Archive for September, 2009

i need it for a school project!

All details are on their home page

I live in the Dallas area. I want to buy sheet music, like songs people would know what I’m playing if I played it in front of someone. Ex. Taylor Swift or something like that.

http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/

they have tons of sheet music.

I want the piano sheet music for "My Declaration"by Eliza Bennett,can anyone give me some websites?

I thought Eliza Bennett was Caroline Bingley’s pet name for Elizabeth.

At any rate…do what Jane Austen would have done: go to a (music) library and get the piano sheet music for My Declaration by Eliza Bennett.

Or if you’re lazy look it up on Google. Just type it in and click away. Who really needs an instruction manual for that?

I need some piano sheet music that sounds very nice but is also challenging. I’ve been almost playing piano for 3 years. So does anyone out there know any title of songs i can play? thanks

The level of music you need depends on the level of difficulty that you are currently playing, not necessarily how long you have been playing.

Without knowing exactly where your technical level is, I would recommend that you check into the following:

J.S. Bach: anything from "The Notebook for Anna Magdalena" http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/product.php?inventoryID=100001119&classID=
"Prelude No. 1" from the Well-Tempered Clavier Bk 1 http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/product.php?inventoryID=100000463&classID=
Beethoven: Fur Elise http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/product.php?inventoryID=100000522&classID=
Brahms: Hungarian Dance No. 5 http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/product.php?inventoryID=100005631&classID=
Burgmuller: Arabesque or any selection from 25 Progressive Piano Pieces http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/product.php?inventoryID=100066466&classID=
Joplin: any simplified song http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/product.php?inventoryID=100034358&classID=
Kabalevsky: Clowns http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/catalog.php?classID=&dept=K&keywords=kabalevsky+the+clown
MacDowell: To a Wild Rose http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/product.php?inventoryID=100000495&classID=
Tchaikovsky: Italian Song http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/catalog.php?classID=&dept=K&keywords=tchaikovsky+italian+song
Schumann: The Happy Farmer or The Wild Horseman http://www.themusicnmorestore.com/inventory/product.php?inventoryID=100000163&classID=

I need to find a legal copy of the sheet music. Could anyone please direct me to a site with a link to buy it? I do not want a free download. Thanks.

They also have it on this site: http://homegear.com/r/?q=23135393&r=2116 for $4.95 and you can download it right away.

This article is devoted to learning how to play guitar (and even those just thinking about learning to play or giving the gift of music to a loved one) and how to approach gaining some kind of proficiency on the instrument. Now, we’ve all seen people playing the guitar at various times, sometimes on TV, sometimes up close (a real treat), playing various kinds of music and at varying skill levels. I think the hardest obstacle to overcome when you’re /www.activemusician.com”>learning how to play the guitar or thinking about starting is the thought that playing the guitar is only something musicians can do, or is only for people who are musically inclined. The simple fact is that anyone can learn to play the guitar. It’s just a matter of spending some time with it on a regular basis, and practicing in a manner that’s both fun and productive. Once it becomes part of your routine, it’s only a matter of time before your skill level and confidence develop.

When I started learning the guitar, there were a couple of learning aids I found to be indispensable. They include:

• Learning to Play Guitar Chord Reference Book – This is really helpful when you’re not sure how to play an F chord or a B minor, or want to learn some other ways to play it
• Artist Songbook – This is a songbook which has the piano, lyrics, and guitar chords to your artist’s favorite songs, and is great for learning how to strum and change from chord to chord
• Classical Guitar Book – This helps you familiarize yourself with the feel of scales and arpeggios, and also improves your sight reading
• Guitar Tab Songbook – As you progress, you’re going to want to play some of the guitar parts from your favorite songs note-for-note, meaning exactly as your favorite guitarist plays them. This type of book has the music for this both in standard notation and guitar tablature

I had a very insightful guitar teacher who started off each lesson by showing me a new chord and how to play it. Some good chord reference books that tackle these types of chords are the Whole Book of Guitar Chords and The First Book of Chords for the Guitar both written by Dan Fox. Once I had a feel for the chord, he would choose a song from a songbook from one of my favorite bands that used this chord (say a B minor or an A7) and would have me learn that song using an appropriate strum pattern. My mom played the piano, and would often visit the music store to buy sheet music songbooks from her favorite artists, so eventually I got her to buy me a few gems of this type:

• Beatles Complete – This is a valuable book for two reasons. One is that it’s The Beatles. The second is that The Beatles composed songs with relatively few and very easy to play chords (”I Saw Her Standing There” has three), and also songs with many and often unorthodox chords (”Michelle” has, um, a lot), especially when used in rock music. This makes it a great vehicle for learning new chords incrementally via their songs
• Neil Young – Decade - My brother wore out this recording and when I started playing some of the tunes from it on the guitar, it gave his little brother some instant credibility. Many of the songs in this book were recorded by Neil on the acoustic guitar, so it lends itself to the beginner who’s learning on an acoustic
• Led Zeppelin Complete – This is a strange and beautiful book. It has the main guitar riffs for every Led Zeppelin song on the first five albums (I – IV and House of the Holy) but it’s in standard notation. I spent a summer learning every song in this book and not only did my guitar playing improve, but so did my sight reading
• Eric Clapton Deluxe Revised – This contains some of the best songs from Cream, the Layla disc by Derek and the Dominoes, and some of Eric’s early solo work, but it’s unique in that it has a separate section with some of Eric’s best guitar solos transcribed. Eric is a great role model when you start learning how to play a guitar solo, because some of his solos are simple enough that they can be played by a beginning-intermediate guitar player (though it takes a lifetime to learn to play it with as much feeling as Eric)

Once we covered the chord of the week and the song that went with it, we would tackle a classical piece. One of the best classical books I can recommend, especially if you’re not a classical guitarist, is Classical Studies for Pick-Style Guitar – Volume 1. This book is great for developing your right-hand picking and also for developing your sight reading since all the music is in standard notation. There are some interesting pieces by Matteo Carcassi, which require you to arpeggiate various chords, and also some Bach Inventions that are arranged for duet guitar, so you can play with a friend. You can hear how this sounds in an on-line guitar lesson I created at WholeNote – Bach’s 8th Invention.

The one thing that’s changed over the past decade in sheet music for guitarists is the emergence of guitar tab songbooks. In the late 1990’s, an archive of guitar tablature files was collectively created and dubbed the On-Line Guitar Archives (OLGA), in which random guitarists from around the world created text files containing their own transcriptions of how to play your favorite songs by your favorite bands. The problem was that the quality and accuracy of the transcription was hit or miss. Sheet music companies finally wised up and started releasing accurate note-for-note transcription books, which were the real deal. In my day, you were a god if you could play the guitar solo, “Eruption”, played by Eddie Van Halen off Van Halen I, because you had to learn it by ear off the record, which is pretty much impossible. Today, you can just buy the Van Halen I guitar tab songbook and get all the music for Eruption both in guitar tab and standard notation. Oh, and they also throw in the rest of the songs from Van Halen I, and from Van Halen II, as well. I’ve always loved the whacked-out intro that Eddie plays in Mean Street, which opens the Fair Warning recording. The Van Halen Guitar Anthology Series has the tab for this, note for note, including every last harmonic, pick scrape, bend, and tap. It’s unbelievable. And it’s not just Van Halen. You can find similar guitar tab songbooks for The Beatles, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dave Matthews Band, Nirvana, Green Day, Audioslave and pretty much anyone else you can think of.

Finally, as you develop your practice routine, the one thing most often overlooked during practice is being able to play in time. When you start to get comfortable with chords and strumming, there’s a natural tendency to stop or to hesitate while switching between chords. A good metronome will make you aware of this and force you to play in time. The Qwik Time QT-7 Quartz Metronome is a good budget option and provides a good click, while the Wittner Wood Case Metronome w/ Bell and Cover is the kind you can hang onto forever and pass along from generation to generation (and I should know – I have one from my grandfather). The Fender MT-1000 Chromatic Tuner/Metronome is unique in that you get both a metronome and a guitar tuner in one convenient package. Very handy, indeed.

You too can learn to play the guitar today! Hopefully, this gives you a bit of direction as you learn to play the guitar. Remember that it’s simply a matter of spending some time regularly practicing some of the basics and then applying them to your favorite music. Keep expanding your knowledge of the basic chords and learn to play songs that use them, along with the strumming patterns of the tune. Combined with some classical pieces for dexterity and developing your sight-reading chops, you’ll be well on your way to mastering the guitar in no time!

Christopher Sung
http://www.articlesbase.com/music-articles/learn-to-play-guitar-a-beginners-guide-88437.html

Piano improvising and arranging is an art but definitely not a science. It is all based on chords and chord progressions. There aren’t any steadfast rules for creating an arrangement, nothing to dictate the limitless potential of your imagination. Musicians learn to arrange by simply arranging and improvise by improvising—over and over again. It’s a big game of trial and error. But it’s also a scientific method: you keep the experiments that work, and abandon those that don’t work.

That being said, there are a few things that can help you in the knowledge of piano improvization. Don’t think of these as rules, but rather points on a roadmap guiding you through the vast world of arrangement and improvisation possibilities.

The first step, of course, is to learn as much as you can about chords and how they work. Once you get a handle on piano chords and the chord symbols that represent them such as Fm7, G9, D, C7, etc., you can then learn how to break those chords up in various patterns.
Learn several different chording patterns, such as open voicing, arpeggios, upward inversions, western bass, Alberti bass, swing bass or boogie bass. This course guides you through these techniques, in addition to others, and teaches you to understand when they’re the most appropriate.
Learn some right hand fillers, like octaves (and the multitude of harmonic possibilities associated with octaves), tremelos, grace notes, twangs, runs, and turnarounds. Again, this course teaches you these fills and several others.
Study pre-arranged sheet music. Your local music shop will have tons of music books containing several arrangements; read and play through these in detail. Seeing what other people have done with various pieces of music will help you understand the art of arrangement and also introduce you to new techniques!
Dig into different musical styles, like ragtime, blues or country-western. Pick up some compilation CDs focusing on a particular style of music or purchase some piano sheet music specializing in the style. Understanding the fundamental elements of various styles will help you learn to arrange any song in that particular style—or just add a few stylized elements to any arrangement.
Jump online and type in “chord piano” or “piano chords” into your search browser, and you will come up with a zillion choices where you can learn all you need to know about chords in a reasonably short time. It’s not rocket science, and once you learn a few piano chords, you probably will become addicted to chords and their application to your piano playing.

Duane Shinn
http://www.articlesbase.com/music-articles/playing-the-piano-using-chord-symbols-instead-of-being-tied-to-the-written-sheet-music-51778.html

Most people who took piano lessons as a kid, including me, grew up learning to read music exactly as it is written on the printed page. Being able to read music is a valuable skill, and I am delighted I learned that skill at an early age.

But there is a downside to only being able to read music without understanding what you are reading. A couple real-life examples illustrate the point:

What happens when you are playing and your sheet music slips off the piano and onto the floor? Unless your name is Victor Borge and you can turn the situation into comedy, you will probably find the situation extremely embarrassing. I have seen it happen several times to pianists who play well but who don’t know how to improvise, and it’s not a pretty site. It happened to me once years ago as well. I was accompanying a singer and someone opened a side door, letting a gust of wind sweep into the auditorium and right across my piano. The sheet music scattered onto the stage and a couple pieces blew off the stage. If I hadn’t understood the music and had a grasp of it’s harmonic form, I would have had to stop, pick up the music, get it back in order, and so forth, delaying the soloist and the performance. As it turned out I had several people ask me how I kept playing without the music in front of me. I replied that I knew the chord progressions of the song, so was able to “wrap the chords around the singer” and therefore keep the song going.

So what are chord symbols, and how do they work?

Chord symbols are a shorthand way of writing what is going on harmonically in a song. For example, if I were to write the chord symbols of the first line of What Child Is This? (also known as Greensleeves and several other titles) in the key of Am, I would write:

Am G F E7—which corresponds to the first line of the song and would appear directly above the melody line in the treble clef, so all the pianist would need to do would be to read the melody (tune) of the song—not all the supporting notes.

I think you can see that once you know a few chords this would be infinitely easier to remember than the entire score of the song. Not only that, but that chord progression—A, G, F, E7—repeats several times during the song, so once you know the form of the song, you have a huge advantage over someone who is chained to the written music and has no idea about the logic of the song.

So how does a person learn this “musical shorthand”? It’s no secret—there are books galore on learning chords, plus web sites that teach chords, or you could even pick up a chart of chords in your local music store.

Then buy a “fake book”—a songbook with hundreds or even thousands of songs, each song showing just the melody of the song with the chord symbols listed above it. Each song alone would be known as a “lead sheet”, but cumulatively the collection of songs is known as a “fake book”. Then every day play a dozen or so songs just with the melody in your right hand and the chord in your left hand. It will sound barren at first, but you’re learning how it works.

After a couple weeks of that, instead of playing the melody in your right hand, sing the melody (doesn’t matter at all how it sounds) and use your right hand to break up the notes of the chord you are playing in your left hand. Once you get the hang of it, you can start breaking up the chord in both hands and experimenting with various rhythm patterns.

I am not saying it’s easy; I am saying it’s fun and exciting and that it is worth it many times over!

Duane Shinn
http://www.articlesbase.com/music-articles/how-to-play-the-piano-using-shorthand-chord-symbols-instead-of-reading-the-full-score-65132.html

Why is it easy to compose piano music?

Because you have to start from where you are. This should be fairly easy; Otherwise you have not started from where you are.

A suggestion is to start writing piano pieces for beginners in a progressive order. The idea is that as the pieces get more complicated for the player they will also become more complicated for you to notate and compose and you will subsequently learn as you write.

How is composing beneficial for your piano playing?

1. Your compositional endeavours will make you more and more aware of intrinsic musical subtleties in the music of other composers. When you start to think and feel like a composer you will also become a better performer as well. Performing is also a creative process similar to composing.

2. When you compose you will become a better sight reader.

I remember an assignment I had many years ago when I wrote the music to a musical. It made me aware of many notational problems I had not taken the time to solve for myself before.

When I started to play my piano music again I was astonished when realizing it was much easier for me to sight read complicated piano sheet music. The reason for this I concluded was my concentrated effort to notate my own piano music.

The process to play something with my fingers and and then try to notate the music on manuscript paper was so to speak a reversed sight reading exercise.

What about manuscript paper?

You can use a notation program or you can write on paper or use both approaches. I suggest that you start writing on paper the way that composers have done for centuries.

Composing piano sheet music by hand on manuscript paper is a cheap and effective exercise to learn the various sheet music symbols.

Very often I jot down musical ideas on ordinary white paper after drawing five lines by hand. It works fine if you can’t find your manuscript paper. You can buy manuscript paper for sheet music or print out your favorite format for free on the site http://www.blanksheetmusic.net

In conclusion, composing piano sheet music can become a natural part of your daily practice routine.

Spend half an hour a day composing your own piano sheet music and you will increase your musical knowledge and become an even better musician!

And remember; Composing piano sheet music is fun!

Peter Edvinsson
http://www.articlesbase.com/music-articles/piano-lesson-it-is-easy-to-compose-piano-sheet-music-11018.html