9/3/2023 0 Comments Absolute pitch trainer![]() The truth is that this simply does not work for most people, whose playing remains clumsy or musically flat no matter how hard they try to make their playing sound expressive. This minority can learn music in the conventional passive ways and sound good. ![]() Performance mimicry is a knack that a few people possess to a high level. The belief that problems with playing the piano are simply due to a lack of talent is such a cop-out, pedagogically! But this unhelpful belief seems to be confirmed when we encounter another dark talent – the ability to play with musical flair, even when there is no genuine fluent expression. However, it is much better if our musical fluency is based on principles that we understand clearly and consciously: rather than relying on intuition and blind confidence, we can have real trust in our skills, and progress along a path of lifelong learning, always refining and improving them. It’s passive playing that makes most people’s playing stiff and inexpressive, not lack of talent Unfortunately, we tend to revere such dark talents in our culture and generate a disempowering mystique around fluent musical skills, which creates the myth that uncommon, strange and very special talents are necessary for musical fluency. This extremely rare and mysterious talent is definitely not something most people can ever aspire to. You might know one of those extraordinary people who can improvise or play by ear with varying degrees of fluency without actually grasping how they do it consciously. So rhythm training forms a major part of the work you do on this training. Tonal fluency is just not possible without first being equally fluent in the language of rhythm. This common negligence will block fluency. Oddly, people seem less worried about their poor rhythmic awareness. We must also learn to tag rhythmic elements. “Tag” means know and love deeply as meaningful musical elements that make sense – not only as sounds but also as physical, spatial structures within a clear map of our instrument, in this case the keyboard. Instead of being deeply familiar only with certain songs or pieces, we can instead learn to tag tonal or harmonic elements that are used in all music. The typical karaoke approach to understanding music needs to be replaced. Absolute pitch is of little importance anyway, it is a sense of tonal relationships or a map of tonality that we must develop. Studies prove that when we recall a favourite record, we hear it playing in our heads in the right key, not the wrong one. Yes, you read that right! Unless you are one of the tiny percentage of people who suffer from genuine tone-deafness – a rare condition that does exist, like colour-blindness – you have pretty good tonal memory. This training teaches you tonal and rhythmic elements that are instantly recognisable and which you can use to express yourself effortlessly. – these are all elements that the brain processes far too slowly for musical fluency. Intervals, chords, scales, time signatures, note values etc. Aural training just makes you good at aural tests, it doesn’t make you fluent. It is sad that many of us believe the idea that we need to train our musical ear, first before we can expect to be fluent musically, or worse that most of us have little or no musical ear and there’s nothing you can do about it. What about perfect pitch – and aren’t most people tone deaf?
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