welcome to piano video lessons year one lesson one. The best way to experience
these lessons is on my website pianovideolessons.com there you'll find
the complete lesson index and printables. In this series of lessons were moving on
from the beginner lessons we learned to play piano without reading music. In this
series we're going to be learning to play piano while reading on the staff.
In order to complete this lesson it's important that you know two things
you must know it's all the piano key names and also your piano finger numbers
so before embarking upon at this Year One series of lessons it's a very good idea to go
back and check those two lessons which I have already taught in the beginner
piano course you can click appear in the corner and check the information cards
for all of the links that I'll be mentioning in this video. So, let's get started.
In order to play music we are going to be reading music on the staff
and we're gonna be reading notes and a note can be represented with just a
circle that's the most basic form of note and we'll call that a whole note so in
order to read those notes we need to understand a little bit about the piano itself
Piano notes are sounds of course but they can be represented visually with these notes
and sometimes the sound goes higher and sometimes the sound goes lower
if you think about a bird in a tree you can remember that notes that move up to
the right are called high notes and if you think of something low on the ground
like maybe elephants or a shark underwater these are the low notes on
the piano so anytime I refer to high notes I'm talking about notes that are
to the right and if I'm talking about low note I'm talking about notes that are to
the left. So if I visually represent these notes as high and low that helps
us understand a little bit about the way the staff works so let's have a look at
the concept of the staff because this is where we're going to be reading the
music. Here you can see a staff it's actually two separate "staves" that's the
plural for staff. There is one staff at the top and the staff is these
five lines and this set of five lines is for the right hand and this set of five
lines, the lower set, is for the left hand so each hand is going to be reading
its own staff. At the beginning of the staff there are some symbols. This symbol
is called the treble clef. If you are going to tune the sound on your
stereo and you wanted to adjust the high sounds you would adjust the treble on
your stereo so this treble clef is the way we represent the highest sounds on
the on the staff for piano we usually play these sounds with the right hand
because it is convenient and we can also play these sounds with the left hand
because it's very possible. But, in general, and for getting started we're
going to think about using this treble clef on the top staff for the right hand.
If you are going to tune your stereo to adjust the low sounds you would adjust
the bass on your on your car stereo and so bass means low sounds and low isn't
this direction so in order to represent these notes on a staff with only five
lines we could put them all on this treble staff we needed another staff so
we have this bass staff with a bass class at the beginning.
so if I move down into this range here I usually use my left hand and so the
lower staff will represent left-hand notes, especially at the beginning but
the right hand can play in this area so don't get it in your mind that bass
staff is always for left hand. The LOW staff is the left-hand staff and the
HIGH staff is the right hand staff. Awesome! So that helps under help you
understand what these five lines are for but we still don't have any notes on the
staff, so let's try some notes and like I said before a note really can just be
a circle so I can draw one note right here. If you look at that note you'll
see that it has a line going through the middle of the note. We call this a "line note."
If I move it up just a little bit it's got a line on either side of it, so
in the middle of this note there is no line. This is called a "space note" and as
I move this note up the staff it goes through this series of line notes and
space notes. So, I can place a note on a line or I can space place a note between
two lines. We would call this one a line note because it has a line going
through the middle of it just like a bead on a string going right through the
middle of the bead. Here we will call this one a space note, and again, it's
because there is only space inside this note there's no line going through that
note. When we write music on the staff there are five different places we could
put line notes on the staff: one on each line. And there are four different places
where we could write space notes within the staff: one in each space. When we move
along the piano we will start
on a line or a space note; in this case I started on a line note.
the note that's beside it is the very closest note ( I'm going up in this case.)
so these are both the same, they're both on the same line, now if I go up the
smallest amount I can. I go up to this first space. If I go up again I'm going
to move from this same note up to the very next note which will put me on
another line. On line two. I can move up another note
and will this one be a line note or a space note? What do you think? I'm going to move up just
a tiny bit here and I'm going to be in space two. Again, I can take another step
from space to up one white key and end up on the next note it's a line note and
I think you can see that I'm building a pattern here: every time I go up a note
I'm alternating between lines and spaces. So this is the way the notes move on the
staff. And what we're going to be learning to do is actually recognize
each one of these pitches for its own note that it will be representing.
So, rather than just in general moving up the notes, we are actually going to know
specifically which notes each of these line or space notes represents.
So let's have a look at your lesson materials. You can see here there's a review of
everything that I've just told you that music is written on the grand staff.
The top staff is for the right hand and that the bass staff is for the left hand.
Now, just to clarify: when we're playing piano music keys the treble
staff and the bass staff aren't just hovering beside each other.
They're actually connected. So I'm going to draw a line down here.
That's bar line. And then to show that this is played by the same performer there's a
brace in front of this bar line. So anytime you see this brace and bar line
with two staffs we know it's a Grand Staff and that is what piano music is
written on. We also said that the treble cleff is where the high notes
are written and the bass clef is where the low notes are written.The right hand
usually plays treble clef notes the left hand usually plays bass clef notes.
Here you can see I have shown an example of a line note
and an example of a space note. So, now it's time for you to practice drawing
these. Get out your pencil and draw some notes making sure that each one of
these has the line going right through the middle of the note. Make sure that
your not squishing it like this or squishing it like this..this makes it
difficult to read.
Keep your notes centered on the line. And then you can practice drawing some space
notes and again keep your notes centered between these two lines These one are looking good.
here's a bad example where I've gone over this line and here's another
bad example where I've gone over this line and here's a bad example where I
didn't touch the lines at all. So try to make your notes touching the lines on
both sides. Then we can draw the five notes going up on each line of the staff
just to help us recognize that notes will be moving in different directions
up or down. And here we have the four space notes so go ahead and print out
(if you haven't already)
this worksheet. Read through the information make sure you understand
that all we watch any portions of the video that you might need re-explaining and
do the written work. In lesson two you are going to be learning two of the
notes: middle C in trouble G. And we're going to be playing a song using those
two notes called "Google Maps." so click up here in the corner to take yourself to
the website and also there's a link to this lesson number two
alright see you in the next lesson!