My technique of finding out the key by ear is based on something I saw on youtube. Essentially you loop the song you want to find the key of, then on the piano, play all of the notes one by one and decide if the note sounds sounds wrong in relation to the existing notes in the song (most likely because it’s not a note of the same key) or if it sounds okay.

Once you have identified enough notes that sound wrong in the song, you can start using that to figure out what notes should be sharpened or flattened to end up with the key of the piece.

I’ve only tried this once or twice but it did work for me.

I’ve noticed in my piano practice journal app i use on my iPad that i have over 100 entries of things to practice. I tried to practice it all, but so far after 2 days, I still have plenty of different practice activities to go through before getting through the list sequentially.

I’ve been concentrating on the most recent songs lately, so it’s almost been a month since i’ve played any of the others. If i don’t practice them soon, i’ll end up forgetting how to play them. 

Fortunately not all of them are songs, but rather exercises or playing the same songs transposed or with different rhythms.

I just tried the Gakufu camera app for iPhone released by Kawai.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://recombu.com/news/iphone-app-scans-and-reads-music-plays-in-real-time_M14772.html

I have downloaded it with my Japanese itunes account and it is really useful for me.

You can take a photo of a line of music and it will automatically identify the notes. You can then make corrections, select the key, choose whether it is in treble or bass clef, store the recognized music and even transpose it on playback.

To play the notes, you can either swipe across the notes or you can manually tap the rhythm on the play button.

I use it as a tool to help me train my rhythm for songs that i’m having trouble with. So I simplify things by taking out the difficulty of finding the right keys to play and focus on getting the rhythm right. Then when I have that figured out, I find I can play it better when I go back to the piano.

I went to the Australian piano fair after work today after finding out that it was over 3 days including the Friday which I didn’t realize until I got to work, so not many photos for this day.

My goal is to check out all the grand pianos to figure out which one to save up for in the future.
I tried a number of grand pianos and they felt quite different from what i expected.

The first i tried was a Yamaha GB1K and it was a lot smaller than I imagined. The action was a bit more heavier than my Yamaha T121 and the sound was dull and muffled sounding. When I mentioned that to the Yamaha representative showing me the pianos, he agreed about the sound and mentioned I had good ears. He recommended me to try some of the higher end grands in the C series such as the C2, so I gave them a shot.

I felt that they were not loud enough for me. I tend to like a piano to be loud and let me feel the bass notes as i’m playing them. I feel I get the sensation when playing my upright but it was lacking in the grands. The Yamaha representative mentioned that the piano isn’t near a wall like a vertical is, so it was likely that the sound is projected differently so from a player’s perspective it isn’t as loud but going to the side of the piano, you can hear it louder.

I still felt that the action on the grand was different from my upright. Of course, grand pianos are supposed to have a different more superior action from uprights, so I think it’s likely that i’m just not used to playing grand pianos.

I played most of the C series grand pianos, except one on a raised floor that looked like a concert grand. I didn’t have much time that evening so i didn’t try them all out as thoroughly as I wanted to.

After trying the yamaha grands, I checked out the T121 they had there and felt that the action and sound was not the same as mine. I felt that mine suits my tastes better sound-wise than the one I tried there for some reason.

I tried the other yamaha uprights of the various higher grade models and they certainly have a good improvement to the sound. The action feels different, but is something I can get used to easily. If I were to not get a grand, but a high end upright, these would be worth considering. The ones I liked the best out of those were the YUS3 and YUS5.

I tried some China made pianos.. I think it was Richard.Lipp & Sonn pianos, but both the uprights and grands were terrible. I didn’t like the cheap plastic feeling keys and the tone was not nice. I need confirmation tomorrow as my memory fails me as i can’t remember the exact name of the brand but I think it’s this one.

I continued to try more Chinese made pianos and tried a Story & Clark grand SCS700V priced at $16,499AU. Somehow it seemed to catch me by suprise as it had a sound that i was looking for and with an action that felt good. However there was an area of concern where of the bass G# keys got stuck down a bit when pressed and didn’t return properly. The difference from my upright is an improvement in sound but not by a huge amount.

When I tried the Story & Clark uprights, the tone and action didn’t meet my expectations.

There were a lot of other Chinese pianos but I didn’t get to sample them all as I didn’t have the time. I’ll try them all out tommorrow and the day after. I did recall some had sticking keys, cheap feeling keys, or squeaking pedals. However I believe all those problems are minor and can readily be fixed during a tuning. It still does make you wonder about quality control though.

I did find a used Kawai piano which was about $4000 and sounded and felt similar to the Yamaha
uprights. I will have to replay it to figure out how it really compares. The touch I think was lighter, but sounded very similar.

I tried a few digital pianos too, The top Yamaha clavinovas, the CLP-480 wasn’t as good as I expected. The action wasn’t to my liking and the sound wasn’t acoustic level either. Also there was no resonating soundboard or vibration when playing bass notes like what I felt when playing a high end yamaha digital piano last year in Japan. I have no idea what model it was but I’d like to play it again. I’ll check again for it tomorrow.

I found the new model of my Yamaha DGX-630 called the DGX-640. The design I don’t like as much and the sound is the same but the key action feels much more realistic. It is closer to the type of touch I like in a digital piano.The price is also much cheaper, I paid $1600AU for my DGX-630, but the DGX-640 is only $1199 I would love to upgrade to the newer one but I can’t really justify it just for the action.

The YDP-S31 next to it is much simpler, just a piano sound but it is a slightly better one and also has a better feeling action. It is very compact and I can’t figure where the speakers are located. The speakers are a little lacking for bass, but it’s stylish and compact.

I tried the Yamaha Modus H1 and F1/F11 and they were quite pricey.. Near the $10,000 price. They weren’t particularly great with the sound though as I tried playing a song using some jazz/blues chords and it just sounded wrong compared to how it sounds on an acoustic. I suspect it’s either the speakers or the recording of the piano.

Anyway, thats all I can recall at the moment. I’m still excited after trying out heaps of pianos and can’t wait to try more over the weekend. Currently I think my year of playing an upright piano has made me biased towards uprights for being closest to my ideal feel and sound of pianos.

More to come in my next post. (Pictures to be added soonish)

This is pretty much what my parents put up with everyday when I practice the piano. It’s a long video with me playing with all the mistakes included. I admit that I picked the more interesting songs from my song playlist for the video.
I use the iPad to tell me what songs I should practice. It shows me a list of songs I can play, tells me how recently I’ve practiced it and it can record how long I practice it for. So far I’m averaging about 1 hour of practice a day, although some days it’s a bit less.

My teacher started me on playing songs before learning to read, so I can play most songs from memory (about 1 hours worth), but need to practice every day so I don’t forget them. I’ve started reading music recently so I have been concentrating on quite a bit too.
As you can tell, the main song i’ve been practicing lately is Fur Elise as I learnt it fairly recently.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is the first part to Fur Elise that I learnt 3 weeks ago. I’ve noticed how chord based this piece is after learning it and noticing the broken chord patterns in the left hand.

I think I still need to work on this piece more, but since I hadn’t posted anything for a while, I decided to record it and post it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have been using an app on my iPad called Music Journal to record my piano practice times, to identify what songs i’m neglecting and to make notes of my playing during the practice session.

I feel it’s making sure that I am doing my share of practice every day and helps identifies my weaknesses that I can work on the following practice sessions.

My playlist of songs indicating how recently i’ve played them.

A summary of my practice session with my comments.

– Posted from an iPad

After starting to learn to read music on piano from my lessons and seeing some friends sightread various songs, I’ve realized that it is by far the best way to learn to play a song the fastest way possible without requiring the need to analyze the music for ages to decipher what the melody and chords are in the piece and how things fit together like I’ve been doing lately.

I’ve also realized that sightreading isn’t as easy as it sounds. After thinking about it for a while I came up with an analogy for sightreading which really helped me understand what is involved in performing the task.

It’s essentially like touch typing on PCs. That is a difficult enough task for most that use a computer. However, sightreading on piano is like reading 2 different lines of text at once and typing them out at the same time on each hand. But it gets more complicated than that, because, you also have to type at the correct timing and hold the keys down for the right amount of time.

Fortunately music isn’t totally random (I hope it isn’t!!) so the music being played can be simplified into recurring patterns. I guess that would be like typing words instead of typing individual letters.

So thinking about it in that way, even if you can touch type, it seems incredibly difficult to acquire this skill to play anything that you have the sheet music for.

Anyways, I’m now currently working on this as a goal to allow myself to play any song I have the music sheet for. I’m still in the early stages of learning to read music for piano, but so far can sightread the right hand melody part of music with a bit of trouble at times. I can’t really play both hands even at a slow pace as i’m still trying to identify the notes, but the reading exercises my teacher has given me are quite good at training me to overcome that gradually.

Over the easter break I did a few jam sessions with a guitar playing friend of mine. This is one of the songs we played.

For this one, it didn’t take very long to learn the chords, and I managed to play them in time quite reasonably after about 4-5 tries. I’ve learnt a lot from the jam session.

I found that counting was really important to keeping the parts in sync. Just playing by ear results in getting lost in the song and unable to recover quickly if you miss a note.

Also check out my friend’s cover of the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmF5xPNJYy4

Click here to view the embedded video.