Name: Fundamentals of Piano Practice
ISBN: 9781419678592

Fundamentals of Piano Practice

This is the first book ever written on how to practice at the piano! Learn the most efficient practice methods, musical playing, relaxation, and Mental Play (playing the piano or the music in your mind) which has been neglected by most teachers; all great musicians used it, yet often failed to teach it. Mental play impacts every aspect of piano playing: memorizing, controlling nervousness, developing performance skills, playing musically, acquiring absolute pitch, composing, improvisation, etc. Genius is more created than born; most of what had been attributed to talent are simple knowledge-based solutions that we can all learn. Improved memory can raise the effective IQ; memory is an associative process based on algorithms -- music is such an algorithm, enabling us to memorize hours of repertoire. Learning piano makes you smarter and teaches project management. Includes chapter on tuning your own piano; the chromatic scale, temperaments, circle of fifths, etc., are explained.

What Hacker News says

jmchusterNov 2021

Ooh, that's a pretty bad miss on my part.

I read

> This is the best book ever written on how to practice at the piano!

> This is a work in progress, some sections have not been copied over, there are probably a few formatting errors/inconsistencies, and generally nuttiness. Please ignore or contribute patches on GitHub.

> This is Sphinx adaptation of Chaun C. Chang’s excellent book, Fundamentals of Piano Practice.

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spekcularMay 2021

I assume when he mentions the Piano Street forums, he's talking about people like Bernhard. The guy was a legend. Some of his posts are collected here by topic: https://pianoselfteached.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/contents/. But, the information density is rather low, so besides the repertoire suggestions I recommend skipping it. This blog does a great service by distilling all his ideas into a short post.

For a book-length treatment along the same lines, there's Chuan C. Chang's Fundamentals of Piano Practice: http://www.pianopractice.org/. His daughters won state piano competitions using these practice techniques. Beware, though, that there are a few crazy tidbits sprinkled in (for example, his claim that if you practice piano while sick, you might cause brain damage). But most of it is useful.

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soulofmischiefFeb 2020

Chaun C. Chang's The Fundamentals of Piano Practice [0] does a fantastic job of describing the relationship between practice and improvement, and how to make the most of your time.

You'll probably come across advice you've already figured out on your own, but there is a wealth of information for even experienced musicians.

> Learn to play a few simple songs that you like, using 3-4 simple chords (there are a ton of tutorials for that), and then spend 1,000 hours playing around on the vicinity of that musical environment.

I would fundamentally disagree. I picked up guitar 12 months ago, and while I couldn't play you a single cover song, I have written over a hundred fleshed out songs. My practice time and creative time were intertwined, and I let my practice sessions inspire my songwriting and vice versa.

It created a clear path of progression for me, and through learning about and writing dozens of different genres I successfully brute-forced my songwriting skills into maturity. I didn't get locked into any particular style as to not limit myself; I intentionally didn't learn 12-bar blues, for example, until about two months ago. I'm not boxed into referring to the Circle of Fifths every time I write a progression.

I still have a long way to go, for sure, but my fundamentals are solid, cohesive, and broad instead of defined by a narrow perspective of playing three-chord songs for 1000 hours. I have written a hundred songs and am preparing to gig, while my friends who have been playing guitar for 10+ years are still struggling to write their first full original song.

[0] https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/

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soulofmischiefFeb 2020

Audacious? I never said most of them were good. Most of them were awful. But I followed through till I was finished.

I never made any claims as to my abilities, just my personal accomplishments. I didn't mention unconventional progressions. You need to read my post again, because your criticism is unwarranted.

> Limit yourself to three chords and write a song, you might learn something.

Learn more than three chords and write a song, you just might learn more than the average guitarist. Fundamentals of Piano Practice emphasizes the importance of never getting comfortable, of always pushing yourself during practice. Why settle for mediocrity?

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kazinatorJun 2019

Some of this advice echoes that in Fundamentals of Piano Practice by Chaun C. Chang.

https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/en/lat...

Chang precisely recommends the same thing: don't just practice by going through pieces from beginning to end repeatedly. Being a scientist, he quantifies that with efficiency arguments, which are along these lines: if a five minute piece contains two-bar difficult passage, then you can only practice that passage twelve times in the span of one hour. If the passage is only ten seconds long, you can practice it twelve times in just two minutes, which is 30 times more efficient.

One tools is to use a metronome to find the stress passages in a piece. Without a metronome, we hide the stressful passages by slowing down subconsciously.

Set the metronome at a baseline rate at which you can play everything. Then gradually crank up the speed. Then the stress points show up: passages where you fumble.

Chang makes astonishingly clever observations about speed. Basically, speed has two extremes that are easy: very slow, or super fast. It's just as hard to slow down from high speed playing as it is to speed up slow playing. The initial argument he makes is that there is no faster way to play three notes than to just hit a three note chord with three fingers, which is easy, and "infinitely fast". Moreover, it is basically easy to slow down from that "infinite speed" a little bit; if we hit the chord so that the fingers are staggered slightly, we will play a fast arpeggio. A really fast run of notes is like that: hitting groups of notes in this manner, and changing the hand position in between those groups.

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deadfeceJan 2015

I found a lot of improvement in my guitar practicing by reading "Fundamentals of Piano Practice."

The author made it available for free at http://pianopractice.org/

As I play fingerstyle I study hands separated by separating the bass and melody as thumb and fingers, then move to hands together.

I also analyze the piece to find the hardest as well as the most repetitive measures, work those out and pick up the rest of the piece. You also work these measures with transitions, by playing the preceding measure or half measure leading in and out of the measure you're practicing.

I typically don't get a lot of time to practice so I will pick up my guitar at random and play measures that I'm working on.

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