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Piano and Guitar - Notes on how to learn to play a musical instrument

My notes for the intrepid adventurer!

Index

Description

This are my notes, that I gathered from my search in the world of learning to play the piano and the guitar (Classical and electric).
I speak about music theory, I speak about sight reading, I speak about practice, about good books, good Youtube channels and about configurations on Linux. I leave in Portugal and also tried to find the best cheap solution for piano and guitar, the best bang for the buck. All products have to works well on Linux and my localization impacted my choices, they were the best solutions for me, but maybe aren't the best solutions for you. But there is a really good and solid info here about learning to play those instruments.
The objective of learning to play an instrument, should be, the enablement of the production of beauty in the world though music.

Music theory

It’s the foundation of all music, you can learn an instrument by ear and imitation or by a more profound and better way, you can learning music theory, by books or trough a teacher. In here, I’m looking on the more economic side of things so I’m not talking much of getting a private teacher because they can be several times as expensive as the initial cost of an instrument. So not accessible to all. Music theory is the foundation of all music, is it’s alphabet and it’s grammar. So my main resources for are primary books, Youtube channels and sites.

Books

  • Harmony and Theory: A Comprehensive Source for All Musicians
    by Keith Wyatt

  • Music Theory: From Beginner to Expert 3rd Edition
    by Nicolas Carter

  • Music Theory For Dummies
    by Michael Pilhofer, Holly Day

  • Berklee Music Theory Book 1
    by Paul Schmeling

  • Berklee Music Theory Book 2
    by Paul Schmeling

  • The Jazz Theory Book
    by Mark Levine

  • Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice Hardcover
    by Vincent Persichetti

  • The Complete Musician: An Integrated Approach to Theory, Analysis and Listening
    by Steven Geoffrey Laitz

  • Tonal Harmony
    by Stefan Kostka, Dorothy Payne, Byron Almén

  • Reharmonization Techniques
    by Randy Felts

  • The Jazz Piano Book
    by Mark Levine

  • Basic Materials in Music Theory: A Programmed Approach, 12th Edition
    by Greg A Steinke, Paul O. Harder

  • Harmonic Materials in Tonal Music: A Programmed Course, Part 1, 10th Edition
    by Greg Steinke

  • Harmonic Materials in Tonal Music: A Programmed Course, Part 2, 10th Edition
    by Greg Steinke

  • The Study of Counterpoint: From Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus Ad Parnassum
    by Johann Joseph Fux and Alfred Mann

  • Contemporary Counterpoint: Theory & Application
    by Beth Denisch

  • Hearing and writing music professional training for todays musician
    by Ron Gorow

  • The complete idiots guide to songwriting
    by Joel Hirschhom, Joel Hirschhorn

Youtube channels and videos

Sites



Ear training and sight singing

Ear training is an important thing to work on because it helps a lot in the process of learning a musical instrument, it helps to understand more the music we listen and it helps our singing. But sight singing also helps ear training, the tree things give positive feedback to each other and that is always a good thing. After that you can go on to music analysis.

Books

  • First Steps to Ear Training
    by William Curtis

  • Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician
    by Joe Elliott, Carl Schroeder, et al.

  • Music for Ear Training
    by Michael Horvit, Timothy Koozin, et al.

  • Music for Sight Singing
    by Thomas E. Benjamin, Michael Horvit, et al.

  • Music for Sight Singing, 10th Edition
    by Nancy Rogers, Robert Ottman

  • Music for Analysis: Examples from the Common Practice Period and the Twentieth Century
    by Thomas Benjamin, Michael Horvit, et al.



Psychoacoustics - Audio Illusions



Guitar

The beautiful string instrument :-D

Finding a good and economic guitar

The guitars that I like that are good and economic are from:

Solutions for the big hands or the fat fingers problem.

I live in Portugal and APC Instruments - António Pinto de Carvalho - that is the largest European Luthier, it's headquarters and production are in the city of Braga in the north of Portugal. They do guitars by hand, they make guitars and wood string instruments of all types, shapes and sizes at good prices. A typical classical guitar nut is 52 mm and for large hands or fat fingers, that can be too small. But if you ask APC they will take there normal line of 7 (60mm nut) or 8 strings (70mm nut) guitars and apply a 6 string custom bridge and a custom nut in the factory, so that you can have a large string inter-distance in a 6 strings. They do this for just, a really small amount. They made an incredible high quality guitar instrument for me at a very low price.

How to tune your guitar

Use a tuner or a tuner APP and tune to the following mnemonic notes for each string.

Eddie - Higher string position
Ate
Dynamite
Good
Bye
Eddie - Lower position string

Higher position string ____ E - A - D - G - B - E ____ Lower position string

Sight Reading with the guitar

Sight reading requires that you read at least 4 to 5 pages, of different guitar sheet music every day, for several months. And it’s a skill that if you stop practicing you will be worst at it, so you have to always keep practicing it. The best book for guitar sight reading that I know of is the:

  • A Modern Method for Guitar: Volumes 1, 2, and 3 - Berklee
    by William Leavitt

It’s 424 pages of gradually increasing in difficult guitar sheet music in a large font.

A good video to learn sight reading is this one:

The most difficult part of playing the guitar is to memorize all notes on the fret for the 6 strings.

For sight reading, there are the following techniques (see the piano section for more details):

  1. First you will have to start by memorizing a music peace (first parts, then all the music) because you can not sight read it fast enough in real time at the beginning.

  2. You will start to recognize patterns in the structure of the music, parts that repeat and parts that are similar in form, so that you can more easily localize yourself on the music and compress the music more easily in your mind. Recognizing what is the same and what only has little differences, it’s patterns.

  3. You have to know the notes on the G clef by heart, and the upper and lower 4 to 5 ledger lines, but that is really simple, with the book I recommend in this section, from Berklee. We have to know this process, but it is slow to do in real time, so wee will have other tricks to minimize it’s use, but it’s the foundation.

  4. You have to learn to read music not by each note name or value, but by it’s interval in regard to the previous note. That will make you read much faster and will allow you to find patterns in music and patterns in the repetition and moving of the intervals in consecutive notes. The normal process is to detect the first note in the horizontal lines of the staff and then the others, you will try to detect it’s intervals in regard to the previous note. First is a C, next is upper 3º, lower 2º, upper 5º, lower 7º. Normally you only have to remember by heart the 1º, 2º, 3º, 4º, 5º, 6º, 7º and 8º (octave) intervals. And them pattern in the consecutive notes, example the next 4 notes are pairs of 2 notes with an interval of 2 between them and they are going up in steps of interval of one along the staff.

  5. After learning to recognize the intervals instantly, you will need to do the some for chords. Example, you will determine that the root position of the chord is a C and then you will learn to see that the upper two notes are in intervals of 2. This makes the recognition of the chords much faster.

See all the videos from the music Youtube channel LeCheileMusic

  1. We have to be looking always a little bit in front of what we are currently playing to have time to sight read the music sheet and to have time to process it.

  2. We have to learn the fret board by heart, see the book and do scales:

  • Guitar Fretboard Workbook 2nd Edition
    by Barrett Tagliarino
  1. We have to practice a lot, in order to we can use muscle memory to place and move our hands on the fret board rapidly and almost without looking, so we can look at the sheet of music continually.

Books for sight reading

  • Sight Reading Trainer
    by Robert Kay

  • Improve Your Sight-Reading! Piano Grade 1, 2 e 3
    by Paul Harris

Site's for sight reading

Good Books for guitar

Youtube excellent guitar performances

Youtube guitar courses or lessons

Youtube to learn to play songs

Especially good lessons

3 Freely available guitar ebook resources from there respective sites

Nice Youtube guitar channels in Portuguese and Spanish

Guitar forums

  • Forum - Classical guitar Delcamp forum
    They have a free multi level course on classical guitar with free materials, free exams and exams reviews from the members.
    https://www.classicalguitardelcamp.com/


Piano

The king of all instruments :-D

Adult piano learning

It’s never to late to learn tom play the piano :-D
To play the piano you will use all your brain capacity, all your sight, all your earing, all your movement coordination, and the best thing is that this training and practice will make your sharper, mentally more active and more in control of your abilities. It will also sharp your senses and make you see the world in a different way. You will see even more beauty in the world.

To see the different difficulty levels of piano music, see:

To see the different complexity levels of music in the perspective of a composer, see:

To excite you, so that you can learn to play convincing piano even with little knowledge, see:

To see examples of the first year evolution of a person learning the piano, see:

And now for advice from the great pianist Lang Lang, see:

An hilarious but very real diagnostic of the problems that adults have while trying to learn the piano.

  • In Portuguese - Felipe Scagliusi - 7 erros que adultos cometem ao aprender piano (e como evitá-los) - 7 mistakes that adults do while learning the piano (and how to avoid them)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t19SN9LgjeQ

How to start learning the piano even if you don’t have a piano, the paper piano

Even if you don’t have a Piano, and even if you don’t have a 50 dollars MIDI Keyboard Controller connected to a computer (Linux, Windows or Mac) or mobile phone, you can also start to learn how to play the instrument. Just draw a paper keyboard layout on two or tree sheets of paper and put tape between the sheets. To now the correct keyboard measurements of an octave, then it repeats to the right and to the left, see:


“Modern piano keyboards ordinarily have an octave span of 164–165 mm (6.5–6.5 in), resulting in the width of black keys averaging 13.7 mm (0.54 in) and white keys about 23.5 mm (0.93 in) at the base, disregarding space between keys.”

And then play with with your fingers with the paper piano, along this play list:

And see here a really cool technique and to see how useful it is even if you have a piano.

To see that even good pianists can start this way see:

Finding a good and cheap piano or MIDI Controller that works on Linux

  1. If money isn’t a limitation, then go wild and get your self a good grand acoustic piano, from the best brands: Steinway, Kawai, Yamaha, Fazioli, C. Bechstein, Petrof, Steingraeber, Grotrian, Blüthner.

  2. But money is always a limitation :-D The second best thing is an upright acoustic piano. But they are also not very cheap and require that you call a piano technician, to tune your piano 2 times a year, so they have high maintenance costs. Your have all the normal brands like Kawai and Yamaha and others. And if you leave in a apartment, you cannot play at earlier or late hours in the day, because a piano is something loud. No phones syndrome :-D

  3. The next best thing, is to find, what in my humble opinion, are the best 2 digital pianos in terms of keybed and in terms of sound, but not very cheap:

  1. The next best thing, is the cheap KORG D1 that has the very best keybed even when comparing to the sub 1200 euros range of pianos, and this piano is for the price of the most entry level pianos on the market. But has the same keybed that the KORG Kronos at 7x times the price and the same that the KORG Grand Stage at 4x it’s price tag. The sound is good, but for the best sound you can connect it to a computer or a Raspberry Pi and use the free and high quality piano sound fonts that I list below. It has a MIDI DIN Out that you can connect via a cheap 5 bucks converter to USB computer. It weights 16.5Kg and is built like a tank. See the video below.
  1. The next best thing, is a MIDI Keyboard Controller, you can choose a heavy weighted keys MIDI Controller or a synth keys MIDI Controller. In this regard, I have search so many controllers but my current best option for a good controller, at a low price, that as a solid solid built and is USB Class compliant, so that it can work well with no drivers on Linux. The touch of the keys is nice for the price. They are:

See the following video:

To generate the piano sound, you can connect to your computer and use it’s internal audio interface or use a good and cheap external USB Linux compatible audio interface like the following two alternatives, and use the speakers or the headphones:

Good quality and comfortable the headphones, that can go down to 16 Hz so that you can ear, with easy, even the lowest piano music note the A2 – 27 Hz:

Then for a good piano sound, use the free and really good piano sound fonts, that works even on Linux or Raspberry Pi (and windows and MAC). See the section below.

To see how to configure all this on Linux, see the corresponding section below.

  1. Lower price that this, you can have a paper piano that you can see as a really interesting option to start to learn the piano, if you can’t afford a 50 dollars MIDI Keyboard Controller, but you have access to a internet connection or a mobile phone. See the previous section.

Finding good sound fonts or SFZ's for the piano that work on Linux, Windows, Mac and Raspberry Pi.

There are 2 ways to produce a good piano sound with a computer or an electronic device, you can record many wave samples at different velocities (from quieter to louder) that will be played when you press a key or you can physically model and simulate a piano with mathematics and physics.

High quality and free sound font’s of several pianos

My criterion for a piano sound font is that it should be free, it should be a high quality piano sound and that it should work on Linux. If it works on Linux, it also works on Windows and Mac and Raspberry Pi.

You can see several free SFZ Piano instruments in here:

The huge Salamander piano
Yamaha C3, C5 e CF-3
Steinway model D, model B and others
Clav ... and Rhodes
Wurlitzer EP203W electric piano
Yamaha CP80 Electric Grand
Hohner Pianet T

There is also an incredible community, that makes good sampled virtual pianos and have that have several high quality free pianos, see for example the UpRight Spring Piano of Schimmel and others.

Or the great and beautifully sampled piano with a binaural 10.000 dollars microphone:

Physically modeled or simulated sound of a piano.

This is the best quality method for the highest realistic piano sound that you can have, but currently there is no open source software to generate a modeled piano, in my opinion the best modeled or simulated pianos are from:

Then you can always develop one that will be open source, to know more about how a piano is physically modeled see the online books:

and for context the following…

Sight Reading with the piano

Sight reading requires that you read at least 4 to 5 pages of different piano sheet music every day for several months, and it’s a skill that if you stop practicing you will become worst at it, so you have to always keep practicing it.

The best video to learn sight reading is this one:

The most difficult part of playing the piano by sight reading, unlike the guitar, is not the memorize of all notes on the fret for the 6 strings. In comparison to the guitar, the piano keyboard layout is much simpler, your only have to know one octave, and after that the mapping of notes repeats lower and upper in the register. But in the piano, you will be juggling with many more thing at the same time, first you have the staff lines for the clef off G and the clef of F, then you have two independent rhythms, independent notes and times for each hands 5 fingers. And you have much more notes on the ledger lines to memorize.

For sight reading there are the following techniques:

  1. First, you will start by memorizing a music peace (first parts, then all the music) because at the beginning you will not sight read it fast enough in real time.

  2. You will start to recognize patterns in the structure of the music, parts that repeat and parts that are similar in form in the music sheet, so that you can more easily localize yourself on the music and compress the music more easily in your mind. Recognizing what is the same and what only has little differences, it’s patterns.

  3. You have to know the notes on the G clef staff and on the F clef staff by heart, and the upper and lower 4 to 5 ledger lines. We have to know this process, but it is slow to do in real time, so wee will have other tricks to minimize it’s use, but it’s the foundation.

  4. You have to learn to read music, not by each note name or value, but by it’s interval in regard to the previous note. That will make you read much faster and will allow you to find patterns in music and patterns in the repetition and moving of the intervals in consecutive notes. The normal process is to detect the first note in the horizontal lines of the staff and then the others you will try to detect it’s distance interval in regard to the previous note. First is a C, next is upper 3º, lower 2º, upper 5º, lower 7º. Normally you only have to remember by heart the 1º, 2º, 3º ,4º, 5º, 6º, 7º and 8º (Octave) intervals. And them the pattern in the consecutive notes, example the next 4 notes, are pairs of 2 notes with an interval of 2º and they are going up in steps of intervals of one along the staff lines.

  5. After learning to recognize the intervals instantly, you need to do the some for chords, example you determine that the root position of the chord is a C and then you learn to see that the upper two notes are in intervals of 2. This makes the recognition of the chords much faster.

See all the videos from the music Youtube channel LeCheileMusic

  1. We have to be looking always, a little bit in front of what we are currently playing to have time to sight read the music sheet and to have time to process it.

  2. Like with a PC keyboard, if you can already type fast, you can type without looking at the computer keyboard. The same happens, with time with the Piano, and this is very important because to sight read at normal speed you have to keep your eyes on the music sheet and not on the piano keys. This is very important for speed. So, how do you train yourself to not looking at the piano? You can make a “aparatus” out of cardboard that covers the piano keys giving you a small distance for your hands movements. And at the beginning try to find your location, with the sense of touch, from the different block of black keys in the octave. With time you will learn it by heart and you will not remove your eyes from the music sheet. See this process here:

  1. You have to practice a lot, so we can use muscle memory to place and move, the right and left hand and fingers to produce the respected interval between sequence notes and chords without looking at the keys of the piano.

Books for sight reading

  • Sight Reading Trainer
    by Robert Kay

  • Improve Your Sight-Reading! Piano Grade 1, 2 e 3
    by Paul Harris

Site's for sight reading

Good Books for the piano

Discover good music for piano of all periods

See the video description to know the music / composition that is being played and then go the next step and find on youtube the best interpretations or recordings of each music, compositio or concerto.

Good youtube channels and sites

Good youtube videos

Piano forums

Finding a good and cheap Audio Interface that works on Linux

To generate the piano sound, you can connect to your computer and use it’s internal audio interface or use a good and cheap external USB Linux compatible audio interface like the following two alternatives, and use the speakers or the phones:

They also have a headphones output with volume control and you can connect to them a instrument Hi-Z Jack (example Electric Guitar or Acustic / Classical Guitar internal sound system). Or externally you can connect a Condenser Microphone (2 channels XLR with 48V fantom power to up to two microphone) to record directly you acoustic guitar sounds or tour vocals.

Finding a good and cheap microphone for vocals and classical or acustic guitar

In the market there are very good and very expensive large diaphragm condenser microphones, one of the best of the not incredible expensive ones is the:

From what I can search and in my opinion, a good one on the cheaper side of things is the:

How to record or play live an Acoustic Guitar from a piezo pickup - Impulse Response

The sound from the piezo isn't a real replica of the sound of the instrument that you listen directly from the instrument. So you will need to record some WAV files from it and from a condenser microphone simultaneouslly. Then calculate with a small program the impulse response (IR) that will transform the linear "distorted" piezo output into the sound that the instrument acustically produces, and that you can listen to. The IR is then applyed to the guitar recording track, or you can use a IR speaker simulator like Two Notes Torpedo C.A.B. M+ Speaker Sim, this will enable you to apply it in real time to your sound and make the transformation (convolution of the IR). The ToneDexter from Audio Sprockets does this in a one stop solution. But you have the option to choose between the three possibilities ... apply the IR on the computer, realtime on a IR speaker simulator. or use the ToneDexter that does all the process. But read on the technical details about the subject, because they are really interesting.

Configuring all things to work on Linux (Ubuntu / Debian) with open source software

To see how to configure all the open source programs, study the following web pages and youtube videos:

For the Raspberry Pi, see:

See also my notes on how to learn linux:

Disclaimer

I talk about diferente products, because after a long and dificult search for good solutions that are low cost but have quality, those ones, where the ones I choose for me, I payed them with my money and they are not a payed advertise. The fact that for me they all have to work on Linux is another parameter that I have always in my mind when choosing a product. Normally, the manufactor, doesn't tell you, that it works in Linux or that it is USB Class Compliant, a sign that it will work, so you have to dig deeper into forums, reviews and the internet in general. That was what I did heavilly.

License

The text of this notes is on Creative Commons License.
They are only my notes and may not be 100% accurate, so double check them, use them only as an indicator, not has something written in stone.

All my other guides

Have fun!

Best regards,
João Nuno Carvalho

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My notes for the intrepid adventurer!