Top Guitar Lessons in Tulsa | Recognizing a Amazing Piano Player
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Hi, thanks for joining us for another podcast with Curtis Music Academy, the subject of this podcast is Signs of an Intermediate Pianist. Now, I actually did not create this list, although I did add a couple of things to it. I got this list from a YouTube video by Piano note is super helpful. And I would actually agree with almost everything on this list. So before I get started, I actually wrote down some things that helped me as a teacher. So this actually might help teachers more than it helps students. And I think it could help students, especially if they’re wondering, am I a beginner pianist or an intermediate pianist or am I an advanced pianist? So this will kind of like give you a guideline to help. So this is kind of my criteria for teaching any top guitar lessons in Tulsa for adults now, kids are a little bit different, but this is what I like to do.
This is the structure or the skeleton a little bit out of a lesson book, a finger power or Hanon or Czerny or something of that nature, music theory, understanding chord charts and goal songs, maybe two per year, depending on how fast the student is growing. Maybe more, maybe four, Preeta. Now, obviously, I don’t do that with every single student, but that would be the ultimate lesson. And I’m learning not to spend too much time on one thing because that’s what going home and working through the lesson book would do. Like I noticed when I first started playing first I was teaching the piano.
I would actually go through the lesson book a lot with a student and now I’m realizing I don’t really need to do that. I just need to trust that the student’s going to do that at home. So that is a total little side note. Let’s go ahead and go into signs of an intermediate pianist. Now, these are broken down into, I think, five different categories: technique, chord progressions, theory, repertoire and dynamics and emotion. So let’s first start at technique.
I think this might be the most important category of all. So if I’m looking for top guitar lessons in Tulsa with an intermediate pianist would be able to play scales, chords and arpeggios for major and relatively minor for all like keys at 80 beats per minute. They would also be able to play blocked in broken chords for major and minor chords. Hands together, that adds a little bit to the difficulty. Sometimes it’s easier to do just one hand at a time and together makes it a little bit trickier. So number three is two octave arpeggios, hands together and separate, OK.
Number four is major I’m sorry, minor natural harmonic and melodic miners knowing the difference and being able to play the difference. Now, I have a confession to make. I would consider myself an intermediate pianist, but I don’t know if all three of those minor skills I actually know I’ve memorized the harmonic scale for all kids, but I know the natural miner. I know how to figure it out for each key, but I don’t think I know the melody, so I’ve got some homework I need to do.
Ok, so number five under this category of technique is seventh chords, knowing the difference between major seventh, minor seventh and dominant seven. That actually might be a really great podcast to do sometime in the future when thinking about top guitar lessons in Tulsa. Number six would be ear training and being able to recognize the difference between a major chord in a minor chord that actually does take practice sometimes.
I’ve practiced with my beginner students. Can you tell if this is a major or minor chord? And that is tricky, especially if you don’t have a musical background. Lastly, technique is playing with a metronome. And we have spent a whole podcast talking about this. So that is a definite must for being an intermediate player. OK, so the next category is chord progressions. So the first thing, a requirement, if you would call it that, for being an intermediate player is knowing the one for six minor and five diatonic chords for every white note key and being able to play a variety of rhythms.
So if you were going to play in a church worship band or just a garage band, you would actually have experience with these things. And so just kind of being able to jump in and play the keyboards in that setting. OK, going on to theory, understanding things like the skill, formula, rhythm values, time signatures, et cetera, and sight reading in, there are great skills to know for reading, reading as well. So that’s just touching on three items for theory.
Obviously, things like the circle of fifths time signatures, key signatures, different things like that are all or under the category of theory. Now, going on to the next item is repertoire. When you’re ready for top guitar lessons in tulsa and this is something I’ve never thought about before, but it’s absolutely very true. So an intermediate piano player will have 10 pieces that are performance ready. So that way if they’re at their grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving or if they’re at an airport in there waiting for their flight and there’s a piano there or anything in between, and someone says, hey, can you play the piano? They would have some pieces ready to play.
That is really critical. And that’s why I really encourage my students to memorize pieces. Memorizing will never hurt you. It does come easier for some students than others. Some would prefer to sight read rather than memorize. But in my mind, you cannot go wrong with knowing how to memorize. Even though it might be more comfortable to read. Top guitar lessons in Tulsa is another item under repertoire would be having 20 or 30 pieces that were previously learned that just need polished. So someone recommended having a binder for this. So it is true. Like if you’ve played the piano for years, you’re not going to keep a song polished all the time, you know, because you keep adding new songs and adding new songs.
So there’s just no way to keep every song perfect. So what I do to keep some older songs fresh is I just again have them printed out in a binder and I just maybe play through them once a week or something like that. And that really helps me. We want top guitar lessons in Tulsa, the last item is dynamics and emotion. So the difference between a beginner player and an intermediate player is playing with dynamics and the intermediate player will take the audience on a journey. So this includes things like crescendos and decrescendo. So I tell my students also it’s easy to sit down at a piano and play loud. That’s just kind of like default for most people. And so I encourage people to learn how to play soft when finding top guitar lessons in Tulsa.
And it is actually, in my opinion, more difficult to play soft than it is to play loud. I don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but it’s definitely true for me, especially given my background, that four years, just my personality, I wanted to only play loud and fast on the piano. I thought, there is no need for me to play anything soft. It just had no appeal to me at all. So anyway, I have changed since then. And it’s just like when you’re a kid, you only like chicken tenders and French fries and ketchup. And now that you’re an adult, you have a wider variety of tastes and you like a lot of different types of food. It’s the same thing with this. It’s learning to just be and understand and appreciate deeper music and dynamics are all a part of that expressing emotion.
Another thing is the crescendo and decrescendo. It’s actually harder to do. It’s easier to stay out one dynamic than it is to go back and forth. Every top guitar lessons in Tulsa is important. It reminds me of the waves of the sea, how they get bigger and smaller and they contrast. And so when you’re playing with the crescendo in the decrescendo, it’s important to think about it like that because your song is a living organism. And so it should have ebbs and flows in it, just like the waves of the sea. So any thoughts about the signs of an intermediate pianist?
It’d be interesting to hear some other piano teachers and other pianists view this list. Most people probably would agree for the most. You might want to add some things or tweak some things, but I think if you can play all of the things and if you understand them, I think you’re really set up well. And actually, top guitar lessons in Tulsa have caused me to print out this paper because it’s my goal not for every student, because I know every student is different and they might want to stay at a level that’s maybe a level two, level three. But this is ultimately my goal for my students. So thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you at the next podcast.