Learn to play beautifully

Question: I am having so much trouble reading the part where Schubert departs from the lovely, melodic scenario at the beginning and begins this dark left-hand rolling undertone. I cannot read those left-hand notes. Can you help?

– Kat (Huntsville, Alabama, USA)

Albert’s reply:...

Question: How do you play a note with both sharp and flat symbols in front of it?

– Richard (Singapore)

Albert’s reply: There shouldn’t be a note with both sharp and flat signs simultaneously – this is a contradiction in terms.

It is possible to have, say, a C-flat and...

Question: What do you think is the best method for training students for sight reading? Somebody said that one of the methods is practicing sight reading… do you have other methods? Thanks.

– Achilles (Malta)

Albert’s reply: By far the best way to learn to sight read is to...

One of the more confusing aspects of learning to read music for many music students is compound meter. Also called compound time, I’ve seen virtually all music students and even many music teachers fail to understand its basics. This lesson will clear up the confusion once and for all.

Any...

“Dictionary definitions” of simple meter (also called simple time) tend to be so confusing that they are of very limited use to beginning music students.

I’d therefore like to offer a simplified, more practical definition: Simple meter is any time signature with 4 or less as the...

A fundamental component of music rhythm, time signatures display the meter of a piece or section of music.

A time signature is composed of a top number and a bottom number. A common confusion is that the top number is the number of beats, and the bottom number is the beat unit, but this is only...

Let’s take a look at the F clef. Here is the symbol:

Whichever line this clef is placed on is the F below middle C. For piano music it’s placed on the fourth line from the bottom:

Notice how the two dots in the F clef symbol straddle this line? When placed on this fourth line up,...

This symbol is called a G clef:

It’s called a G clef because it curls around the note G. Whichever line the G clef is centered on is G. Let’s see it on the staff…

This is a treble clef. The symbol is called a G clef… but when it’s placed on the second line of a...

“Music notation” is a contradiction in terms. Music is heard, while notation is seen. Notating music is thus a translation from one sensory modality to another.

Yet in any translation, some information is bound to become lost.

“Written music” is thus an oxymoron. Music is...

A whole note (also called a semibreve in British English) is the longest note typically found in music notation. It is notated with only an open note head (like a half note), without a stem.

Here it is on a staff:

A whole note has a duration equal to two half notes:

… or quarter notes:

A piano keyboard may look confusing at first, but the layout of piano keys is actually very simple. While it would be nearly impossible to identify individual keys if all we had were the white keys, the pattern of black keys makes it easy to identify the keyboard layout. The black keys are...

One of the most popular pieces among piano lovers, Bach’s Prelude in C major (BWV 846) is also a prelude to the Well-Tempered Clavier as a whole. It started out life as an exercise for Bach’s son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach:

This manuscript is in the hand of the young Wilhelm Friedemann,...