Piano & Keyboard Practising for Beginners.
Nov 16th, 2008 by admin
A French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote, “there is no such thing as a great talent without great will power”. And this is so true when it comes to learning to play a musical instrument.
When it comes to playing my clavinova piano I make sure that I practice each day, even when there is a lot to do, it is well worth keeping up the habit if you can only do say 20 minutes. One short exercise I do that only takes me about 10 minutes is to run through my scales – a job loathed by most kids when attending music lesson - but the exercise really loosens up the fingers and improves the overall quality of playing other tunes. I begin with C major and then work my way up through the notes (C sharp, D, D sharp etc) up to B, and then do the minor scales in the same way.
For new players, just learning how to read music, there are books of scales you can buy in most music shops, or of course you could buy any of the excellent books on the subject from Amazon UK or Amazon.com if you are in the USA.
If you feel that reading music isn’t something you want to do, you can do this playing by ear and you will find, the more you practice, the easier it becomes. What may not appear too apparent is that you will begin to notice a difference when playing other tunes as well, because with such practice, your subconscious mind will pick up exactly where you want your fingers to go.
I was once talking to a piano-player friend of mine, who couldn’t read music, and he put it quite quaintly when he said that when he played, it felt like each of his fingers had little brains of their own.
As you continue with your practice, your talents can only improve, but there may be times when you feel you are having an “off day” and doing nothing but make mistakes, but in the words of the famous American Lawyer and diplomat Edward John Phelps, “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything”.
When we practice our music, I believe the mind goes through a process of incubation. In a practice session, try as we might, we may find that we cannot get our playing of a certain passage of music right – we just keep making those same mistakes over and over again. Frustrated, we quit our lesson feeling that we are never going to be able to play it. Then we return to it the next day, and voila! We play it note-perfect. Our mind has incubated the knowledge we were so desperate to acquire the day before.
