Piano Lessons Tulsa | When Students Have Difficult Reading Music

This content was created for Curtis Music Academy

When you are giving piano lessons Tulsa to your students. Typically students understand and grasp the concept of learning a instrument pretty easily and a lot of times when a student understands how to read music, the notes and the clefs in all of the different elements of reading music on a staff, typically it’s pretty easy for students. And the reason that it’s a lot easier to read than say rhythms is that the notes are so much more objective truths. If you think of the first space on the treble Clef, that note is f, it either is f or it is an f and it’s it is right there and it’s laid out for you. Either you know that it’s f or you don’t, and that allows students to understand it a lot easier. Now, I’m not saying that students will grasp onto this concept quickly and efficiently every single time, every single student, whiners and that, but through time it’s pretty obvious whether or not you’re playing the wrong note.

You could point at the page and say, Hey, are you playing this note correctly? They would look down and they would say yes or no, but with rhythms, the biggest problem with rhythms is the fact that if you’re playing it wrong, the chances are the reason you’re playing it wrong, it’s just because you don’t understand it or you’re, you’re just not that confident with rhythms, and so with teaching rhythms, we really have to allow our students to continually maximize their effectiveness with learning rhythms by consistently helping them in their piano lessons Tulsa.

So for instance, if the rhythm is two eighth notes followed by two quarter notes, some students might play that as four eighth notes and to help them to understand you can’t just point to the page and say, did you play that correctly? Some students, depending on their ability to understand rhythms, some students may very well be able to look at that and say, no, I did not play that right.

I played that as for eighth notes instead of two eight notes and two quarter notes. However, the majority of students would have to either hear the correct rhythm or they would have to be refreshed on what an eighth note sounds like or what quarter notes sound like. So there’s all sorts of different things that will cause you to have to help your students when talking about rhythms. So continue on and help your students to maximize the effectiveness of their lessons through teaching them rhythms. So rhythms are always something that can be improved upon and they can always be spoken about in the piano lessons Tulsa. And even if you’ve already taught the concept of eighth notes, quarter notes, half notes and whole notes, it’s important to go ahead and continue reviewing that every single lesson so that your students can be successful when learning rhythms. Another thing about rhythms is that very frequently a rhythm will be mixed up into a series of rhythms or series of notes rather that the student has not seen before.

For instance, if a student has been taught the concept of eighth notes and they understand that very easily, then one of the things that can be tricky is playing a new rhythm, like to eighth notes to a quarter note to two eighth notes to a half note because perhaps previously they had only been playing eighth notes and then whole notes. So with that being said, the concepts of rhythms go far beyond just the lengths of the notes in and of themselves and goes far beyond that to reach into different concepts like understanding how rhythms react in the context of moving from one rhythm to the other. And this is just something that increases with time throughout piano lessons Tulsa. The more you play the piano, the more rhythms you will come across and that is something that is very huge for learning and maximizing the effectiveness of your piano skills because you want to be a master at the piano.

That is why you are taking piano lessons Tulsa. If you didn’t want to be a master, then what would be the point of taking piano lessons? Perhaps you want to learn some of your favorite songs or move forward with helping your daughter play piano because your daughter’s really into piano, but you’re not. Whatever the reason for learning the instrument is, the more you stick with it and the more you practice and attend your music lessons, you will be successful. Find progress throughout the course of your life.

So moving along. Rhythms are very, very strange at first, you will get better at learning rhythms and playing rhythms. And one of the things that is a very strange concept at first is syncopated rhythms, which basically is just the definition of playing notes that are emphasized on the offbeat or in layman’s terms, the part of the beat that is not the most hard-pressed part of the beat. So with this,

you gotta be careful because syncopated rhythms are very, very strange at first. But with the help of your instructor, especially your piano instructor in Tulsa, this is something that can very well help you throughout the course of taking piano lessons Tulsa. You want to be the best person that you can be. You want to be the best piano player that there ever was and sticking through it, learning your rhythms, learning your notes are all effective ways to make sure that you aren’t just dominating and doing a phenomenal job learning your instrument. So push through, continue on and make sure that whatever you do, you are doing it to the best of your ability throughout practice and throughout your piano lessons Tulsa and throughout helping others learn instrument so that others can be successful as well.

And with reading notes, one thing that can help and especially with students that are learning an instrument for the first time is identifying intervals and understanding that a line to a space, if it’s adjacent to each other, that’s a second or a line to align is a skip or a third and a space to a space would be a third or a skip. And understanding those intervals will help tremendously. Piano lessons Tulsa allow anyone to get better and understand intervals easily. Then instead of having to read two notes while sight reading, you can actually read, just note, see the relationship between the two notes and it will help your ability to sight read much more because you will be able to see the relationship, you’ll be able to understand and identify those intervals at a split second. Instead of having to use the brain power to identify two different things, you just have to identify one the interval and then you will move forward and fly through your song at an accelerated rate.

This is extremely effective when you have multiple notes at the same time. So if you’re playing a four note chord and you can see that the first two notes on the bottom are skips, it goes from aligned to align. And then the note from your second note to the third note is a fourth because it goes from aligned to a space that are not adjacent. And then lastly, the third note to the fourth note is a skip because it goes to from aligned to align. Then you know immediately the shape of that court. And it’ll help you to identify those notes in a very quick and easy manner as you are taking piano lessons Tulsa.