Learning The Piano

Hello everyone and welcome to EnglishPod.

My name is Marco.

My name is Catherine and today we have a very technical, very advanced lesson for you.

This is all about one of my favorite subjects.

That's right.

We're going to talk about music, but specifically we're going to talk about the piano and learning

how to play the piano.

So we're going to talk about very specific vocab related to this instrument.

Right.

So piano and playing music, not listening to music.

Right.

And there are a lot of interesting words and phrases here.

Some of them actually come from foreign languages like Italian.

So listen up.

We'll be back in a moment.

And when we come back, we'll be talking about what these words and phrases mean.

Hi Cody.

How did practicing go this week?

Well, I had several tests and an oral presentation this week, so I didn't get a chance to memorize

the second page, but I think I mastered the tricky section.

Great.

Let's start with some scales and arpeggios first.

Good, good.

This week, work on keeping the rhythm steady when you play the last part with the 16th

notes.

Now let's take a look at this tricky section.

Charlene, before I start, I was wondering if it was okay if I put a small crescendo

in here and then a decrescendo back to pianissimo again over here.

Hmm, it might work.

I'll have to hear it.

Show me what you've done.

Not bad.

It was horrible.

I played it much better at home.

It's just nerves.

Just play the right hand for now.

One, two, three, four, five, six, ta, ti, triple e, ti.

Good, good.

Don't forget the accidentals.

The key signature says that note should be a G sharp, but now it's a G natural.

Now add the bass clef.

You're going too fast.

Remember the tempo for this piece is andante.

Is that better?

Yes, much better.

Watch where you lift your foot off the pedal.

What was that?

Sorry.

The stretch for that octave is always hard to make.

That's okay.

Keep going.

You're moving ahead by leaps and bounds.

Watch your dynamics.

Keep your elbows lifted.

Remember to stroke the keys.

Don't pound.

That's better.

Remember that as a pianist or any other musician, your technique will be what separates you

from the pack just as much or as more so as your musicianship.

All right, we're back.

You probably noticed that there are a lot of ways to describe certain aspects of playing

the piano.

They talked about scales and all that stuff.

Why don't we take a deeper look at this vocab in Language Takeaway Part 1.

Language Takeaway.

The first part of the lesson is the warm-up.

That's when we start to get our fingers moving and really stretch out.

This is an important part of any musician's routine because it's also a way to practice

some very basic, very fundamental things.

The first of which is a scale.

Okay.

So actually, Cody started warming up with some scales.

So what exactly are scales?

Well, basically, there are different musical notes.

Some people know them as do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do.

Some people call them C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. But each of those and many others have

scales.

So that's eight notes together.

Okay.

So basically, when you're playing scales, you're just playing a sequence of these eight

notes.

Right.

Going up or down.

Okay.

To warm up.

And what about an arpeggio?

I think this is Italian, right?

Definitely.

Arpeggio is another kind of warm-up where you're not playing every single note.

You're playing some notes in a scale.

All right.

So, la, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

That's an arpeggio.

Okay.

Very good.

So, and as you said, these are usually for warm-ups, right?

Yeah.

They're also very important because they come into play later when you're talking about

the key that a song or a piece of music is in.

So this helps you memorize the key that some music is in.

Okay.

Very good.

So I think related to this is the rhythm of the piece that you're playing.

That's right.

So rhythm is really important.

You can even say, you know, he's got rhythm or they have rhythm.

It's a way to describe the beat of a kind of music.

So sometimes it has to do with how fast or how slow something is.

Other times it has to do with the way that the notes work together.

For example, a steady beat would be one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.

This is a complicated beat.

It goes ta, ti, tri, po, li, ta, ti, tri, po, li.

So this is a very difficult kind of rhythm.

Okay.

So the rhythm is just kind of, it gives you how fast, how slow it is.

And I guess if you can take a look at notes and you can play it in many different rhythms,

but not necessarily they're going to sound correct.

Right.

And actually it's interesting.

In English we also have a group of instruments that are called rhythm instruments.

So this would be like the drums.

Okay.

So it gives the beat.

Yes.

Very good.

And well, moving on, I think some other Italian words popped up in here when they talked about

crescendo and decrescendo.

Right.

So crescendo is when something becomes louder.

So I can make a crescendo.

But a decrescendo, de in Italian, just like in English means it's the opposite.

So it means it's getting really softer.

Okay.

And what about pianissimo?

Pianissimo is basically an indication.

It also comes from Italian.

It's an indication that a player, a musician should play something very, very, very quietly.

It's almost like a whisper.

Okay.

So all these three words have to do with the volume of or how loud or not so loud you play

the instrument.

That's right.

Okay.

Very good.

And well, moving on now, we talk about accidentals.

Okay.

This is important.

Remember earlier we were talking about scales.

Well, for example, the G scale has one sharp.

So that's an F sharp.

So if I'm playing it on the piano, there are seven white keys and one black key.

Okay.

So actually here they mentioned G sharp and then something like G natural.

All this, just like for everyone that's out there is complete Chinese to me.

I have no idea what this is all about.

So you have the accidentals and G sharp and you're describing something about sharpness

with accidentals.

That's right.

So basically if you look at a piano, you have white keys.

Those are natural.

They don't have a sharp or a flat.

The sharps and flats are actually played on the black keys.

Usually it's a half step from a normal note.

So G, it's a half step.

We're talking about different keys.

So if something is in the key of G, all of you music people know what this is, key of

G, there's one accidental.

What's the accidental?

It's always F sharp.

And so an accidental means a sharp or a flat in that key.

Okay.

So when we talk about sharps on the piano, they're basically the black keys.

Yes.

Well, sharps and flats can both be black keys.

Okay.

Very good.

And well, apart from accidentals and G sharp, G natural, the teacher also talked about a

bass clef.

Okay.

This is important for people who play lower instruments like the bass, you know, the upright

bass that big one or people who play the piano, obviously, this represents a way of writing

the lower notes.

Okay.

So you see the lines, those five lines on paper and people write the notes.

Well, sometimes they're for higher instruments, you know, the flute or the trumpet.

But sometimes when they're for lower instruments, like the left hand of a piano or for the upright

bass, you have to write it in a special register, a special part of the sound kind of continuum.

And that's the treble.

That's the bass clef.

Okay.

So basically, if anyone has ever seen piano notes, it tells you what to play with your

left hand and your right hand.

So I imagine the bass clef will be everything that's on your left hand because that sounds

like deeper, graver, right?

Yeah, it's lower.

So it's lower on the scale instead of like up high up here where it's on the treble clef.

All right.

So, oh, so the opposite would be the treble clef.

That's right.

The treble clef is up higher.

It's most other instruments like the trumpet.

The bass clef is for lower instruments.

And that just means that the way that you read the music on the page is a little bit

different.

Okay, very good.

And well, we also got into things like tempo and the piece was described as andante.

Andante.

This is a very Italian word.

Okay, so andante means that something is played slowly.

Okay.

So apart from andante, if so, it's a style or a tempo.

I guess tempo is the speed of which is played, right?

That's right.

But you're right to say that it's also a style because in many symphonies, for example, there's

a movement, a part of the symphony that's called the andante.

And that's when everything starts to get slow and serious or pretty.

I've heard, I don't know, in piano, I've heard of something called staccato.

And I think this is also related to tempo, right?

Staccato is the way that you play something.

So instead of having these long, pretty notes, you're playing them like this.

They're very, very sharp.

Like a machine gun.

Okay, so but it's not related to the tempo.

It's kind of more just like the way that you press the keys.

Exactly.

It's a style for playing.

Okay.

All right.

Well, the teacher also told the student to be careful where they lift the foot off the

pedal.

And the student said, I'm just so sorry.

The stretch for that octave is always hard to make.

Okay, so an octave is really, really important in music.

Like we were talking about earlier with a scale, a scale is eight notes.

Well, the root, the place the word octave comes from is the number eight, like an octagon.

So octave means eight notes together, or like low C, high C, that's an octave.

So think about the piano, when you're putting your fingers on the keys, covering eight keys

means you have to stretch your thumb and your pinky out really, really far.

And so he's saying, sorry, it's hard for me to do this because the octave, that stretch

is really hard for my hand.

Right.

Okay.

So this is different from an eighth, right?

Well, it depends.

Are you talking about eighth note?

I don't know.

Because I just came into the night because an octave is eight and an eighth note is different,

I imagine.

Yeah.

Well, you heard in the dialogue, 16th note, eighth note.

That's actually talking about the length of a note, how long you hold it.

Okay.

So basically you're saying it's the way you measure the music.

You can have four count or three count, but you divide that into pieces.

It's like a pie in math where you divide it into pieces.

So if it's a 16th note or an eighth note, that's the length based on the kind of music

you're playing.

So I imagine 16th note is shorter than eighth.

Yes.

Okay.

At least I got that one right.

And 32nd note is shorter than a 16th note.

Wow.

You have all the way up to 32nd.

64th note is shorter.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

It gets very complicated, very mathy.

All right.

And towards the end, the teacher recommended for Cody to watch his dynamics.

What does she mean with watch your dynamics?

I used to get this all the time in music.

So you're concentrating on your music, you're playing, you're getting the notes and Cody

is stretching his hands.

The octaves are so far away and he forgets to play it loud or soft because on the page

it says like we heard earlier, decrescendo.

So get much, much softer.

So Cody completely forgot.

He's not listening.

He's not reading the page and seeing what it says about the volume of the music.

So basically the dynamics are like the instructions of how loud to play it or not so loud.

Exactly.

So does it say pianissimo or the opposite?

Does it say forte?

And it will actually say this on the notes.

Yes.

Forte, it'll say that.

F-O-R-T-E or sometimes just F.

Oh, okay.

So P is piano.

That means like we said earlier, quiet.

Pianissimo is P, P, P. It's very, very quiet.

F is forte, loud.

Okay.

So I think, well, if anyone out there plays an instrument you can relate and you can maybe

know about these things that you may know it in your original language.

I know many people who play musical instruments and don't really know the technical words

in their original language.

I mean, things like Andante and pianissimo, things like this, I think are universal, right?

They're used in whatever language.

Exactly.

Very, very widely used.

But things like the accidentals or bass clef or scales and stuff like that, I think it's

obviously different languages.

For example, you know Italian, like scales or accidentals, are they?

They're different.

They're different, right?

They're different.

All of the other words.

So the instructions on the page, because music is shared all over the world, the instructions

on the page are almost always in Italian, so piano, andante, or they're in German.

Oh, really?

Some music.

And everything else, scales, octaves, these are all in your native language.

And so they're very, very important to study if you want to play and I think very, very

useful if you want to study an instrument.

Yeah, of course.

I think it's also a very good idea to just have a general knowledge about these things

because sometimes it's nice to know a little bit about it and maybe if a friend is talking

about music, you can maybe understand a little bit more about what it's like.

Or if you see music, a sheet of music, you can now more or less know what's going on

with all those drawings and little scribbles there.

Absolutely.

And if you have any questions, of course, you're welcome to come to our website and

ask or share your experiences as Marco has just said.

So please come to EnglishPod.com.

We hope to see you there.

All right.

We'll see you guys next time.

Bye.

Let's David!