Getting the most from this great hobby!
It’s about the speed A friend of mine told me that his piano teacher had recommended he try staccato practice when needing to build speed with something. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, but as I have a couple of projects at the moment that are requiring me to get up...
"Will Staccato Practice make me faster at the piano?"Continue reading
This post is to go with my YouTube Video comparing Piano Practice to baking a Layer Cake. I often want to tackle pieces that are way beyond my current technical level. This means that by definition I need to gain the technique which I will need in order to be able to manage the new...
"Piano Practice: A Layer Cake Approach"Continue reading
This post is to go with my YouTube video Today I’d like to share a neat trick I found to help when trying to master a couple of tricky Waltzes on the piano. That trick is to play it in 4/4 time. You might think I’ve gone mad – a Waltz by definition is in...
"Piano Practice Idea: Waltzing in 4/4 time?"Continue reading
This post is to go with my YouTube video https://youtu.be/0Nz8ibdQUOI. Ever struggled to decide how fast (or slow) to play something – especially when there’s no metronome marking on the score? This is the case with most classical music and, in fact, you’d have to think about how useful they might really be in reality...
"Piano Practice: Choosing the ideal tempo – no metronome required"Continue reading
When interpreting a piece of music, there are a number of ways to add interest to it and one of these is something I’ve noticed lots of professional pianists use – I call it Inner Voices. That is to say things that seem to be written as part of the harmony or the bass which...
"Add colour to your Piano playing with Inner Voices"Continue reading
This piece appeared in Pianist Magazine Issue 94. More popularly recognized as a cello solo (with piano accompaniment) famed as the music to the ‘Dying Swan’, this arrangement by Silotti is beautiful by its elegance and simplicity. Here, I’m using the term simplicity in its relative sense. If you take transcriptions by composers such as...
"Learning The Swan for Solo Piano, arranged by Siloti"Continue reading
I went Scuba Diving this weekend … very relaxing and prompted me to write this post based on a theory I developed a little while ago. As I’ve said before, I developed terrible problems with tension in my playing once I reached Grade 8. This probably caused me to abandon the piano in my early...
"Is there a similarity between playing the Piano and Scuba Diving?"Continue reading
I was watching an interview of a young Martha Argerich on YouTube some time ago. She made the remark “je ne fais pas de gammes” – I don’t do scales. So many scales and so little time All pianists will have memories of learning all of their scales, Major, Harmonic Minor, Melodic Minor, Chromatic in...
"Should I practice scales on the piano?"Continue reading
When I decided to re-start piano, I mentioned it separately to a couple of friends who didn’t know me as a youngster (and so didn’t know I used to play). Interestingly, the first thing both of them said was ‘but you don’t have pianist’s hands!’. More oddly, one of them has never even played piano before...
"But you don’t have Pianist’s hands"Continue reading
Why Technique? When I reached my grade 8, I hit a sort of technical wall. I had never previously struggled with repertoire at my grade – passing my exams with distinction for very little effort. At grade 8, I scraped a pass mark (and think I was lucky to get that). One of the first...