Monthly Archives: April 2010

Special Book Price for Music Matters Blog Readers

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One of the things I discovered (quite to my surprise!) when I connected with people at the MTNA Conference this year is that many of the readers of this blog had formed certain ideas about who I am that are not quite in line with reality. ;-) For example, I found out that quite a few people thought I was married and had children – neither of which are true. One friend who knows me said that another teacher was so insistent that I was married that when my friend assured her I wasn’t, she surmised that I must be divorced – which is also not true. A couple others thought I was a homeschool mom – also not true.

So, in order to set the record straight (and to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of the release of my first book!), I wanted to offer a special deal for anyone who is curious to know who I really am, how I got started teaching piano, why I started this blog, some of the philosophy and ideas behind my teaching, plus lots of other things! From now through the end of this month, you can order a copy of my book: Pajama School – stories from the life of a homeschool graduate for only $12. Just checkout at SibroPublishing.com with the coupon code: MMB. And if you have any friends or students/families that you think would enjoy the book, you are welcome to order multiple copies at this same discounted price. Also, if you want your books autographed (either a generic autograph or personalized), just leave a note to that effect in the comments box when you checkout and I’ll be happy to autograph them for you!

Free Mozart Downloads for Munchkins!

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As long as I’m thinking about little kiddos this week, I thought you all might want to check out this great offer! At Munchkin.com you can download a couple of complete albums full of selections by Mozart. There are two albums – Mozart Wombsong and Mozart for Toddlers. Each one is divided into three sections – Wake Up, Play Time, and Sleep Time. You can download the whole album at once or pick and choose specific pieces. What a great resource!

Pre-Piano Camp Ideas!

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In addition to offering a regular summer piano camp for my students this year, like I’ve done for the past several years, I’m also planning to offer a pre-piano camp for 3-5 year olds. I’ve taught preschool music classes in a co-op setting before, but haven’t ever offered such a camp here in my studio. I am really thrilled about this possibility, though, because I think it’s so helpful for children to have musical experiences prior to commencing piano lessons. I’m still working out all the lesson plan details, but I came across this wonderful collection of Early Childhood Online Music Resources on Joy’s Color In My Piano blog several weeks ago and have had it bookmarked ever since!

The format I’m planning for this pre-piano camp is a 1-hour class once a week on a weekday morning. The hour will be divided into 10-minute increments with a whole variety of different activities to keep the children engaged and excited about what they are learning. I have quite a few families interested in the class, so I think we’ll have to limit the size, but I’m really excited to see how it goes!

Have any of you all put together your own class like this before? Any resources or suggestions that you think would be helpful in planning and preparing for it? I’ll take all the input I can get! :-)

Melodic Minor Scale Fingering Diagram Added

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For those who missed it, I updated last week’s Free Piano Scale Fingering Diagrams post to include the melodic minor scales. Originally I didn’t create melodic minor scale fingering diagrams because I figured there wouldn’t be much demand for them. So much for that theory! Based on the feedback and requests I’ve received, I went ahead and created these melodic minor scale fingering diagrams as well. The upper layer of numbers (black and white) is for the ascending scale, and the lower layer of numbers (gray) is for the descending scale. This seemed like the best way to reflect the fingering and key changes within the scale. Let me know if you have a better suggestion!

Minor Scales – Melodic

Monday Mailbag – Scale Blocks

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Would you mind also explaining your step 1 of how you make the scale blocks – why you needed 12 of the first block and only 8 of the next ones?  I’m sure there is a very simple explanation, but at this moment it is eluding me!

This is in reference to the How to Make Your Own Scale Blocks post.  The only reason I did this is because I made four full sets of two octave C  scales, and I placed a C at the beginning, middle, and end. Here’s the picture so you can see what I mean:

It would probably make just as much sense to do an equal number of all the blocks so that it would be consistent for forming any scale, but I decided to do a few extra of the C-block. Click here for a variety of games and activities that you can play with your students using the scale blocks!

Remember, if you have a question you’d like to contribute to next week’s Monday Mailbag, leave it in the comments below or send me an e-mail sometime this week with Monday Mailbag in the subject line!

Helpful Scale Resources

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I guess I’m on a scale kick this week! One of my students asked me if I knew of any good on-line resources for scales that included an audio recording of the scale. She’s an aural learner, so it’s really helpful for her to hear what she should be playing. I did a bit of sleuthing around and came across some pretty cool stuff.

For example, did you know there is an iPhone App called Scales & Modes? It’s beautifully designed and contains a ton more scales and modes than your average musician would ever need to know. My student was able to download this for only $1.99 and use it with her iTouch!

This Your Accompanist website has downloadable mp3 recordings of the Major and minor scales, plus a few others.

Here’s a printable set of scale fingerings (on the staff), grouped according to fingering patterns. A handy reference.

The Piano Tricks website contains several short, concise tutorials on different musical concepts that could be helpful for students to reference for reinforcement. Sometimes it just helps to hear the same thing several times from several different sources!

Anyone else have any great resources for understanding and learning scales? I’d love to know about them! You can never have too many, right?!

And I thought I knew about all the best places for free teaching resources…

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…well I was wrong! As I mentioned yesterday, in looking through some of the websites that teachers sent me, I found some really gems. One in particular merited an immediate subscription to the blog feed and a mental note to come back and peruse in more depth for some specific resources. If you haven’t seen it, you have got to check out Jen’s Piano Studio Blog!

Jen has some wonderfully creative and helpful (and free!) game and activity ideas and worksheets that you can download and use in your studio. I really love this Major/minor scale identification manipulative activity set with little feet representing the half and whole steps. What fun! I also love these Symbol Search worksheets. What a great way to help students identify all the symbols they should know in a piece of music. I’m sure you’ll have as much fun exploring this site as I did!

Piano Teacher Website Listing is Up!

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We already have a nice collection of studio websites, so I’ve compiled all the links received thus far and put together a page for the  Piano Teacher Website Listing. There is also a link in the right sidebar so that you can easily access the list. I’ve already come across some fabulous ideas just from looking at these websites! (Incidentally, I decided to keep this list to just studio websites since I have another category listing for Music Blogs already.)

I think I got everyone included who either left a comment or sent me an e-mail. If you are not listed, but would like to be included, just send me an e-mail and I’ll update the page to include your site.

Free Piano Scale Fingering Diagrams

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For some reason, some of my students really struggle with scale fingerings. I’ve been trying a variety of different tools to help them remember and master the fingerings. One of my students suggested placing diagrams in the back of the assignment books with fingerings for all the scales. I thought that was an excellent idea, so I created the diagrams below for that purpose. Next year, I’m planning to include a complete set in the back of every assignment book.

Feel free to download and print these free piano scale fingering diagrams for use with your students (let me know if you catch any mistakes or have any ideas for improvement!):

Major Scales

Minor Scales

UPDATE:

Originally I didn’t create melodic scale fingering diagrams because I figured there wouldn’t be much demand for them. So much for that theory! Based on the feedback and requests I’ve received, I went ahead and created these melodic minor scale fingering diagrams as well. The upper layer of numbers (black and white) is for the ascending scale, and the lower layer of numbers (gray) is for the descending scale. This seemed like the best way to reflect the fingering and key changes within the scale.

Minor Scales – Melodic

Monday Mailbag – Recording MP3s

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Ensembles, I love ‘em! They are hard to coordinate and take a lot of patience during rehearsals. I have done what you do, students split lesson times. But only after each has their part learned fairly well. I always play the other part, up until then so they know what the whole thing should sound like.  I love that you record the part as an mp3. That is a super idea. I haven’t looked but could you give us the run down of what technology you have in your studio and what you need to record and compress into an mp3 for us, please?

Would you believe I searched and asked around for several years before finally figuring out how to record CDs and MP3s in my studio?! And now that I know how easy it is, I can’t believe how difficult it is to get straight answers about how to do it. I know that many other people face the same frustration because the two posts that deal with how to set this up in your studio are two of the most frequently visited posts on this site! Just read over these two posts and you should be set up and ready to record, compress, and either send or burn mp3s in no time at all!

Record Audio CDs in Your Studio

Recording Made Easy

Remember, if you have a question you’d like to contribute to next week’s Monday Mailbag, leave it in the comments below or send me an e-mail sometime this week with Monday Mailbag in the subject line!