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Thanks, so I guess I have been playing it correctly. I just wanted to make sure I understand exactly what is going on. I know we talked about this song the other day, but I woke up this morning in a panic thinking that I had been playing it all wrong the whole time. I guess I must have had a bad dream.

Incidentally, out of all the recordings I did, Solace is the only one with any glaring mistakes, two of them to be exact! Ouch. One is that out of haste I skipped the first two separate notes of the piece on my final recording. The second one is that I gave up on the ending, and just put my own ending in there. I will do a better recording hopefully soon.

Yea the ending took a while to be able to play smoothly, I'm glad i stuck with it because i actually like the song now.. One day I will probably try to play the complete Scott Joplin pieces. I guess now I will move on to "La Bamba", I have toyed with it a little and I don't find it to be as hard as SOLACE, but we will see what happens in a few days. Thanks for you help Music_in_me

See that's why I think discussions like these are very important. Your question got me asking about the relationship between the note time duration and its detached (or staccato) nature.

In that same piece, how would it sound if the detached 1/4 notes were 1/8 notes? What does it really mean to hit a note staccato? My intuition would say that you hold a detached quarter note to its full time value, but then you just chop off the very end of it. So, in this piece, you would keep your left finger on the first 1/4 note as you play the second 1/8 not with your RH, then give a sudden lift to your LH finger. But that doesn't seem to be done, as far as I can tell, in any of the examples of this piece that I've heard.

Could any of you ask your teacher on this?

This quick reference here seems to say that there is no exact rule for this:
http://neilhawes.com/sstheory/theory43.htm

Yea, now you are starting to see what I mean. At one point someone told me that if the notes line up then they are to be played simultaneously, the only example i can think of is that. One "track" is playing out of sync with the other "track" by about 1/8 of a beat, because if you actually add up the notes one hand is further along in the song than the other. If we take SOLACE for example during the ending you have a C with the 5th finger on the left hand after holding a C with your right thumb for 1/8. There is a temptation to play these notes together but if you look at the way they line up it seems they should be coming in slightly out of sync with each other because you have to hold it. Then you have the 3rd finger on the A followed by the rest of the cord 1/8 after that? If you play all these together you get an ending that sounds right but if you look at other parts in the song with the same setup it only sounds good if you leave room for the 1/8 delay, so it would seem in the ending you have to do the same.So yea, this song really got me thinking and re-evaluating the way I been playing piano. I can "play" the song, but how can i really be sure that I'm not off by 1/8 of a beat.. maybe we are over thinking this, but I would be curious to hear from a teacher also. I been basically just using the books by myself and listening to the CD plus some youtube clips.

Hope this wasn't too confusing.

Take a listen to mine and see if that's what you expect. The beats have to follow the LH accurately... that is, there are 4 beats, each beat starts at the beginning of each 1/4 note. That's clear. The RH notes do not all fall on the beat, that's also clear. My main issue is for how long you hold the 1/4 notes? That is, how much note and how much rest?

The more general question is: If you have notes to played staccato, how long do you hold each note before you give it the staccato effect?

Sounds good to me.. What your playing pretty much matches up with what I have.

I see what you mean about La Bamba and the timing. I seem to be able to play it decent, so I'm just going to move on. I always did like Twist and Shout better than La Bamba anyway. It seems the songs are now starting to get a lot easier now, nothing really new here, I'm sure I will get stuck on something eventually. Anyone else notice that things get easier after "La Bamba".

I know progress feels nice, but personally, I think it's important to be able to, more or less, play a piece in its entirety before moving on. This doesn't mean to play it perfectly "musical" but it does mean to play it as written. This ensures that the skills meant to be learned were actually learned as opposed to perused. La Bamba is a frustrating piece, so I can understand how you feel.

Waltz: You are right. I can play the song as written, what I may end up doing is most of these songs still seem to be a "review" of book 1, before I move on to the new material I will take a 2nd flip through it just to make sure I didn't miss anything. I'm not in a rush to finish the book believe me, I know its going to take some time. I think I went through book 1 about 4 or 5 times to be honest before I moved on to book 2. It seems that each song has something new to be learned.

This was a little hard, and long to play it with all the repeats, but I managed it ok... one or two glitches though.

Next is another long one, Hava Nagila.

Night Song

This is the first time, at least by my listening, that it seems a piece gave you some trouble. You played most of the parts well, but there were a lot of timing issues and hesitations: especially during the 2nd part. I thought Night Song was one of the prettier pieces from book 2, and it can be played very differently depending on the performer. I read your post about candor, so I am trying to be that, please don't take offense.

Oh dear, my brain read "managed" as "mangled" the first time through. Good thing I read it twice.

It sounded pretty good to me, but you're looking at someone who didn't finish Alfreds book one before heading off to learn Einaudi pieces.

Yes, "I mangled it ok"... is really a more accurate description of how I went about this one . Waltz, it's a very pretty piece, I agree, but it looked like an etude or exercise of some sort, so I didn't take it very seriously . After a day or two, I'll try to get back to it and do it better; the timing was especially bad.

Timing and hesitation is my middle name when reading music. I do much better when I memorize a piece. One of the problems is that I tend to lose my place. I've been asked to look ahead when reading and if I have to look down to find a key, to mark the book where that happens so that I'll know exactly where to continue. I'm still pretty rusty at this but will hopefully come with time. I am currently working on Hava Nagila and love it but is more difficult than it looks. I have the first two pages down OK but the next couple are more of a challenge.

Music in Me - let us know how you Hava Nagila. Happy playing!

Ooops...... My question to Music in Me should ready: Let us know how you do with Hava Nagila. Sorry, I think I'm half asleep yet.

So that's where you went astray! I was wondering...

But, it's not too late - you can still join E.A. (Einaudi Anonymous)and come back and pick up where you left off in Alfred 1 - it won't be easy as the "Einaudi Addiction" is one of the strongest known to modern science, but it has been done...

JF

The first two pages took me 2 days or so to learn. The last two pages took over a week. They are MUCH harder. I don't mean to discourage, actually the opposite, if you feel frustration just know it is not you but that the piece does increase in difficulty.

I've been informed by a highly reliable source that there's a killer (or so it's been said) version of "Hava Nagila" (slightly modified from the Book arrangement) here to serve as inspiration and guide:

Alfred 3, Page 1

JF

Here comes Hava Nagila

Like with all other pieces, there is always a way to do it better, but sometimes we have to move on. This piece is 4 pages long...if you make one mistake you have to go back and redo it from the beginning, that's a bit too much. Also, it's a fast song, even though I like it better if slower, but I had to do it just like in the book.


Next is Space Shuttle Blues.