Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum The Importance of rhythmic patterns

Hey everyone !
I'm new member of this community, hello everyone!
I have heard about the importance of rhythmic patterns to piano players... it is said that once you master this skill, u can play any song by ear; and also you will be able to easily play your own creative music.
I am wondering how all of this is possible.
I am rookie piano player... and i want to teach myself something useful until i can arrange to start studing with a teacher.
i would appreciate alot if someone could tell me a link to where i can find articles and start studing rhythmic pattern.
question : what is more worthy to learn right away... rhythmic patterns or music sheet sight reading??
thnx for your concern... waiting hopefully for some replies!

Derek

You have the coolest avatar image of anyone at Piano World. Is that Sasquatch dancing? I heard he prefered to get down in the forest.

What should you do? I'll just wing it here.

Try and pin down a type of music that you want to learn. It sounds from your post like you might be leaning in the pop/blues/new age direction. If this is the case, there are people on the forum (Bob Muir, Balladeer, Seaside Lee, Sharon and others) who are doing really well with a program called Piano Magic. Search that term here and you'll get lots of threads with information on it. If classical is your bag...well you will probably do better learning how to read the music.

Of course there's also Mr. Super-Hunky and his "home-brew" of playing easy arrangements and filling in notes using his ear. Of course, you may not feel comfortable corresponding with someone called "Mr. Super-Hunky" It may lead to embarrassing moments in the future! Just kidding, Hunky has some good ideas and is never short on enthusiasm for music/life.

I would say even without sheet music, one can sit down on front of a piano and play something of color and beauty with some thoughtful experimentation. Do that kind of thing. Also try and get your hands on a beginner book that spells out some of the basics of counting and reading notes. It is not all that hard to start understanding printed music. Maybe at first it will feel like solving a encrypted code, but it will become easier with each new song.

At any rate, welcome to the forum...there's a good group of people here.

Hobie

hey hobie !
lol... yea the avatar thing !! crazy isn't it..
my avatar gets right down to business. =)
the thing is... I like classical, but i want to learn Jazz, blues and in general i like music. whatever sounds good u can count me in. i'm not a 1-music type of guy.
while i lived in Brazil ( my home country ) i went to a music school there for 3 months. that was enough for me to learn notes acounting and standard new player stuff. now I am licing in America.. and wow, what a hassle i'm having to learn music here. the teachers here charge tooo much and know too little. I learn alot of msuic just by talkin to people and took some classes.
here everything seems harder to accomplish =(
maybe it's just me
u said something about mr. super-hunky.. is that a member of this community ??
thnx for your help ! my problam is that i end up mixing everything together instead of taking steps to learn.
i am trying to read music as well as learn chords, learn scales, learn to play without looking at the keys, proper tempo , and technical playing... my god.. i'm a mess! lol i don't know where to start.
what would u recommend ??

De, it depends. Do you want to learn to play by ear first or from sheet music first? I don't know about Hobie, but I wouldn't recommend trying to do both at the same time.

If you want to learn to play from sheet music first, (a requirement to play classical music), then a good method book series can provide needed structure. You can thumb through them at most local music shops to find one you like. I'm partial to the Alfred's Adult series.

If you want to learn to play by ear first, then, as Hobie said, many of us are working through PianoMagic.com toward that end.

Bob

De - cool avatar, indeedy!!!!!

And what Hobie and Bob said - cool! I'm Pianomagic - and I love it. Right now, I'm feeling the music and just knowing ahead of time where the chords will be and picking the melody notes... I amaze myself sometimes. I sit down to play a song cold - and plinking out the notes is actually happening.

Of course to get it smooth you have to practice a few times... That's where I fall short.... (oh, is this suppose to be my story.... oh - I'm wanting to inspire you... that's right....

Anyway, trouble is - I got to sit my butt down a bit longer on the piano bench.... but every little bit helps.

Welcome, BTW

Derek

Brazil! I would love to visit. I hear so much about that place, I joined a Capoira group last year and just loved it. I learned how to play something called a Beir-n-bow (sp?) and it had a gourd wedged into a wire stretched with a bent peice of wood. We sang songs in portugese and learned some basic moves for the Hoda, where people danced using martial arts moves while music was being played. I could only imagine the skill of native people in this art. Brazil must be very cool. Have you ever seen Capoira?

Lerning music in the US is harder, huh? I wonder what makes it so. I could guess, but I would probably involve criticizing our society...I'll save that for when I'm grumpier.

I would start by developing a group of songs that you can play. If you have no songs right now, pick one you like and learn it. Pick one that is easy enough to read or play by ear. Once that one is complete, begin another. The goal is to assemble 4 or 5 songs that you have memorized. That way you can sit down at a piano anywhere and play it. As your skills develop, this group of songs will change and grow with you. But you should always have at least a handful of memorized songs at all times. It will also prevent you from becoming too scattered. Get a ring-bound notebook and keep your materials in there, organized. You may have a section for exercises and scales, another for music you are learning, and anither for personal notes you take as you hear new songs or amass new information.

For learning classical, begin with some really easy stuff. Maybe get a book called "Classics to Moderns: 40 very easy pieces for piano" by Denes Agay. It will have some good stuff to get you started with classical. As you gain skills, more difficult music would be next.

Yes, Mr. Super Hunky is a member of this community, and I'm sure you will get to know him, especially since I am mentioning his super-system of playing music using a hybrid of reading and ear-playing. We all seem to like him...he's hilarious!

Well, it's raining here, so I better get down to some house cleaning while the getting is good.

Take it easy,
Hobie

Welcome to the forum, derek_br,

Somebody on one of the other threads was asking about the super-hunky method, so I'll just copy what I posted there:

Here's a thread where he describes his method in some detail: the super-hunky method for improvising

You can hear his method in just about any of his recordings; check out the piano bar thread, recital thread, and numerous others, but my personal favorite is his "Lake Erie Rainfall," which can be found in this thread here.

p.s. your avatar looks suspiciously similar to the UK wildcat mascot.

Hey people!
thank you all so far for the tips...
capoeira is very good ! i did it for a couple of months... and yep, you're right.. in brazil, when u see those people fighitng capoeira in the roda you think how the heck can people do that?
i find capoeira way easier to learn than piano. hehe.. but why... maybe i was learning wrong hw to play.
that capoeira instrument is called birimbal by the way... ( something like that )
I am from Rio de Janeiro and i live here for some years all together. I just came from rio 5 months ago.
i wasnt criticising america at all.. just saying that since i am not natice i find fidicult to do most things i'm used to doing in my place.
i'm gonna go check out now mr- super hunky material heheh .
oh.. uhmm now i wonder whether to get piano magic material or buy the stuff from playpianotoday.com it's all about rhymic pattern.
what u guys think?
sharon that was inspiring indeed! =) thnx and i'll check it out.

The pattern I just heard on the playpianotoday demo is the first accompaniment pattern we learned in pianomagic. You can hear about a half dozen different pianomagic participants in the February recital .

Sprunger's course is certainly cheap enough at $90. Keep in mind though that you don't have interactivity with the author and there are no samples of how the students are playing.

Again, as Hobie suggested, search this forum for pianomagic and read through the material to see if it fits your style and goals. Also check out the videos on the PM homepage.

Derek_BR:

Your idea reinforces a private conjecture I have nurtured for very many years. I think that rhythm, of which the pattern, or what I term the rhythmic cell, is a subset, is the most vital element of all music. Reading what "experts" say in various musical fields, one is led to believe that all music is reducible to the study of harmony, essentially the combinatorial properties of the notes on a piano.

I suggest that this is so, simply because harmony, being a study of discrete properties, is therefore much easier to analyse than rhythm, which is essentially a continuous phenomenon. As such, all but a few of its musical effects defy written notation altogether.

Moreover, rhythm, as an intellectual and emotional trigger, is clearly a much deeper invariant than either harmony or melody because it applies over any set of pitches at all, not just the arbitrary twelve of Western music, which came into being because 1.5 is approximately equal to 2^(7/12).

You may not have meant your post to have quite such a general implication, but nonetheless I certainly agree with its substance. The older I get, the more deeply rhythm fascinates me, and it is likely to steer my creative musical path for the rest of my life.

Hi De

I bought into the Sprunger course...its great if you want to accompany yourself whilst singing.

unfortunately I sing real bad...nope make that really, really bad!!...so it gathers dust along with a whole heap of stuff.

regards


Lee

hey lee...
I wante to learn how to sing while I learn piano.
i'm a horrible singer too, so what should I do?
how is that pogram like?

to say what Ted said again but differently:

rhythm with no notes is interesting to listen too and is generally considered music.

notes with no rhythm is no longer music and generally difficult and annoying to listen to.

Hi De

if you want to learn to sing better...I would suggest a singing coach or singing lessons...however, I am a lost cause with singing so, I have no idea what they are like?


David Sprunger is a great singer and his course seemed excellent for those who just want to comp with their own singing...sadly for me the course is back in its box gathering dust as I am more focused on playing solo piano (melody, harmony and rhythm) that I learn elsewhere.


regards


Lee