·:[ CelliMuse ]:·
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Dv just impresses me, you know? Sing him a tune and he can pick it out on the piano in no time flat; have all the right inflections and the harmony, even. Give him a paper full of notes, though, and you’ll get a long loud sound of displeasure, generally.

I started him out with a very simple version of “Oh where, oh where can my little dog be?” called “My little doggie.” The problem is that he knows the song and “My little doggie” just wasn’t up to snuff. He complained that it wasn’t how the “real” song sounded. It was just two staves long & I wanted him to play the notes he was reading. He did; and was NOT happy with it at all.

So.

I began hunting for the full song. I found it in a very old music book - one that is even printed in color! It’s a full over-sized page long with six staves. I brought it over to him, showed him and he practiced that tune for a full hour. That’s just unprecidented! It’s like pulling eye-teeth to get him to play for 20 minutes from notes on a page, normally. Needless to say, I am very much impressed that he has that kind of focus when his mind is engaged. With him, if it’s not right, it’s not worth doing, apperantly.

Sometimes, something just *happens* and you create something you actually think is kinda cool. I’ve got Finale’s PrintMusic and I’m having a lot of fun with it. My nephew gave me five bars of a tune and I took it from there. It’s about 6 minutes right now and I need to work on the transitions between thoughts some more, but here it is so far…

Master Classes are now available from The Las Vegas Philharmonic for both Celli and Piano! Master Classes are often overlooked by beginning students because they aren’t yet “Masters.” The point is not that the beginner is the master, but rather that they are learning from a Master.

This is a resource of Light Folksongs. It includes sheet music for violin, viola, cello, and piano.

What range do you like on the piano? It’d be quite handy if you could figure that part out so you could choose an instrument that plays in that range, wouldn’t it? Well, this site has a terrific visual for doing just that. If it doesn’t load up, I’ve also got it below:

At one point, I had a great long piece of butcher’s paper. I drew a long staff on it (thank goodness for Pa’s tools!) and cut out a bass cleff to match the size. Then I printed out very large ovals (note balls) and very large bars. I asked D to cut out each of the ovals and bars, then we glued them together to make quarter notes. This was a great exercise in and of itself because D recognized the different shapes needed to make a quarter note rather than trying to make it all one unit. It broke it down into simpler pieces so she could grab on and memorize the shapes easier.

After we glued the quarter notes together, I printed out a paper with all the letters for the notes she had. She cut out the squares, and we folded the little papers in half, than popped them into a small bag. We hung the bag next to the butcher’s paper staff, which I had hung on the wall, and made a game of it. The cool part was, she got a different song each time we played the game.

What was the game? Easy. Place-the-note!

Grab the bag of letters, and pull one letter out. Then place the quarter note onto the staff where it belongs. Get another letter from the bag… When all the notes are gone, it’s time to play the new song you created!

It gave us variety, note recognition both by sight and by play, and a fun way to share our music with family.

Piano Lessons online? Yep, sure enough!
I never thought I’d see Piano Lessons online, but here they are! Lots of them, too! It looks like a good program, though I’ve not been through the whole of them yet.

I’ve been trying to convince an aquaintence/friend of mine, Chris, to take up teaching Dv the piano at our house. Where Chris has a wonderful (he tells me) piano at home - home is in Goldendale and that’s just not a great option for us. However, he’s got to come into The Dalles to go to work, so I was hoping I could convince him to just hop out to our house to do lessons once or twice a week. Once would probably be enough, but twice with Dv is always better. 5 year old learning systems do better with more reinforcement, after all. We pay Carrie $45 a month, so it would be terrific if Chris would just take over that and teach at our home. Keep your fingers crossed for me with trying to convince him!

Thursday (yesterday), D, Dv, Mom and I went to see David Finkel and Wu Han. They do all their music under their own music label and were wonderful to see. Mostly, what I got out of it is to “own” your instrument and make it a part of you rather than sticking to the militaristic beginner sort of style. David Finkel used his whole body to make the music out of his cello. It was fabulous. They just released a new cd, though it’s not supposed to be released in the US until April.

About a month ago, I took on teaching Dv (5 years old) the piano. His piano is named Journey and he tells me that Journey talks to him. Mostly, it says that it’s tired and doesn’t want to be played right now. The imagination of a 5 year old! lol. He was learning, and continues to take weekly lessons, from Carrie. She wasn’t having much success, though, so I took the reigns at home to see if we could get him to learn and enjoy it.

I’m proud to say that he does love it now - 20 minutes at a time. ::grins:: If he plays Journey for 20 minutes and has a good lesson, he gets to play his V-Smile for 20 minutes before his nap in the afternoons. It’s all about approach, lol. I’ve been working with him on note recognition, where Carrie has him playing from books that teach him just the out-in-space kind of notes. They’re not anchored to the grand staff at all, so they just look like quarter notes, half notes, and whole notes that are a little higher or lower than each other. He didn’t know what to play that way until someone showed him and he memorized it.

Dv now knows Middle C; that it’s played with his right thumb, it’s location on both the grand staff and on the piano keyboard. He also knows D (played with right index finger, location on grand staff, and location on the piano keys) and E (played with right middle finger, location on grand staff, and location on the piano keys). He’s a clever little guy.

As of today, I’m starting him on writing the notes on the grand staff that he recognizes. I really want to set him to making small compositions with his three notes, but we’ll see.