Hi, my name is Brett and I would like to welcome you to pianoAHA. “pianoAHA? Why is it called pianoAHA?” Allow me to explain. We would like to help you improve at the piano, not through blind hard work, but through insight; through a “light bulb moment”; through an “aha”, as it were. Let me give you a small example of the way we look at things. >>>
Let’s say we wanted to look at a couple of different ways of knowing how many different keys there are in an octave. So, in other words, I’m going to cover up everything except for one octave here and I want to know how many different keys there are here.
So one way of doing that might be, of course: You have a teacher and this teacher told you “There are twelve different keys in the octave” and so you know there must be twelve of them because you blindly believe them.
Another way might be through hard work. You could just count them “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12”. That would be another way.
But there could be a third way that might be somewhat more interesting. Let’s see if we can find some interesting structure here. We see the black keys. We have two of them here and three of them here, so there must be five black keys, right? There is no need really to count the black keys anymore because we can see — at a glance — that there are five of them.
The white keys are a bit more challenging, but maybe we can find a pattern. If we see these three here that are surrounding these two — these two black keys — and if we see these four here that are surrounding these three black keys, then we can, again, divide this octave up — this time we’re dividing up the white keys — into two groups: three and four, right? The three surrounding here and the four surrounding here. So with this new information, we can see at a glance that we have five black keys and seven white keys, so there must be twelve.
Now what happens in a week, in a month, in a year? If I have forgotten this and I used the first method — that is, blindly believing my teacher — then I guess the only thing I can do at the end of that year is to go ask them again: “I forgot! How many are there?” So you need to ask them again.
And the second way — where we counted them — if you don’t know in a week, or a month, or a year, well, you can just count them again: “1, 2, 3, 4, etc.”
But in the third way something interesting happens: Insight remains. We have still here our group of two and three, and our group of three and four, so if we just quickly look in our mind’s eye — that is, we don’t even have to go to the piano to see it — we can say: “Well, there must be twelve because we have five black keys and seven white keys”.
So in this same way, you can also learn pieces of music in different ways. To return to our first example of just blindly believing, you might have a teacher who tells you exactly which keys to press at which time, or you might have watched a video tutorial where someone tells you exactly in what order you should “press the buttons” and after a certain amount of time and practice then you can play the passage. That might be one way.
Another way might be through hard work. So we have the sheet music in front of
us and we see: “That note there I have to play here, and that note here I have to play here, etc. and after a certain amount of time and hard work, again, we figure out the passage and we can play it.
But what we want to stress here in this video is that there are other ways. There is something corresponding, for example, to this third way that we talked about; ways of looking at a passage that make it make sense, so that you have a new insight; an “aha”. So that you see: “Oh! Of course, yeah, I see now it makes sense. I know how to play it”. And insight remains. After a week, a month, a year, this insight will be something that will always help you, whereas blindly believing something or just getting there through hard work after you haven’t looked at something for a while, might disappear.
So that’s what we would like to stress here at pianoAHA. Thanks for watching this video and I wish you many happy “ahas”.
You might be saying, “But he…why didn’t he explain it? He was playing Bach’s Prelude in C major. I thought he was going to explain it!” Keep your eye out; we will!”