How to Be Successful in Piano

 Vincent Le

Mrs.Goetz

Composition I

10 September 2017

        How to be Successful in Piano

        As I was growing up music was prominent in my family. My sister took private lessons for Piano which encouraged me to take lessons when I became the right age to start learning. Throughout my Piano career in Texas, I competed in a jazz competition where I took home one fourth place, second place, and a first place trophy. For my first place trophy I was only a ninth grader and I was competing against Juniors and Seniors and I beat them. Sadly, I couldn’t continue my streak because I went to go boarding school in Subiaco, Arkansas. Getting those trophies was no easy feat. It took years of practicing and using the three activities my piano teacher taught me to become successful in piano to get me where I was.

        The first step to becoming successful in piano is to learn how to hit the notes in the song accurately. Practicing note accuracy is important because it helps learn the piece. After the pianist learns to hit the notes accurately, he can go onto the next phase where he learns to increase the speed of notes. When learning to play faster, one must learn to pace themselves and start at slow speeds and work their way up to the speed the piece tells you to go. Note accuracy is the number one step a pianist should learn first because its leads them onto the next step of memorization.

Memorization is a big stride from note accuracy/learning.When you have learned to play the notes accurately looking at the music, you must do the opposite and learn to play without the music. Almost the same as note accuracy, you must work at memorization slowly and split your piece into sections that you work at until you learn it. My teacher taught me that when learning a piece you cannot learn to memorize by just playing it start to finish. She told me that it’s a very big challenge to your brain to take in that much information, so that’s why it’s much easier to just split it into sections. When a Pianist finishes memorization, it opens a new field to learning a piece of music where they can now start to focus on every little detail they need to fix.