Starting A New Piano Piece

August 12th, 2009

Starting a new piano piece can be an exciting, yet daunting task. I’m going to give you some tips on how you should go about familiarizing yourself with the new piece.

One of my favourite tricks is to actually find a MIDI file or an MP3 file of the selected piece somewhere on the internet, download it to my musical library, and listen to it over and over and over again. You can even search YouTube. If it’s a pretty popular song, chances are that someone has recorded themselves playing it on the piano and stuck it up on YouTube.

Some pianists criticize others that listening to the piece to get familiar with it is “musical cheating,” but it’s actually one of the best ways to start a new piece. They probably criticize this because it is believed that every piano player has their own, unique style of playing, and if one listens to a recording too much, they begin imitating the recording and the style played by that musician.

While it’s easy to imitate some aspects, it is actually impossible to fully imitate another piano’s player’s style because piano playing styles are entirely individualistic.

Think about it like your finger prints. Even identical twins don’t have the same finger prints. So, no two piano players can play the same piece of music exactly the same. Not only that, but the same person who plays the same music piece twice, can never play it the exact same way.

Now that you’ve read this article, you can move on to one of my earlier posts, called “12 Steps For Reading Sheet Music,” located in the Tips For Reading Sheet Music category.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

After you’ve simply just listened to the recording of your new piece several hundred times, another good strategy is to actually follow along with the sheet music. You’ll learn various structural aspects of the composition and understand exactly how it’s supposed to sound. This is a very good tip and you won’t understand how effective it is until you try it. I do it for almost every new piece I want to play. It’s worth it!