OK, so this is the fifth lesson in my series on piano for complete beginners.
In lesson four we learned some useful stuff about how we notate things that usually happen
in the left hand, using the bass clef.
We also learned about the C major scale, and right at the end of that lesson we were starting
to play that scale with two hands together.
Now in today's tutorial we're going to drag all of that stuff together and put it
into practice with two short pieces of music for two hands.
OK, let's go.
So what you need to do either now or when you've watched the tutorial once through
is download the accompanying PDF that you'll find linked in the description text underneath
this video.
It contains the written music – the scores, to use the technical term – for two short
pieces of music.
Now this lesson we're going to do pretty much nothing else except learning the first
of those two pieces, OK?
The second piece I'm going to kind of give you as a homework task.
In each piece I've introduced just, you know, just a couple of new ideas that we can
talk about as we go along.
OK, let's start looking at piece number one.
As you can probably see from a quick glance, there are some things in here we've seen
before and some things that are just a little bit new.
The new stuff is all to do with what we call the piece's dynamics, which is how loud
or soft we're playing at any given moment.
I'll talk about that in a second, but first let me play it through.
I'll play it through once with the score up in screen, and once in camera view like
this, so you can see my hands.
Second time through, when I'm playing in camera view, if you've already downloaded
the score you might like to follow along.
OK, let's just play it through once with the score up on the screen.
Here we go.
I'll take it fairly steadily but not too slowly.
OK, and let's do it again, and this time in camera view, so you might want to – when
you're learning it yourself – you might want to wheel back a few times and just watch
what I'm doing.
OK, here we go.
OK, so now we've had first sight of that score and we've heard what it sounds like,
and seen a little bit what it looks like to be played, let's just spend a few minutes
closely at what's going on.
So here we are with the score up on the screen.
Just ignore this green line here – that's the playhead in Sibelius, the application
that I'm using here.
That's got nothing to do with the score itself.
So let's just take a look at this thing.
Before we look at all this stuff with the dynamics, the louds and softs, let's just
check out that we understand everything that's going on here.
First off, something that you might not have seen before is this wiggly line here.
There's another one down here.
It's called a brace, OK, and it doesn't show that you need to do anything different
– it's just used to show that these two staves, OK, and these two staves down here,
are being played on the same instrument.
That might seem kind of superfluous – like, duh, you know, of course I'm playing them
on the same piano – but it can be kind of useful when a piano part is written as part
of a larger score, like in an orchestra, because it shows that both of these staves refer to
the same instrument, OK?
So the brace here is kind of a hangover from that, and it's just considered good practice
to write the braces in when you're writing piano score.
OK, so we have treble clef for right hand, bass clef for our left hand.
It's worth just mentioning here that although right and left are usually notated with treble
and bass clef, that's just because of where right hand and left hand parts typically tend
to sit on the keyboard, OK?
Sometimes you'll have a left hand pretty high up the keyboard, in which case it might
be notated in the treble clef, or you might have a right hand that's fairly low down
the piano keyboard, in which case it'll be notated in bass clef.
Don't worry about that for now, though – usually, though it works this way – treble, bass,
right, left.
But just because you see a treble clef doesn't necessarily mean it should be played in the
right hand.
That refers to the area of the piano the stave is covering, OK?
Not which hand you should be playing with.
OK.
Right ahead of the clefs, here, at the start of the score – by the way, we would call
these groups systems.
So this first line of right and left is the first system, this second line of right and
left is the second system; or the top system and the bottom system.
Anyway, at the very start of the first system, the very start of the score, we have the time
signature, and it is our old friend 4/4, so we know we've got four beats in the bar,
and each bar, er each beat is a crotchet, a quarter note, long.
Up here we've got a tempo marking, andante, which we've seen before and we know that
means "at a walking pace", so not at all fast, but not too slow either.
And here we've got the notes in the right and the left hands.
Now we've got a mixture of crotchets – OK, here are some crotchets, just playing them
with Sibelius – and we've got some minims, yeah, but we've also got a note that we
haven't come across before.
Right here at the start in the left we have a semibreve, which, if you're American you
would call a whole note.
Now just look at this a second – can you work out how long a semibreve lasts just by
looking at the score?
You can probably see that one semibreve lasts the full length of a bar in 4/4, which is
four crotchets, so we can see it's worth four crotchets – four beats.
It actually makes – it's one of these areas where it makes much more sense if you
use the US system, yeah?
Because we call a crotchet and a semibreve is a whole note, so it kind of makes sense,
you know, four quarter notes make up one whole note.
Or two quarter notes make one half note, a minim, and two half notes make up one whole
note.
So semibreves, whole notes, are pretty straightforward – in 4/4 time we're just holding them
down for four beats, and in this piece it's usually the length of a whole bar.
Now let's take a look at what each hand is doing.
In the right we've got something that looks like a melody, OK?
It's reasonably straightforward, and it's all taken from the C major scale.
We might therefore say that this piece is in the key of C major, and we can confirm
that because we can see that the last note is a C, OK?
We'll talk about key in a later tutorial, but just remember the term for now, OK?
The key of C major.
You'll see I've put in some fingering – in other the right and the left, yeah,
but, and this is important, I haven't put fingering on every note.
Now as a rule, composers or music editors will try not to clutter up a piano score with
too much fingering, or too much of anything else, in fact, yeah, because we want it to
be nice and clear and readable.
So what we've got here is kind of an outline of the fingering, but with most of the really
obvious stuff missed out, yeah?
I've still marked it in pretty heavily, but if you're, for example, playing that
F with your thumb and that C with your fifth it's pretty obvious that the fingers you'll
use here will be 2, 3 and 4, OK?
Yeah, OK, as you've probably noticed by the way, in the treble clef we tend to write
the fingering above the stave and in the bass clef we tend to write it below the stave.
That isn't a hard and fast rule but it's what tend to happen, hea?
And again the reason for that, above and below, is because we don't want to take up too
much space between the staves, either, which we need for other stuff – for a start we've
got this legato marking, so we know we're playing smoothly, yeah?
Legato is so common it isn't always marked unless the composer really wants to stress
legato playing – it's kind of assumed that most piano music will be played legato
unless otherwise stated.
But the things I really want you to look at here are the dynamic markings, which is what
these letters, mp at the beginning and end, and the mf, here and also this funny thing
here, which we call a hairpin, yeah?
Because it looks like a hairpin, yeah?
We'll come to that in a second.
Now, when I was playing through you might have noticed that sometimes I was playing
quite softly, and sometimes a bit louder – and that's because I was following these dynamic
markings.
Let's just look at what they mean.
Now the piece starts mp, which means moderately soft, OK?
– mezzo piano in Italian, but we don't need to worry about that, moderately soft.
Again, these things are kind of subjective – it's like the andante, you know, it's
not a hard and fast, you know, tempo marking there, saying, you know, "you must play
at 80 beats per minute".
Rather, you know, it is quite subjective, it allows you a lot of latitude in interpretation,
which is really important, because, you know, this is about being musical.
You've got to kind of interpret it for yourself.
So mp means basically quiet but not too quiet, and, as you can see, all of the first four
bars are all mp, moderately soft.
Now then, starting on bar 5 – look, we've even got the bar number up here – we're
mf, mezzo forte, means moderately loud.
So, again, we're not going overboard, not too loud, but, you know, a bit louder than
we were when we were playing mp.
Then, at the start of bar 6, we run into the hairpin.
What does that mean?
Basically it tells us to – sorry, the start of bar 7 – it tells us to steadily get quieter
throughout bar 7, OK?
So we're starting mf, here, and we're going back down to mp, to moderately soft.
A hairpin can go either way – if it starts wide and gets narrower it means 'get softer'
and if it's the other way around, you know, starts narrow and gets wider, it means 'get
louder', OK?
The important thing is, and this is really critical, is that it's gradual, and the
length of the hairpin shows us how quickly we should get louder or softer.
So in bar 7, ideally, and this is what I tried to do when I played through, each one of these
notes above the hairpin should get just a little bit softer than the one before it,
until this note in bar 8, this C, is back down to being mp – the same volume, roughly,
as at the start of the piece.
OK, as I said, important point, nobody pretends this is an exact science, so, you know, don't
go downloading a decibel-measuring app and checking that you're playing at exactly
the same volume for every mp note and all the rest – you know, this sounds kind of
wishy-washy, but dynamic markings are something you should judge very subjectively: judge
it by how it sounds to you and how it feels.
In this week's PDF, on the third page, I've included a list of some of the most common
dynamic markings, so make sure you check those out and learn them – because they will come
in really handy.
Another thing I want you to do with this short piece is listen to yourself playing it.
That sounds kind of mad, but when we're playing the piano it's very easy – and
I've said this loads of times in the past in other tutorials – it's very easy to
get so focused on pushing the right key at the right time, you know, er, yeah, um, that
we forget to listen to ourselves.
That's bad because it kind of breaks the feedback loop between ear and fingers, and
means we risk ending up with performances that are kind of, you know, technically correct
but which lack any expression.
So, listen carefully to what you're playing and, even though it's a really simple piece,
try if you can to give it a little bit of expression – make it musical if you like.
After all, that's the whole point of doing this stuff.
Now, after you've worked on that piece, which, you know, obviously I've played through
for you, I've got a little bit of homework for you before the next session.
It's a second piece of music, also in the PDF – you'll find it on the second page.
And this one I'm not going to play through for you or explain, at least not yet: your
job is to work it out for yourself.
Then I'll play it through at the start of the next lesson and you can see how you've
done.
I've included a couple of explanatory notes in there just to help you along.
Now as well as learning that unseen piece, I want you to keep practising the first piece
– OK, your aiming to have it really accurate, and to play it to a steady beat – that's
really important – don't speed up for the easy bits and slow down for the hard bits.
And, and this is really important, I also want you to keep working on the various versions
of the scale of C major that we learned in lesson 4, the previous lesson.
OK, so there we go – that should be enough to keep you going for now!
I hope you're finding the course useful so far – if you are, please do consider
supporting my crowdfunding project at www.patreon.com/billhilton, if only to the tune of, you know, a dollar
or two dollars per tutorial I post.
Remember to subscribe to my channel using the little red subscribe button down here
in the bottom right, like my Facebook page and follow me on Twitter – the links are
below – and, above all, practise practise practise so that when we go into the next
lesson, when we're going to look at another new piece and some different types of notes
and scales, you've got the stuff we've learned so far down really well.
See you next time!
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