Episode 11 - Practising Makes Progress

welcome to show 11 . Thank you for joining me . The number of weekly listens is slowly increasing , so if this is your first time here , I hope you enjoy the podcast . So if this is your first time here , I hope you enjoy the podcast . Last week the news was that the Kawaii NV10 was back up and working .

Stan the technician had visited and done some general work on the instrument , which began working again . Although he wasn't quite sure what had caused the problem in the first place , he called back early in the week to make sure everything was still fine , and it was Until Friday .

Back early in the week to make sure everything was still fine , and it was Until Friday . I practised on Thursday night and I was running ahead of schedule on Friday morning , so I thought I'd get in a couple of runs through the jig . The piano wouldn't turn on again and it has stayed that way since . It's just as well that I got the Roland as a backup .

You'll hear it later in today's episode . Last night I went to see Devi Mamak and the Caravan Band at the Camelot Lounge in Marrickville , an inner suburb of Sydney . Devi is my piano teacher and she heads a small group of musicians .

I arrived at the venue early , having not been there before and was a little worried to find that it is in line with the main runway at Sydney Airport . Getting out of my car , I got a really good look at the landing gear of an Emirates A380 a couple of hundred feet overhead .

The upstairs venue , though , was incredibly well soundproofed , so plain noise didn't intrude on the performance . The caravan band , in its incarnation last night , had two djembe drummers , a saxophone and woodwind player , a bassist and a second drummer , with Devi on the piano .

Of course , the music was mostly composed by Devi , using some Indian ragas and based on works by other composers such as Beethoven and Bernard Herrmann . The group was accompanied by five dancers in the Middle Eastern tradition . It was a great night , and I got to hear some music that is not the type I would normally go out to , but which I thoroughly enjoyed .

Who knew that starting to learn piano would open up a whole new world of musical adventures ? This week's YouTube

recommendation is Two Set Violin , a pair of Australian classical violinists who make YouTube videos and perform as soloists . I know it's not piano music , although they do work with pianist Sophie Drummell on some of their videos . She also accompanied them on their recent concert tour .

Twoset is made up of Eddie Chen and Brett Yang , both of whom grew up in Brisbane and learned the violin later studying at the Queensland Conservatorium . They were both members of professional symphony orchestras before resigning to concentrate on their YouTube channel . This got me thinking about why we play music .

If you do it so that people will enjoy your work , then being a member of an orchestra is a pretty good way to get your music to people . The two-set violin has over 1.6 billion views , so it appears that YouTube is a pretty good vehicle for spreading classical music too .

The channel is comedy based , but that doesn't mean that there's not also a good deal of serious classical repertoire included . I now know a lot more about violin technique than I would have otherwise . Both Eddie and Brett are accomplished performers , and in a number of videos they critique playing styles and explain exactly what is going on .

Understanding more about stringed instruments is always handy , as I found there's a fair bit of piano music that has been adapted from string pieces .

Did someone say Pucklebell's Canon , if you want to see some entertaining classical content , then you need to give TwoSet Violin a watch , and if you think that YouTube is not somewhere that you are going to find content that is taken seriously by the classical music world , then bear in mind that the violins that Brett and Eddie play have a combined value of over

$20 million . They're on loan from Teresa . Youtube doesn't pay that well yet .

Signing up to learn the piano means signing up for hundreds and hundreds of hours of practice at the keyboard . It really can be a problem when you're deciding whether to start , knowing that it's going to be a long time before you can confidently say I play the piano rather than I'm learning to play the piano .

So if you're being honest with yourself , you need to work out if you're going to get along with all that . Time not being perfect . Modern life is all about getting things done quickly and efficiently . Time is money , as they say , so if something is going to take a long time , it had better be worth a lot of money . Of course that's rubbish .

There are many things that are worth doing , take a lot of time and aren't worth any money , but that's not the message that sells the latest consumer product or service . Whole businesses have been built on getting people to spend money to save time .

Marketing something based on the time it will save is a very effective way of getting a person to part with some money . That's why I get so annoyed with YouTube videos with titles such as Master the Piano in just 30 days . Clearly they're not legitimate .

Yet most of them have tens of thousands of views , so they must be messing with some people's expectations and perhaps their bank accounts . All the videos appear to be linked to paid courses .

I've now been practicing for the last six months and I'm still a long way from mastering anything , but I'm making progress and it's that slow improvement that's keeping me going . I think that it's important to remember to look for that improvement to keep your motivation up . Finding improvement is easy if you look back far enough .

Over six months I managed to learn to play most of the major scales with each hand not necessarily simultaneously , but certainly better than when I first began , and I hope that in the next six months I'll get to the rest of the flat scales and onto the minor scales .

I think that it will take me longer to get up to the speed you see in professional players' channels , but I don't have a deadline for getting there . Following my piano teacher , debbie's advice , I've recently made some changes to the way I've been practising . As you know , I've been working on the Samuel Arnold jig .

I can play it from memory without error now , so I'm moving on to the dynamics , which I had mostly ignored . I will normally play the piece five or six times during a practice session , all the way through , as I'm working on the overall sound , not the individual notes .

Evie suggested that I only play it once during each session because that way I have to be much more attentive , as I won't get a go over if I make a mistake . We negotiated so that I'm allowed to play it twice per practice , and I've seen that she is right . I'm paying more attention and I think it's speeding up the overall pace of improvement .

Having this take up only a couple of minutes in each practice means that I can keep it in the rotation for much longer without it getting in the way of learning new things . How much longer will I keep practicing it ?

Well , I've heard it said that a good pianist practices a piece until they get it right , but a better pianist practices a piece until they cannot get it wrong . I'll try for the latter . A single play through each session isn't going to work if you're still learning the piece .

Repetition is the key to getting the notes into your working memory and while learning each new bit , that's important . I'm seeing that in practice with the new A Time For Us piece . Debbie also suggested I concentrate on just a very small part of the music .

So for the past week I've been working on the first three and a half bars , and separately , and then hands together , at a very slow pace . At the beginning of the week I had to closely read the score to have any chance of getting through the 10 left hand and 11 right hand notes .

Now I can play each at about the correct tempo and with hands together , though much slower . It may not be a lot of progress , but it is something that I can see and I know that if I keep it up then by this time next week I'll be further along .

I'm unsure how much further , but if I have to guess , I'll say the halfway point of bar 9 , which means learning some left-hand chords . I also know that in another six months I'll have learned so much more

and that it will have been six months well spent . This week's review is just the first part of what will take a few weeks , mainly because there are so many different bits and options to it . It's a review of Piano Tech 8 , a virtual instrument package designed to be used with a MIDI keyboard .

Virtual instruments work in the same way as the sound generator part of a digital piano . They take the movement of the keys and turn that into sounds . Usually , that is by having an inbuilt collection of sampled instrument sounds that are combined and processed to produce a sound similar to a real acoustic instrument .

The more expensive the digital piano generally , the better the final result . Standalone virtual instruments can be programmed directly using software such as GarageBand , or they can be used on a system linked to a MIDI keyboard . Pianotek , which comes from the French company ModArt , works slightly differently to other digital instruments .

Piano Tech uses modelling rather than samples , so instead of recordings of actual instruments , mathematics is used to generate the final sounds , in the same way as my Roland FP-90X does for some of its sounds . Of course . The question is how well does it do this ? Piano Tech doesn't just model an acoustic piano , it models particular acoustic pianos .

For example , the first one on the list is the Steinway Sons Model D , possibly the most used concert grand piano in the world . Does it do a decent job ? Well , probably . The Steinway company has certified the model and allows Piano Tech to use the Steinway trademark , so they're obviously happy with it .

In future parts of this review , we'll investigate the available instruments in more detail . So how do you use Piano Tech ? The Piano Tech software works on Macintosh , windows and Linux computers and iOS devices . It's not natively available for Android , but there are workarounds . I've used it on my Mac , ipad and iPhone and it acts the same on all of them .

Also , your OneLicense allows you to use it on all your devices at no additional cost . I'm mainly using it with my iPhone . I plug the iPhone into the MIDI USB port on the Roland using a USB-B to USB-C cable , which does two jobs .

Using a USB-B to USB-C cable , which does two jobs , it transfers the MIDI information to the Piano Tech app and the generated sound back to the FP-90X so that the sound comes from the speakers just as if I was playing the Roland . Normally , it sounds great .

I'll go into more detail about the actual steps in using Piano Tech in the next episode , where we'll look at some of the instruments as well . In the meantime , if you'd like to try the software yourself , modart have a free trial that includes all the features of the full version . It just has a time limitation and some of the black keys are disabled .

They even tell you how to reset the time limitation . If you want to try it some more , if you've got a MIDI compatible keyboard and a way to connect your iPhone , I'd suggest giving it a go .

Well , that's it for this week . If you'd like to contact me , email is the best way . You'll find me at david at pianofinelyshow and the website at wwwpianofinelyshow . In both cases , piano , finally , is all one word . The show is also on Facebook , instagram and Threads .

You can subscribe via any popular iOS or Android podcast application or from directories such as Apple Podcasts , spotify or YouTube Podcasts . The show notes for this episode are on the website and include a text me link which will let you send me a message . So until the next episode , I hope your piano stays in tune and you enjoy your time at the Keys .

This week's progress piece is pretty short . It's the first three and a half bars from Nino Rota's A Time For Us from Franco Zeffirelli's film Romeo and Juliet . I'll put in all three parts , the way I've been practising each hand separately and then both together . The single hands are close to the correct tempo , the hands together not quite so much .

Ah , ah , thank you .