Using Composer as Piano teaching aid

Hello Dale,

There are lots of ways you might use Notation Composer as a teaching aid for learning to play the piano. The best way to use Notation Composer as you learn the piano depends a lot on what method of learning happens to work best for you personally.

I have some fairly strong opinions about what are effective and ineffective ways to learn to play piano or other instruments. One of the things that I believe is most important is to use your ear.

I believe that too often playing an instrument is taught as though it's just a mechanical skill. Sometimes musical keyboard playing is taught sort of like a typewriting skill: see the word (notes), type the keys. Where's the music in that?

My general advice about using Notation Composer to learn the piano is to use it as a tool for more closely listening to the music you want to learn to play on the piano. Get the music in your ears. Get the music in your head. Then your fingers will deliver music from your head to the piano keys. Playing the piano then becomes more than a mechanical skill; it becomes a musical skill.

In light of the above overall musical, rather than mechanical approach, to learning the piano, here are some specific suggestions for using Notation Composer:

• Find a MIDI file for the music you want to learn; or manually enter the notes from, for example, your Alfred book. (Next year Notation Composer will support sheet music scanning via third party products and MusicXML.)
• If you are a beginning pianist, you might find Composer's Easy Notes feature useful: it displays the letters of the pitches (C,D,E,etc) in the noteheads.
• Slow down the playback of the notes so that you can hear them more clearly.
• To hear how your right and left-hand notes mix, musically, to produce the overall sound (harmony), try temporarily turning up the volume of the right or left hand while turning down the volume of the other. It's very helpful to hear the musical roles of your right and left hands, which can be emphasized through this per-staff volume control. To do this, select a staff with the staff control button, and then slide the volume slide to left of middle. That has the effect of decreasing the volume of non-selected tracks, so that the volume of the selected track stands out.
• If you have a MIDI keyboard, then play along with Notation Composer, perhaps playing just the right or left hand while Composer plays the other hands. However, I don't generally recommend practicing one hand at a time except when you're trying to work out fingering problems.

But now I'm crossing out of my claimed area of expertise. I do play the piano. But I suspect that there are great piano teachers out there who would totally disagree with my recommendation to not spend much time practicing one hand by itself.

I better go back to writing more music software code.

Well, just one more tip. Have fun! If you have fun learning to play the piano, then you'll learn to do it more quickly. Have fun using Notation Composer to learn to play the piano.

Cheers
-- Mark