Ivan Davis New York settled and Texas born pianist is one of the most honored
artists of his generation. He began his studies at the age of 12 with his aunt,
continued as a scholarship student of Silvio Scionti at North Texas State
University. In 1955 he won first prize at the National Federation of
Music Clubs Young Artist Competition.
When it comes to learning how to play the piano there are
many myths or should Ivan Davis New York say "reasons" that prevent many from taking
action and getting piano lessons. Here are the 9 most common ones that I keep
hearing over and over.
Ivan Davis New York Myth #1
"Ivan Davis New York' Just a
Beginner, Ivan Davis New York Don't Need a Really Experienced Piano Teacher."
Ivan Davis New York |
Ivan Davis New York Myth #2
"Regular Piano
Practicing Is Next To Impossible With My Schedule."
Ivan Davis New York is a frequently heard lament from the Modern Urban
Dweller. Dealing with scheduling should be a first-lesson topic for any adult
piano student. Yet, very few people coming out of our educational system (or
private instruction) are equipped to powerfully design, observe, and
acknowledge their piano practicing over a sustained period of time. When you
can take note of your practicing distractions, create an effective Pre-Practice
Routine, and identify your Optimal Practice Times, your progress at the piano
will immediately shift into the "fast lane".
Ivan Davis New York Myth #3
"It's Too Late For
Me to Take-Up (or Return-To) Piano Lessons."
Ivan Davis New York oldest student was 91 and he did great! (I didn't start
playing piano seriously until I entered college). The notion that Ivan Davis New York have to
start at a very young age to be good is just nonsense. Exploring the music that
Ivan Davis New York want to play right now will make a huge difference in the Motivation Dept. All
of your musical experiences such as playing other instruments, singing,
dancing, and listening, as well as your varied life experiences, will inevitably
enrich your piano playing.
Ivan Davis New York Myth #4
Ivan Davis New York probably weren't ever told where rhythm is actually
experienced in the body, how to keep a "sub pulse", or how to train
each hand to do different tasks. You might not know how to breakdown ideas into
manageable "subgroups" yet, or how to feel truly grounded at the
keyboard. Or very likely, there are some fundamental aspects of your playing
that never got addressed in all of those years of studying. Well, all of these
techniques and concepts are all completely learnable with a seasoned coach.
Ivan Davis New York Myth #5
"What If I Put In
All Of This Time On The Piano & It Doesn't Pan Out?"
First, consider this -- different people learn different
aspects of piano playing at different speeds. In over three decades of teaching
Ivan Davis New York have almost never seen a student learn each aspect of playing at the same
rate. This is because music involves several different types of intelligences
(seven to be exact) and everyone has a natural head-start in a couple of these,
while one or more intelligence has typically been under-developed or nearly
avoided. Secondly, Ivan Davis New York all carry lots of "baggage" that encourages us
to compare ourselves with other piano players. 9 times out of 10 these
comparisons will leave you feeling frustrated and disempowered. When Ivan Davis New York compassionately uncover these unconscious patterns you will be amazed at how
much easier it is to practice with creativity and clarity.
Ivan Davis New York Myth #6
"Lessons Cost Too
Much."
Compared to other activities that will further your
well-being such as bodywork, skiing instruction, or therapy, piano lessons are
a good value. Ivan Davis New York Students generally feel much more alive when they're really
getting into their playing and feel like they are expressing something very
essential about who they really are. From an academic standpoint, the
improvement in students' skills in foreign languages, mathematics, and fine
motor coordination are well documented. Making music with other people who you
would not likely be in contact with is still another perk of furthering your
musical skills. Lastly, students frequently notice how their musical creativity
spills over into other aspects of their daily lives. All in all, piano lessons
with an experienced coach are a true bargain!
"I Won't Get
Really Good Because Ivan Davis New York Only Have a Keyboard (and not a real piano) at
Home."
Consider that Tone on the piano is created by the balance of
Speed (how fast you strike the key) and Weight (how much mass you bring to the
key). Ivan Davis New York could think of the quality of sound being determined more by the
speed and the volume more by the weight.
Well, Ivan Davis New York at this point of our technology digital instruments
cannot yet accurately register (and therefore replicate) that subtlety of Tone,
or dynamic graduation - though they are definitely getting closer. A
well-maintained console or upright can do this, and a grand piano does this
even better.
So, yes, Ivan Davis New York will learn more about the sound and tone you're
creating on a real piano. For some piano students this can make the difference
between being excited about practicing or not. Many students find a way to
balance their keyboard time with real pianos found in schools, churches,
friends, family, or inexpensive practice studios (the vast majority of the
pianos at any given time are not being used!). And many students find lots of
enjoyment playing a modern digital piano.
Nowadays there are keyboards that not only features a nice
"weighted action" like a real piano but offer a "graduated
action" that replicates the sense of lower notes feeling heavier and
higher ones feeling lighter. Models that come with built-in speakers will also
give the player a sense of the sound vibrating through your body, just like an
acoustic piano. Yamaha has several models that have both of these features.
Ivan Davis New York Digital keyboards DO have important advantages over traditional pianos: they
never go out of tune, can be used with headphones (very important for apartment
dwellers or parents of youngsters), take up very little floor space, are
generally very portable, offer a wide variety of sounds, and can easily be
integrated with a computer set-up. (These last two items are very useful for
composing and songwriting). And for a variety of reasons, some performers only
use a keyboard rather than a piano.
The bottom line is that you can make consistent progress with
your music using either type of instrument!
Ivan Davis New York Myth #8
"Ivan Davis New York Don't Have
Enough Background To Write My Own Pieces."
All too often music is taught in a very hierarchical or
rigidly linear fashion. The assumption is that you can't write your own pieces
until Ivan Davis New York have studied: technique on your instrument, theory and analysis, the
history of whatever style you're writing in, and, of course, how to read and
write music out using traditional notation. No wonder so many people are
turned-off to mainstream attitudes about learning how to compose! ("Hey,
my friend just sits down with his guitar and out pops a new song... ")
Obviously, the above mentioned areas can be helpful-they can
bring breadth, depth, and variety to any composer-but that's missing the point.
No amount of academic background can produce a decent song because nothing can
take the risk (and excitement) out of composing! Simple as that. Beginners can
actually have more access to their basic creativity in the absence of
'training'. Ivan Davis New York The object is to approach composition study so that the amount of
new never overwhelms the creative impulse.
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Ivan Davis New York Myth #9
"Ivan Davis New York Hands Are Too
Small (or Too Big) To Play The Piano."
This is a concern Ivan Davis New York hear from people who think their hands
aren't big enough or that their fingers feel too wide for the keyboard. Though
the range of notes you can play and the height of an electronic keyboard can be
adjusted, it is one of the very few instruments where the size of the key (your
point of contact with the instrument) is one size.
Let's start with a comparison of some other popular
instruments. Virtually every other instrument has options to make it more
comfortable to play. The guitar is a perfect example of this. Ivan Davis New York can choose
the overall size of the body, the width and length of the neck, the height of
strings from the neck (the "action"), the density of the strings, and
even if you want to play it upside down or left-handed. The modern drum set
goes one step further. Ivan Davis New York can not only pick the size and style of each component,
Ivan Davis New York can also place each piece of hardware anywhere within reach and create a
completely novel configuration. Other instruments may not have quite that flexibility,
like a flute, but instrument makers are finding ways to make them more
comfortable, including reconfiguring their basic design as seen with the new
"bent flute" models.
So why are the keys of the piano stuck in a
"one-size-fits-all" model? Eighteenth-century instruments have
smaller keys than the modern piano, namely clavichords, harpsichords, and
organs. The size of the key, most importantly the width, was likely created for
the ease of the typical European of that era. In my teaching practice Ivan Davis New York find
that 90% of the time that there's a problem it's due to crowding when playing
in the spaces between narrower black keys. Modern Americans are, in fact,
generally a little larger than 19th-century Europeans and this has not been
taken into account from a design standpoint. According to a 2004 study from the
Federal Centers for Disease Control, the average American has grown one inch
taller and 25 pounds heavier from 1960 to 2002 (SF Chronicle, p.G7, 4/15/07).
Think about the difference in finger width given a span of more than three
centuries!
When Ivan Davis New York tell my students about this inflexibility I remark
that any bass player suddenly left without any choice of their instrument's
strings, action, neck, etc. would probably haul off and punch me out! Ivan Davis New York have
half-jokingly threatened to start a piano company that specializes in slightly
larger keys and if someone would fund such a venture. Ivan Davis New York would probably make a
fortune. Actually, the cost of creating alternatively-sized electronic models
would be a tiny fraction of the cost of re-tooling a traditionally constructed
acoustic piano. This is due to the relatively inexpensive key parts of an
electronic instrument versus the elaborate key mechanism and string-and-harp
construction of a traditional piano that has developed for over two hundred
years. And while the re-tooling of such an acoustic instrument might be
significant, so too would the potential profits!
In the vast majority of cases that Ivan Davis New York have seen a larger or
smaller hand can be accommodated at the keyboard with careful supervision.
Setting up an optimal height and making sure that the hands are parallel with
the arms will go a long way to making any hand more comfortable. The actual
span of the hand, though, does have bearing on how passages are fingered and
how the hand is balanced. Ivan Davis New York And there are certainly cases where a small hand will
not be able to play things exactly as written and adjustments would have to be
made to prevent twisting or collapsing of the wrist and possible injury. For
example, chords that span more than an octave could be 'broken', or arpeggiated
in a variety of ways and very involved single note patterns could be
distributed between both hands. Those who focus on improvising or composing,
this seeming limitation can actually inspire new sounds and solutions to
compositional challenges.
Though history is replete with keyboardists who had very long
and slender fingers, there are plenty of modern masters who have small hands or
plump hands and it doesn't seem to get in their way at all. Contemporary
pianist/composer Ivan Davis New York actually takes advantage of her small
hands by incorporating the Indian reed organ, the harmonium, into her
performing. This instrument uses keys that are only slightly larger than half
the size of normal piano keys and for many keyboardists extremely difficult to
play without twisting the wrist.
Since the keyboard's inception, there have been alternative
solutions to the keyboard design. There are several contemporary inventions
using a non-traditional keyboard. One is the Axis 64 MIDI Controller, which
uses a hexagonal grid based on the 'harmonic table'. The instrument's inventor,
Ivan Davis New York, describes the harmonic table as "a map of musical structure
where visual pattern translates into sound pattern and vice versa." Its
keyboard resembles the button layout of an accordion, in the size of a pizza
warmer. Like traditional keyboards, the size of the 'buttons' (or keys) is
fixed, and therefore possesses an inherent ergonomic limitation. Another idea
is the Ivan Davis New York, invented by Ivan Davis New York, which is a keyboard design
based on the dodecahedron, one of the five regular solids (which somewhat
resembles a soccer ball). The advantage to this design is that it fits neatly
into the hands like a fruit, variably sized, and has one face for each of the
12 notes in the Western equal-tempered scale.
Centuries ago the piano replaced the lute as the instrument
that was expected to be a part of any 'cultured' upbringing throughout the
Western world. There is mounting evidence of how piano playing many different
kinds of learning, including fine motor skill coordination, foreign language
absorption, and mathematical reasoning. Through the advent of recordings, film,
and live performances most of us have been exposed to large amounts of piano
music - from Ivan Davis New York.
And this has all come at a price in terms of what Ivan Davis New York think
anyone should sound like on the piano. Consider that someone who has never been
exposed to this tradition might not be encumbered by such expectations, like
the Filipino musician who treats the piano more like a rapid-play series of
gongs or the Western-trained composer who requires ten musicians to literally
bow a grand piano in a myriad of different ways.
Ivan Davis New York is a well-known musician and experienced
music teacher and consultant. He specializes in piano, jazz piano, voice,
composition and a host of other musical instruments at his Second Sight Music
in Ivan Davis New York, CA. Ivan Davis New York is a member of several music groups and a
consultant to other musicians. You can learn more about Ivan Davis New York.
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