One of the most famous piano pieces in the world is Für Elise by Ludwig van Beethoven. Here is a nice recording of this piano piece for you to enjoy!
Piano sheet music to print can easily be downloaded from the internet. The score is a scanned quite old editions but with nice and clear layout. There is no fingering and dynamic additions in this score.
sheet music to download
Five minute introduction for complete beginners will teach you quickly how to read piano sheet music:
And here is another explanation of note values, beats and other music terms necessary for reading sheet music:
The Rocket Piano course consists of eBooks, games, and mp3 audio files cover a very wide range of lessons for learning to play piano at home in your own pace.
The eBooks offer instruction for beginners, intermediate and advanced players covering music notation, finger techniques and exercises and lessons on how to play gospel and jazz music.
Many of the lessons includes audio recording. Some includes also videos, which are mostly a view from over the shoulders of a player showing a certain technique.
The games covering sight-reading, pitch recognition and chord identification is a very useful part of the course and are alone worth the whole price for the course.
Rocket Piano offers e-mail support and their response was very quick and helpful.
Even though Rocket Piano offers some really great lesson materials the product does not have the ability to track your progress and obviously can’t give a student feedback on their playing.
Since the course costs only 39.95 USD it’s a great value for the money.
Read more and get your copy at:
This season is a time for music. Few things herald the Christmas Season as does the gathering of loved ones around a piano - singing old favorites and hallowed standards.
It’s one thing to listen and enjoy them - but quite another to actually play them!
We have found a special course which we would like to recommend. It is suitable for late beginners as well as accomplished players - and everyone in between. As long as you know the basics, like reading treble clef notes, understand rhythms, you too can be playing christmas songs in time for the holidays.
Mozart is considered one the greatest musical minds in history. He was nothing but pure genius and in fact, it may even be a long time before anyone even comes close to his capability, and producing the same quality workmanship in music. Sure, we have had a few child prodigies that have surfaced here and there, and even more that have shown some really great potential, but I still stand on my previous statement. So what makes these great musical minds? What do these children have that makes them stand out from the rest? A lot of debating has been going on about what makes a child intelligent. Some scientists have said that it is genetic and we are born with great intelligence inherent in the very genetic coding that makes who we are. Others say that intelligence is learned through experience and that from the very moment we are born and we open our eyes to view the world for the first time, our brains begin to absorb everything through all five of the senses. We begin to build a picture and try to understand what is happening all around us and then we store and learn from those experiences. Whichever one it happens to be, they both have something in common. In both cases our minds develop by forming neural pathways that begin to interconnect and work between each other. The one thing that all scientists can agree on, is the fact that the more you use and develop your neural pathways, the more likely you are to have a superior brain with superior cognitive ability.
So how do we develop these pathways? How do we make ourselves smarter? Research has shown that music can and does play a big part. Of the many instruments that one can learn, the one that stands out most is the piano. Studies have shown that playing the piano helps to develop many key areas in the brain that are responsible for superior mental and cognitive functioning. Playing the piano requires a great amount of control and dexterity in the hands, a highly developed sense of co-ordination, extensive concentration, tone differentiation, and something called sight-reading. Each of these factors help develop an attuned sense of being, and lead to wonderful by-products that the individual can find most useful as they go on along their journey through life.
Control and dexterity in the hands can improve handwriting skills, and lead the child to write more like a calligrapher rather than a doctor. However, this is not proven, but merely an observation. By learning to play with both hands and controlling the left and right sides simultaneously, you train the brain to communicate between the two hemispheres, thus creating neural pathways that allow the hemispheres themselves to communicate better with each other. A natural by-product of this would be that the mind could then use all aspects of each individual hemispheres combined rather than use the more dominant one, as this is the case for most of us. The simplest way to explain this is that research has shown that the left side is predominantly logic oriented and the right is creative. By creating the links between the two sides you can combine both those aspects.
Another benefit that is mentioned is that of hand-eye co-ordination. By learning to make your hands move according to what your eyes can see, you are able to improve motor-neural connectivity. What that means for the individual is that it will have a distinct impact on motor co-ordination or body movement. To give you an example, a pilot would needs such reflexes to control a plane according to what he sees while taking off and landing. A cricket or baseball player holding a bat and watching a speeding ball moving toward them will be able to judge how to hit the ball in a more proficient way.
Improved concentration has obvious benefits. If your child is able to sit in a classroom and listen to what the teacher is saying, rather than stare out the window wondering what he or she is going to do during lunch, they will invariably take in more of what the lesson has to offer.
Tone differentiation is the ability to hear or judge the difference between the notes that are being played. The main benefit here would be an improved hearing ability. A child will force itself to listen more intently to what is going on in the world around them.
The last aspect to mention is called sight-reading and it is linked to hand-eye co-ordination in the same way that the eyes help the brain co-ordinate the movement of the hands.
Aside from all these wonderful physical benefits that a child gets from learning to play the piano, there are also the emotional benefits that are really a by-product of all these physical aspects that occur. The child will have more confidence in everything that he or she does. By concentrating more and learning more in class, they will achieve better grades, making them feel smarter. The hand-eye co-ordination can help them improve on the sports field, as well as any given use in their working career and the child can even become that pro-golfer or pilot if they want to. They will carry that confidence through out their life, knowing that they can achieve anything and they will always have the ability to walk into someone’s house that they hardly know, sit behind their grand piano and start to charm and woo everybody with any of their favorite melodies. It even works wonders for family gatherings.
So to sum it all up for you, the possibilities are truly endless. Teach your children to play the Piano and bring out the Mozart that’s in them.
It’s a matter of fact that acoustic instruments are superior to digital equivalents, at least when it comes to practicing and performing classical music. But for the purpose of practicing at home there are a few advantages of the digital piano which the acoustic piano falls short on:
1. It’s always in tune.
2. It’s (more) portable.
3. The volume can be turned down or headphones used when practicing.
The two latter is of course only practical issues but the first is directly related to the sounding music.
Most piano teachers would agree on the importance for student’s of all levels to focus on listening carefully to the sound they create in order to deepen the awareness of the music, get more qualitative and colorful sound out of the instrument and make a performance communicate more intensively with the listener. Most piano teachers would also agree that an acoustic instrument is therefore far superior option as a practicing instrument since it’s natural and richer sound is better stimulating focused listening than the digital piano’s artificial sound.
But, what if the acoustic piano is very out of tune?
One could assume that the more out of tune an acoustic piano is, the less appealing and stimulating is it to listen intensively to it and below a certain limit of “in-tune-ness” the acoustic piano falls behind it’s always-in-tune digital friend.
The conclusion is that an acoustic piano is a better practice instrument than the digital piano, but ONLY if it is in tune.
With this important insight in mind, how much did this vital part of the campaigns (see video below) affect the US election results?
Obama chosed to go for a high end digital “grand” while McCain made a more conservative choice and picked an acoustic Steinway B (although quite out of tune towards the end of the campaign).
Did Obama win simply because he always plays perfectly in tune while McCain does not?