Hi Matt and welcome,
I have a couple of the supplementary books, but they don't have any theory in them, I have seen some Alfred's books at my local music store that does primarily focus on theory but I do not believe they are part of the same series. I could be wrong though

I hope it can't hurt to mix and match! I'm finishing up Book 1 (Basic). I have "Amazing Grace" runing scared, and I just ordered the All-In-One Book 2. I hope that isn't breaking some primary rule of the universe, I mean, moving from the basic course to the "all-in-one."

No rules broken...in fact I believe there are more pieces in the ALL in One vs the primary adult book...

Hi everyone! This is my first posting on Piano World (yay!) I just wanna say hi to everyone on this thread and to any fellow lurkers around. Please keep up the interesting and useful discussion.

I discovered Piano World about a month ago and have been lurking particularly in this thread (been reading the first ten pages so far, still got 40 pages in front of me). I just wanna say that I really enjoy reading this thread. I began working with the Alfred's all-in-one book 1 (Taiwan edition) about 2 weeks ago and am now on page 37. I'm completely new to the piano (at least in terms of dedicated learning), but not to music making. I've been playing guitar (electric and acoustic) for many years and I'm having a blast with piano now. Interestingly, I find that both instruments complement each other nicely in that I practicing on my guitars is even more fun now that I have the piano (btw, I'm a proud owner of a 1971 Yamaha U1 that I acquired here in Taiwan about a month ago). I also find that my prior experience in making music (including playing in a band and with like-minded musicians) does benefit me a lot in my piano endeavour.

Well, I hope to contribute more to this thread once I'm done reading through it. Nice meeting you all.

Welcome marrzipan! Enjoy the journey.

Mark...

I had that same issue so I made myself a "cheat sheet" so to speak. I made copies of the pages in book one and book two that had the chords shown with their finger positions. Then I cut them all out(each was like 2" square) taped them to a sheet of paper, made a copy then laminated it.

It contains all the C, F and G chords and their inversions for left and right hand with finger positions. With them all one one page, it's easier and more fun too, to play in semi-rapid succession each chord. It really enhances your chord playing because it forces you to learn the chords and to change chords quickly and accurately.

I am in Alfred's Chord Approach level 2, although I just now picked it up again. I haven't had a lesson or practiced much since April but I begin my lessons again next week.
I took the last few nights and went through my level 1 book and pretty much breezed through that, a few took some time to get again, but I am still extremely rusty and nowhere near where I was as my teacher will clearly see.

I began playing scales again to get the rust off, C,G and D scales. Is it just me or is it much simpler playing scales in contrary motion than parallel motion? Or is it that I'm just THAT rusty? Anyway, it's nice to back.

Hey, Keycrazy, great minds think alike. I did the exact same thing right after that post. :-)

Welcome to the forum and the Alfred's thread

Well, what a different a year makes. Keep plugging away and enjoying. I am almost done with book 1 (prob 1.5wks) and will then be taking a break to work on practicing a piece then back into Book #2.

well I did not touch my toy keyboard for 2 and a half months.
pulled it out the other day and set it up. Reviewed some Afreds stuff and discovered that I had forgotton most of what I had learned. .busy season in Ohio this time plus losing half a day to go to cleveland and hit the big toys...(such wonderful big toys. for those in the Cleveland area there are 2 marvelous carillons and one has an amazing warm tone. Dont know about the other . )
Good news and bad news is now that I am in KC i have found a nice tasty tower to play in with a practice keyboard 4 miles from where I am staying so I can limit my time to half an hour on it so I dont make my paws wish they were elsewhere.
I figured the bass clef wasnt a worry..the whole purpose of my messing on piano stuff was to learn carillon. Bass clef is for pedalboard. I am not coordinated enough to mess with that.
current teacher disagrees. Needless to say I am screwed. Between figuring out what note that is,finding the right pedal (this requires hitting the pedal to see what manual key moves)it is painful...
.I just memorized the darn chords in Alfreds' then forgot them in the 2 months time.

Whoever invented bass clef was evil. (no the the cute guy who plays him at faire)

Silkyferret, what type of work do you do that takes you to a different state every month or two? Do you take your keyboard with you? How do you get permission to play the carillons in all these places?

How do you play chords on a carillon - since you only have two hands (instead of 10 fingers on a piano)?

I'm curious because the carillon is different and interesting, and I've never "known" anyone who has played one. In fact, how did you get interested in learning it in the first place?

This incredible player named Frank Della Penna. Go look at the Cast in Bronze website. and get his cds.......they are wonderful sounding. HIs website is castinbronze.com. Anyway I have known him for years at TRF. He does Ren Fests as well. There are a lot of players out there in college. So its not a dying art!!!I had no interest in learning how to play,just hearing them. Then all at once it just crawled up my tail. I am still waiting for it to crawl back out and obsess some other person. I figured I would never find a teacher. 2 emails later I did. Normally you have to have a lot of keyboard experiance. I had none....
I still have almost none. I am brutally honest about that with anyone who asks and I tell folks I really suck at it because I do. I like to stick to the practice keyboards,no one hears you,you still get to play, and the nieghbors are not gonna complain.

carillon is great therapy if you hang around drama queens. cheaper than drugs,and the best antidepressant known to kitties or man.......

Thanks for the explanation. I'll have to make it a point to find a carillon to listen to.

We have a pretty nice Ren Festival going on right now, here in NY/NJ at Sterling Forest. I keep meaning to take some of my grandkids. My son's boys are very interested in swords and armor. And they love costumes.

Sterling closed a couple of weekends ago.I was there closing day after my small one day NY show.

That is a road map show. someone likes mazes big time on their site crew. The site is uphill like Colorado. Its also a real pretty show. Jeffery the bag piper plays there. you see the same 100 patrons over and over and they are all sweet and fun to play with. Since your in NY there is a carillon in the Rochester U campus. Havent been there. It only gets played once a week or so.

Hmmm...their website says it runs through September 21.

Back to all things piano. I thought I had "Lullaby" down reasonably well, so I advanced to the next piece, and to the lessons on scales and tetrachords. Well, it turns out that I didn't have "Lullaby" down as well as I thought I did. I can't seem to play it now. I've started working it up again, and can do the first four measures slowly, but if I go beyond that I start making frequent mistakes until I just get frustrated. I'm thinking of leaving it alone for a while and then going back to it, because I can feel the frustration before I even start now. I will work on a few new pieces from one of my supplemental books in the meantime.

Hi mom3gram,

I've also noticed that "Lullaby" was deceivingly difficult for a slow piece. I had found myself to be fustrated at times as well when I was there and taking short breaks from it was also my stradegies and found it to be absolutely helpful and effective.

It must be quite hard getting back to it after a long vacation, but I'm sure you'll pick it up again quite soon.

Best regards,

Key Notes

Ok, I thought I should post a report regarding my learning experience. After nearly 3 weeks I have reached page 77. The last song I learned is Standing in the Need of Prayer. And I've just started learning the two Hanon exercises. I guess many of you will find I'm rushing through this book at breakneck speed. It's true, I've been learning on a daily basis for the last 2-3 weeks (usually learning 30-60 minutes per day). I also keep up my daily guitar practice, so I won't ever tire of the piano. I'm happy so far with my progress and the reason I can go at this speed is that the music theory and general concepts of practicing a musical instrument are quite familiar to me already. So I can concentrate on the actual piano playing, esp sight-reading, playing technique and memorizing the keyboard and chords, etc.

I'm teaching myself completely, but I realize that this approach has its deficiencies as you can easily form bad habits that can be hard to eliminate later on. Luckily for me, my neighbour is a piano teacher and good friend of my mom. She came over a few days ago cuz she heard me playing and wanted to see how I'm doing. She said I'm doing very good considering I started from zero just a few weeks ago, but she said my technique is lacking. In particular she said I'm tensing up in my hands and shoulders. I guess this was in part due to the fact I was playing in front of a piano teacher for the first time. She corrected my posture and recommended that I regularly play the technical exercises contained in the Alfred book. So I intend to play the Letchivsky (sp?) and Hanon exercises from the book every day now. She also gave me some additional material to chew on (a volume of traditional folk and children's tunes from around the world arranged for beginners). She said she would drop by every week or so to check on my progress. So I guess I'm all set to become good at this now. )) Ok, I've got my aim set on Lavender's blue and Blow the man down now. I can't wait to play those two tunes after having read so much about them here.

Marrzipan, you are doing very well, I am sure your guitar playing and other musical experience does help, keep up the good work

Yes, you are doing very well Marrzipan, and are very fortunate to have such a wonderfully nice neighbor to help you out.

I also tends to tense up while learning a new piece and so I'm trying very hard now a days to be more aware of my postures and tensions while playing.

Cheers and happy playing to you.

Key Notes

Thank you, Dave123 and Key Notes. I find this thread is really a goldmine for us beginners who use the Alfred method. I'm still sucking up all the information I can from this thread as I go along (I'm now at page 32, only 20 more to go). This seems a very friendly group of people and I hope to contribute more to this thread soon. Now back to lurking...

I've reached Lavender's blue now. I quite like it, and don't find it difficult to play, actually. But I realize that there is a huge difference between just playing a tune correctly and playing it musically, ie with feeling. I still need to work on that. For instance, I find it hard to play dynamically, loud and soft. The mf, f, mp, p dynamics in the music are not really recognizable in my playing so far. Does anyone have a suggestion how to improve on that?

The other day a piano playing friend came over to take a look at my piano and she played a couple of rather difficult tunes. She's been playing for maybe 15 years or more and is used to playing classical and pop. I showed her some of the tunes I was working on and it was a real eye-opener for me how she could play those simple tunes with such musicality. Most impressive to me was that she did it so naturally, like as if to say that's simply the way you play the piano. That was truly inspiring for me. My piano never sounded better.

My practice has been going really well lately. I have been reviewing everything from Money Can't Buy Everything to Lullaby every couple of days, and the pieces that usually trip me up have been pretty smooth. I've even started playing some of them along with the CD. I had never tried that before, using the CD only to see if I was getting an unfamiliar piece correct. I'm really enjoying playing along.

Since I had so much trouble with the last two or three pieces, I decided to take a break from new pieces in Alfred and have been taking my newest ones from the Faber book, where I'm not as far along in difficulty yet, and my kids Bastien level 1 book. But the next one up in Alfred is "Joy to the World" and I do want to start that one very soon so that I have it mastered by Christmas.

hi Mom3gram,

Joy To the World is mostly scales so its an easier tune than the others before it.

I have now finally experienced the "joys" of Blow the man down. Getting both hands to play their parts independently is really not that easy. It took me a couple of days to get it right and the chord changes still trip me up every now and then. But with enough repetition this should not be a problem, I believe. I found that the left hand chord accompaniment is very common in other songs that I'm learning. So it's a good idea to practice this style of left hand playing often.

I'm also practicing the three Hanon exercises from the book every day now (I usually start with these exercises as a warmup). I think these are really good for left/right hand coordination, because you are forced to synchronize both hands perfectly. But since I always practice with a metronome, I was wondering what the ideal tempo is to practice these exercises. The book says "moderately slow to moderately fast". How does that translate to beats per minute? Also, are we supposed to start slow and then speed up gradually during the same exercise, or do we play slow the first time through, then play a little faster the second time, etc?

It took me a couple of weeks I have moved on now, still practicing it though I would like to get the tempo better.
My lessons started again, this past week,I have been assigned a new teacher as my last one, who I liked because he was progressive and never held back and pushed me through at quite a fast pace (fast being relative) decided not to return and start out on his own teaching. Now my new teacher, I am not sure if he is the one for me, I will give him a few weeks maybe his style will help me but I will reserve judgement for a few weeks.

Congratulations, marrzipan, on mastering "Blow the Man Down", definitely a rite of passage on this thread. I continue to practice it regularly myself, because that victory was so hard won that I don't want to lose it.

Hey, you are right, 1silkyferret, "Joy to the World" is pretty easy compared to some of the previous ones. Either that or I'm getting better at playing. :-)

Thanks, mom3gram. I played it again yesterday and it's getting better and better. It's definitely true that repetition is the key in learning the piano (or anything for that matter).

I can understand how the syncopated rhythm (not sure if that's the exact term), eg in the second measure, throws off many of us piano beginners. I think each person has his or her own approach at tackling this challenge. Mine was to not try to think of left hand and right hand as independent units for a moment (although I think that is what we should strive to a certain extent in an arrangement like this). But instead I tried thinking of left and right hand forming one unit which made it much more manageable for me having a guitar background (in guitar you produce single notes or chords with your left and right hand combined, not independently). That way the sequence of the notes instantly became clear. In other words, I tried looking at the score as if it were a guitar score.

Inititally, I had difficulties with left and right hand independence on the piano (perhaps one of the drawbacks of being used to the guitar). But it's getting much better already. I hope everyone here is progressing nicely.

I bought Alfred's book one a week ago. I took piano lessons for a year or two when I was a kid and have played by ear all my life. My fingering was always terrible. I decided that it is time I learn right and since I am 60 I knew it was time to get started. I played the trumpet all through school and I play the bass guitar so I already knew how to read music, harmony, etc. So in a week I have progressed up through Blow the Man Down. It is the hardest piece in the book so far and I think I just about have it mastered. For me, the key was counting out loud and that helped me play the eight notes after the doted quarter notes properly. I only have the main book at this point. I ordered all the supplemental books except for the Duet one because I don't have anyone to play duets with. I appreciate all the comments on this forum. They are helpful.

Well I've just finished book 1!

I do have some "polishing" to do on Amazing Grace but my teacher was happy with my progress on the last 3 songs inc Entertainer (easier version of course). I am going to have to get a nice frame for my 1st Piano Certificate!

Now we'll take a 2wk break as we focus on the Forest Gump sheet music since I want to get a heads up on learning that piece.

Then straight into Book #2 so I'll see some of you over on the other thread. Thanks to all for your help and again to Pianonoobalex[/b] for his excellent Videos (looking forward to checking out the book 2 ones)

Keep at it and enjoy yourself, I know I am