Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Overcoming difficulties with music notation

just testing to see if i can post, have had issues.

Note: Edited to change title, hopefully this will draw more responses.

Hey Kunia5, welcome. You have successfully posted number 1.

When I first saw this, I thought you would be testing me, and I do love a challenge. I am one of those rare people who always have an answer. It's almost never correct, but by gosh, I got one ready.

How about you? How long have you played? What are you learning?

Aloha oe, GMM1--

I'm trying to get back into the piano that I abandoned in high school. I have actually made some progress practicing scales, some basic pieces on my own.

One question is: who do you overcome musical notation dyslexia? Am I the only person on this forum that gets this? What helps overcome this?

I have been practicing one hour per eve and it helps. But some days it seems there is no mind-hand connection.

Mahalo

Hi Kunia5 and welcome to the forum. I'm not certain what you mean by "musical notation dyslexia". I think every novice pianist has the experience where their brain knows which finger to push but it doesn't happen. I recall when I was starting and was trying to do some simple drills thinking "those are not my fingers!". It gets better with practice.

If I've misinterpreted your meaning, try and ask your question a different way now that you've mastered posting!

Welcome again.

No, you are not alone. The only advice I have is keep at it. Kathleen (lovesChopintoomuch) and I keep the electric company in business with all the light we use so we can see. I still have problems when I am tired making out the lines and spaces. Barring any phyical defect, I can say it does get better as we learn to spot the patterns and chords. But, it does take a lot of practice.

The mind-hand connection also comes with practice. Actually, we strive for eye-hand and leave the mind out of it, but as beginners, we must think until we get the skill.

Just remember to have fun with it.

Welcome to the forum, Kunia5. It really is just a matter of plugging away at it. You haven't said how long you've been playing, but it sounds like you've just recently restarted. In that case it is not surprising that reading music is a struggle. But one day, in the not so distant future, you'll pick up a piece of music and surprise yourself by being able to sit down and just play it without all that tedious counting up of staff lines. And THAT will be a watershed day!

Flashcards or practicing on one of those websites that drill you with note recognition can help, too.

Welcome to PianoWorld, Kunia5. You don't have a learning disablity (keep saying it to yourself over and over again ). Learning the piano is slow and tedious process and you're just going through what everybody else is, the natural learning curve (child prodigies excluded, of course). I wish it were like a ukulele where you could put one finger on a fret, start strumming and "Voila, I'm playing a C Chord." Will take a bit more time and patience. Don't give up. Everyone is in the same boat.

Aloha, Kunia5! Welcome to the forum. There are are few of us here from the islands.

Hi and welcome,

Interesting to hear you describe yourself as 'musically dyslexic', because that's exactly the term that I used about myself when I first started to try and learn to read music. But I persevered, and now I can read reasonably well. It just takes a lot longer than you first bargain for.

I think that when we start out there's a sort of unspoken assumption that once you know that the symbol on a certain line means a C, a D#, or whatever, that we should then be able to automatically play it whenever we see it. But there's so much more going on - especially the business of the fingers and the brain learning to get in sync - that it takes a long time before it actually flows in any sort of comfortable way.

There's no point at which it suddenly all 'clicks' - it's more a matter of slowly improving from being able to read a tiny handful of single notes through to being able to read a full score. It's never fully complete, you just get faster and more able to read stuff of higher and higher complexity.

Cheers,

Chris

I would add that it probably makes a lot of sense to gradually build your skills. They don't have you reading Shakespeare in the first grade. Its more like "Jack and Jill went up the hill..."

You may have an overwhelming urge to attempt materials that are beyond your current level of reading. I would suggest resisting this urge, no matter how tempting. My experience is that is will just result in frustration (like the average person trying to read a medical textbook).

Thanks for the all your advice. I will certainly keep practicing. Patience is the one thing I've mastered.

Further to my self-diagnosis of "notation dyslexic," I have ended up (unintentionally) memorizing several pieces just because I have practiced each one so much.

This is not the way it should work, correct? Aren't we supposed to be reading the music as the eye glides over the page? What is the role of memorization in the learning process?

Also, I'm sensing the truely accomplished pianists have the ability to look at the key, then read the notes, transposing (if that's the correct word) in their heads as they play. Their fingers instinctively know which notes are meant to be "black" or "white," depending on the key.

I'm assuming that is why we are told to practice scales so much? If not, what is the purpose of scales practice?

Mahalo again.

Hi Kunia...

There are different kinds of memory. It sounds like you have developed muscle-memory (your hands know how to play along with the melody in your head). This is normal and desirable. Some of us work very hard to do this.

If you want to test yourself, get a blank sheet and try and write it out. I have to really think and can rarely do it. It is good practice and helps make the connections stronger. The few pieces I have done this with I think I have in my head forever. At least for me at this point in my development, it does not help playing so much, as muscle memory is what we use to play at speed and that fades with neglect.

To practice sight-reading, most suggest getting some unfamiliar music and practice with it, rotating pieces so they do not get memorized. I practice away from the keyboard with Bach's inventions as they have one note progressions in the bass and treble.

As far as scales go, do a search and you should find tons of info. I practice scales to help with HT, even play, mixed play, smooth hand shifts, dexterity, and familiarity.

At my level (2 years), I still work at remembering what notes are sharp and/or flat, but it is getting easier and it is becoming more automatic. If I play in G, I don't even think about F#, it just happens, I see the note and play it. Playing scales, IMHO, is one of the main reasons it is getting easier to do.

By the way, I should have warned you I do like to ramble....

I can play in any key, and the sharps/flats just come when I read the notes, without thinking. However, I do not practice scales at all, so I don't think that there's much of a correlation here.

I do suggest just practicing a bunch of pieces that you can read somewhat fluently(without too much tempo chopping). I just grabbed a bunch of hymnals and started playing through them. It was really slow and messy when I first started, but after many months of practice, I can play them at tempo by sight.

Try it! All this practice really works wonders for sight-reading.

Interesting, playadom. Now, I am curious how you developed the skill without scales. You are way beyond me. I know different people learn different ways, and I may be crediting scale-playing when it's possible it's only a part. I am wide open to any tips you might have, as I still find it challenging beyond 2 or 3 sharps/flats. I am a poor sight-reader, and now I'm thinking that might be holding me back from more complicated key sigs....

Kunia, you may be dyslexic in which case you need a professional diagnosis.

One problem which I feel does divide the sheep from the goats is short term memory. Do you 'remember' the key signature all the way through? Can you remember an accidental that occurred a few beats before? Do you remember to use the same fingering as a similar passage the bar before?

There are countless times when a weak short term memory will trip you up. It is probably the most serious of learning difficulties (it's why I could never read poetry - though I'm gradually getting better).

Kunia,

Memoring the music is the way to go. Concert pianists have vast numbers of complicated pieces memorized. Once you know the notes to play you can concentrate on how to play them (soft, load, fast, slow, etc). You can't (at least I can't) do that while sight reading music. Once you have the music memorized you can practice anywhere. I often visualize the finger movments of a piece I'm learning while driving (I do a lot of highway driving). It really reinforces and augments your practice time.

As if driving in Boston wasn't dangerous enough.

Here is a flashcard website: http://musictheory.net/trainers/html/id82_en.html
also there is a program called "noteable flashcards" that lets you select the name of the note using your keyboard instead of the mouse. Spend 5 to 10 minutes a day doing the flashcards and you will see an increase in your reading speed. As stated before, writing out the music will help you learn rhythms and notes.
Sharps and flats will make more sense if you learn the music theory.

This thread has given me much to think about. Notation is the bane of my existence. I've had trouble with it going WAY back...and it was one of the reasons I didn't start playing any instrument (again, after the abortive attempts in my youth) until my late 50s.

Although I started out with the intention to read music, I learned the bass through tablature and ear. Geometry also helps with a "necked" instrument. A 1-4-5 blues sequence on the neck of a bass has the shape of an inverted "L", like the move a knight on a chessboard might make. Once that geometry's understood, key signature only has meaning for the root tone...and improvisation outside that 1-4-5 pattern, of course passing and grace notes, turnarounds, etc.)

This is where I started thinking about the different associations that appear to be involved...I've developed some and struggle with others. The first seems to be the ability to hear the music inside one's head. I don't think all people can do this. I've always been able to.

The next thing I thought about was the association with the sound of a note (or group of notes...a chord or a sequence) in one's head and an idea of how to create it with a given instrument. I've developed that to some degree with the bass and I'm making progress with it on the keyboard.

Then I considered going from where I have an idea of how to create the sound I want and being able to do it from a physical/mental combination. Muscle memory seems to be part of it, as does that connection between the concept of a sound and a conscious or unconscious knowledge of what the body needs to do to make the sound. Maybe those two things are the same. I'm not sure.

I also considered the relationship between what I hear OUTSIDE my head and transforming it into that physical action. Sometimes I can hear something and just play it. Not very well on the keyboard, but it's improving.

Finally, there's that darned visual/mental/physical connection that starts with seeing the notes on a page, comprehending their meaning as relates to what sound they represent (or what key on the keyboard they represent), then making the physical motions to create that note (or chord or sequence.) That's where it all falls apart for me. Maybe I've convinced myself that I can't do it, therefore I can't. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all that.

OTOH, I'm still working at it. I'm doing my best to put the notation in front of me and look at it as I'm playing. This slows things down by an order of magnitude at least and my impatient brain (although it's much better than when I was 10 years old) wants to say, "the heck with this cumbersome method. Let's play some music!" Then I lose my focus on the notation and begin to play from memory or by ear. This is the battle that I've been fighting for the last 3 years off and on, but in the last 3 months for a couple of hours a day.

Up until today I hadn't gotten to a point of frustration where it really weighed heavily on my mind. Well, at least since starting piano. But today there was that voice in my head that was saying, "maybe you just can't do this." I really didn't want to hear that, so I continued on. The frustration continued until I backed off and played something that I had memorized. That allowed me to end the session on a more or less positive note (pun unintended) rather than with a bad attitude.

I'm going to reward myself for getting through the two hours of piano practice with some laid-back bass playing in hopes of completing the return to a positive outlook.

I dunno if this made sense to anyone...I'm not even sure it makes sense to me. But I'll keep playing and working on improvement, little by little.

Hey Kunia. you're not alone. everytime I see a piece with lots of sharps/flats, I get dizzy all of the sudden. But I love Chopin so much. I've been trying to work on this one piece (3 pages) for 2 months now and still avoiding the last page .. everytime I saw that last page, I find excuses to practice other piece.