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Horizontal Staff

8/23/2015

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Horizontal Staff
Reading piano music is a complex activity for many reasons. One of the biggest challenges beginners face is correlating notes that go up and down on the staff to keys that go "up and down" (right and left) on the keyboard. One teaching aid that I and many other teachers have found helpful is the "sideways" or horizontal staff. By turning the staff 90 degrees, students can more directly see how the staff and keys are related. Obviously, the staff can't stay that way, but seeing it turned on its side can help students make the connection even when it resumes its usual vertical form.

In 2013, I decided to make a large horizontal staff with "notes" (colored squares) that actually lined up with the corresponding keys on the keyboard. I color coded the squares to match some wooden letter beads I'd bought. Unfortunately, the bead set is no longer available for purchase (and I lost my pink "G" bead!). It's not hard to get your hands on pink, blue, and purple Post-it notes or highlighter tape though, if you like the color matching idea!

I've linked to two files below: an oversized PDF file that can either be printed on a large printer like a plotter or tiled over six 8.5 x 11" pages (see below), as well as an 8.5 x 11" PDF version that includes a printed keyboard.

Horizontal Staff PDF - Oversized (22 x 13")
Horizontal Staff PDF - Letter Size (8.5 x 11")

You are welcome to use these files in your studio and send them home with students for home use! I only ask that you not redistribute or alter them. Please share how you are using them in the comments!

Printing the Oversized PDF at Home:
You can print the oversized file in Adobe Acrobat Reader using 8.5 x 11" paper using by tiling it over 6 pages and trimming carefully!

Screenshot
Tiled Horizontal Staff
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Feeling Volume Changes

4/29/2015

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It can be a big challenge for a young beginner to connect with music notation. There are so many elements: pitch, rhythm, tempo, fingering, dynamics... Students often accidentally leave out dynamics when first playing through a piece. Sometimes the best thing to do is to help them feel the dynamics away from the page. Here's an exercise I recently used: I drew a "dynamics map" of the student's piece using the signs for crescendo and diminuendo. We listened to a recording of their piece and shaded in the dynamics shapes as the music played--making bigger crayon strokes as it got louder and smaller strokes as it got softer. It's great that the shapes we used were actual music notation symbols, but it would work well whether students had already learned these symbols or not!

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Greensleeves

4/26/2015

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A lot of skills in a simple piece: playing from a lead sheet (from Forrest Kinney's Chord Play), playing legato in the right hand with non-legato chords in the left hand, shaping long phrases, playing dotted rhythms, bringing out the melody...
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Star Bright

4/19/2015

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The student composition below was inspired by a piece called Starry Night from 70 Keyboard Adventures of the Little Monster (Volume 2). The dark notes are fixed pitches, the stars indefinite pitches. The student called it, "Star Bright. "
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The Magical Forest

3/31/2015

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This student's composition, an assignment from his book Tales of a Musical Journey by Irina Gorin,  had some mixed meter patterns and I thought it would be cool to harmonize it. He really enjoyed the sound and called it, "The Magical Forest."
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Improvisation

3/19/2015

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A little improvisation:
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Farewell Symphony

10/31/2014

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A student's drawing inspired by Haydn's Farewell Symphony. Notice the empty chairs and musicians walking away!

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Halloween Sounds

10/30/2014

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Tomorrow is Halloween! So, when a student today asked if she could learn a Halloween piece, there really wasn't time to learn a whole new piece. Luckily, I'd read this blog post by Diane Hidy last year! I suggested to my student that we could try taking a piece she already knew and make it more Halloween-y instead. The piece was A Prairie Dog Companion from Piano Safari Level 2.

We changed the key to G minor and then she decided it would sound better in a lower register. She marked the new notes (B flats) with pumpkin stickers :-)

Happy Halloween!

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    Lauren Sonder
    Lauren Sonder is a piano teacher in Norman, OK.
    She believes in providing a well rounded musical education that emphasizes training the ear, learning music in a variety of styles, and being creatively engaged at the piano.

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