I’m trying to teach myself piano about 30 years after abandoning my childhood lessons. You can find the roundup with links to what is and isn’t working so far here: Learning Piano in Middle Age: Roundup
You can find the previous week here: Week 1.
My second week of piano practice was about playing more than one note at a time, whether across two hands or on a single one. I also got a clearer sense of why I’m doing this whole thing.
Musiah
My free week of Playground Sessions ended last week, so I decided to try out Musiah, because I heard that it paid closer attention to note durations, which neither PS nor Piano Marvel seemed to do. (It does.)
Musiah charmed me with its awkward name and the Australian twang of its overbearing narration. Technologically and design-wise, it’s fresher than PS or PM—it runs in a Unity-based downloadable app, and features a pleasantly rich visual design. It also blessedly has comprehensive hotkeys, so that I was able to use Keyboard Maestro to map the ⏺ button on my music keyboard to skip the tedious parts of the narration, and even more importantly map 🔁 to restart the current piece when I screw it up.
Where Piano Marvel has been bare-bones to the extent that I was sometimes confused about what I should be doing with my fingers, Musiah goes to the other extreme. It comes with some kind of space opera lore that I immediately disabled—though the narrator still insists on calling me “earthling” when explaining things.
The program gives an extreme level of support, which has been a bit tedious in getting through the basics that I’ve already covered in other programs. For instance, the app will sometimes insist on walking through a piece note by note, asking me to click with my mouse to indicate the note letter or whether the current note is higher or lower than the previous note. It feels disruptive to move my fingers back to my typing keyboard and trackpad.
There are also a few frustrating glitches: when walking through notes one by one on the MIDI keyboard, I’m often too fast, to the extent that the app is still checking my next note against the previous one and saying that I’m wrong. I’ve also experienced several cases where my keyboard stopped making sounds when repeating a piece, and the app never seems to shut down properly when I try to exit.
That said, I do appreciate that Musiah takes the time to explain what it’s introducing in each lesson, and what it expects me to be doing with my fingers. I also appreciated that it introduced working with both hands much sooner than PM or PS did. And at this point, while I’m still on “level 1”, I’ve been given some challenging pieces. Just this morning, I spent about an hour mastering “4x4 part 1”—even though it only used C, E, and G, my brain doesn’t seem to be very good at managing different timings on each hand yet. That was satisfying.
I have another week of free trial, so we’ll see how well it sticks.
Piano Marvel
After Musiah’s overbearing and repetitive narration, coming back to the minimalism of Piano Marvel is refreshing. There are still times where I find myself scratching my head about what concept they’re trying to introduce (and trying to find hints in the PDF that accompanies each level). However, now that I’m on level 2 of the “method” track, there have been more frequent videos explaining the intended fingering changes. (Here’s an example for Greensleeves.)The production quality of these videos is a notch below the ones in Playground Sessions or Musiah—the keyboard/camera seems to bounce, and there are sometimes awkward mis-clicks or moments of navigating the software. They’re still helpful, though.
Piano Marvel still feels more pedagogically sound to me. Its exercises are a bit more boring and technical, but I can feel a clearer progression between each one and the next (and they’re individually shorter). It also does a great job of starting with finger number and note name hints early in a piece or sequence and gradually dropping them away.
This week I also started exploring the “technique” track, because I found myself wanting to do more scale-type exercises. I haven’t found those here yet, but this track did introduce me to PM’s ear training exercises, which have you listen for a few measures, then play back the same notes and timing, with a few hints on the staff:
Finally, I tried out Piano Marvel’s “Standard Assessment of Sight Reading™”, which gives you a sequence of pieces of slowing increasing difficulty. You have 20 seconds to skim over each piece, then you have to try to play it back cold. Once you fail to get 80% accuracy on 3 different pieces, the test ends. On my first test I scored 226, which puts me between “Early Beginner Student” and “Late Beginner Student”.
This implicitly gives me an answer to last week’s question about sight reading: I guess an experienced pianist should be able to sight-read a piece after 20 seconds of skimming?
Functional Ear Trainer
Speaking of ear training, on my commutes this week I experimented with Sergiy Korchan’s Functional Ear Trainer iOS app. This app, which is based on a method popularized by Alain Benbassat, uses numbered tones for each scale instead of note names. At this point I’m barely succeeding on the first level, the first four notes of the C major scale. I seem to have internalized middle C (baby steps), but I’m still not reliably identifying the next three. My brain often snaps to Lean On Me, which helps a bit. I’m hoping that this will help grow the right neurons over time. We’ll see, because…
What I’m Here For
…I found myself realizing a bit more why I’m doing this. As I was listening to music on my commute (for instance, Buku’s song Align), I found it easier to mentally pull apart songs into their constituent parts. I could begin to see how I could reproduce them and start messing with them, in the same way that I start to get glimmers of understanding of a foreign language after a few days of puzzling out bits of restaurant menus.
I want to be able to take a song that I like, create my own version of it, and then hopefully use that process to learn how to make new things of my own.
Right now I obviously have a long way to go, something which is painfully obvious to me when I try to puzzle out a real song that’s outside of the C-major scale that all of the exercises I’ve done have been in.
My hope is that eventually I’ll develop the mental structures to deeply understand that something’s in, say, an E-major scale, and my fingers will snap into that mode. I expect that to get there, I’ll need to do more raw scale practice, which none of the tutoring programs I’ve tried have brought me to yet.
Quicklessons by Ozie Cargile
Along those lines, I came across the book for the Quicklessons course on the Kindle store, and I was immediately impressed by the graphic design of the book, and the focus on music theory and composition: circle of fifths and all that. The reviews on Udemy are polarized, with some noting that there isn’t enough support or detailed exercise instruction for it to be a good beginner course, while others praise its musicality. It sounds like it might fit what I’m looking for, so I’ll probably give the 7-day trial a shot soon.
Sadowick’s Ableton Tutorials
When I want a break from trying to train my fingers, I’m also trying to make sense of Ableton Live. I saw recommendations for Sadowick’s YouTube videos. I watched the first few video’s in his Ableton Live Ultimate Course, but they didn’t do too much for me so far—a lot of talking about his gear (takeaway, if you have a lot of things to plug in you should get a sound card/box). I did learn about the top toolbar buttons in the app.
Mostly, though, I did more fooling around with crazy sounds, this time MIDI chorusing and audio reverb effects.
That’s it for this week! I doubt I’ll be able to keep up this level of detail along with actually practicing, but I’m hoping my experiences will be useful to others who are trying to do the same thing in the future.
Next up: getting more familiar with chords, and maybe more time off of the white keys?
