience (With yourself as much as with me)

You will need a pencil and blank sheet music paper to write down music as you compose it. Go over this in black pen to make a neater copy of your sheet music that others might find it easier to read.

The scorewriting program is somewhat optional, but helpful. Melody Assistant not only allows you to write and print out musical scores, it also gives you an idea of what the music would sound like.

The musical instrument should be one that you know fairly well how to play, and one which, when you play it, you can tell which notes you’re playing. For example, a piano is a good instrument for this purpose, as there are a number of octaves which all have the same 12 notes in the same 12 positions. A guitar is a good instrument if you’re able to memorize the fretboard (I’m sure most guitarists know the fretboard, but I just started playing the guitar this year, so I’m not that great at it). A clarinet is an okay instrument as long as you know the fingering for each note. A kazoo is a bad instrument unless you have very well developed perfect pitch. It is important to know which notes you’re playing, and to be able to play any note on command, so that you can write and play music quickly as you go along.

You need to know some basic music theory because I don’t always want to have to explain things like notes, clefs, etc. to you before I tell you how to extend upon it. You will need computer speakers because I will upload MIDI files for you to listen to examples of some music. In future posts I will probably even do some ear training.

Patience is important because I have a tendancy to start blogs and then suddently forget about them, gradually making fewer and fewer posts. So, you’d better catch the blog while I’m still enthusiastic about it. Also, you need patience with yourself because the first piece you compose probably won’t be some great symphony, or even a passable fugue (don’t even ask me about fugues just yet). You must do a lot of composing before you come up with anything really good.

I recommend filling one page of sheet music each day. This can be your own composition, or just copying something from your computer screen by hand because your printer isn’t working (I know mine isn’t!)

If your printer is working, though, you can print out my official “Piano Tips and Musical Composition Blog” blank sheet music. Click on the link below. Then, you can right click the image and click "Save Target As..." or just click and drag the image onto your desktop to save it to your computer. Or, if you want, you can just right-click on the link below and click "Save Target As..." to save time. Then print out as many copies as you want. I added the address to this blog to my sheet music page because, hey, I gotta advertise.

http://www.geocities.com/buckleylerose/blanksheet.gif