Monthly Archives: February 2011

Monday Mailbag – Intervals by Ear

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My students have struggled to identify intervals by ear.  I think some of the games I’ve designed have helped some, but my younger students are still really having a hard time.  Do you have any ideas?

Every year a handful of my students participate in our local Music Progressions evaluation program. One component of the evaluation is a listening test. Some of my students do really well or ace the interval drill portion of the test every year. Some of my students bomb that portion of the test every year. We almost never work on interval drills during lessons. The main reason is because I’m just not convinced that it’s that important. One of the primary factors in student interest, motivation, and practice is relevance. We do lots of playing by ear – picking out familiar tunes, adding harmony, composing original arrangements, etc., because many students love to be able to sit down and play songs without having to focus on printed music. Thus, learning to play songs by ear is highly relevant to them. Being able to accurately identify isolated intervals…not so much.

There is probably a correlation between how accurately a pianist can identify an interval and how easily they can pick out an entire tune by ear at the keyboard, but frankly I would much rather spend lesson time learning to play the songs than doing mundane interval drills.

If, however, you do think it’s really important for students to master this skill (and please feel free to share your reasoning in the comments – I’m open to being convinced!), there are an increasing number of resources available to assist with this. The key (as in most things!) is quantity and consistency. Do lots of ear training exercises and do them every day. This means that the student obviously has to be committed to developing this skill, too. Here are a few resources I’m aware of that are focused on ear training:

Easy Ear Training Apps – I’m hoping to get an iTouch soon, but I don’t have one yet, so I haven’t been able to try these out. But if the caliber of material on the rest of the site is any indication, these apps would be a fabulous way to provide students with a tool to develop their interval recognition skills.

Teoria has a wide variety of specific ear-training exercises, including one for “Intervals Ear Training.”

Big Ears – specifically an interval trainer.

Progressive Ear Training – Wendy, of the Compose Create website, has put together an 8-level (plus a level A) Web Rewards program that walks students through a series of theory and ear-training drills. It’s designed to correlate to our Music Progressions evaluations, but would be beneficial for students anywhere!

Please feel free to share any other resources you’ve come across that have worked well for you and your students!

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!

Custom Design Anything with These Fabulous Music Note and Key Signature Stickers!

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Jeana, of the Sing a New Song blog, has created another wonderful resource that is perfect for custom designing any type of flashcard. Her music staff note/key signature stickers can be printed directly onto address-sized labels and stuck on any piece of paper or other object. The possibilities for such a great teaching tool are endless!

Staff Note Stickers

Super Cool Piano Song Tutorial Website!

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Can I have a new favorite website again this week? Because OnlinePianist.com has got to be one of the coolest sites ever! Do you have students who love to learn songs by rote or by ear? Or perhaps students who want to learn a favorite song from a movie, but don’t have the skills to learn it on their own? Then you must check out this site!

OnlinePianist.com is an animated piano tutorial that you can watch to learn how to play popular songs. Just search by song title or artist and see if you can track down the desired selection. Check out He’s a Pirate – a favorite from Pirates of the Caribbean – to get an idea of how this works. Notice that you can adjust the tempo of the piece (without affecting the pitch since it’s a midi file); you can select either right hand, left hand, or both hands. You can also expand the keyboard so that it fills the whole screen.

In order to view/learn more than two tutorials per day, you have to register and sign-in. However, registration is free and is a very simple process. Once you’re registered you can upload your own tutorials. This process, too, is amazingly simple. Just upload a midi file according to the guidelines and within 24-72 hours it should be approved (assuming they don’t reject it for some reason). You can also submit a request for a tutorial, which apparently goes into a pool that is voted on by other users in order to determine which requests will be produced.

The website also includes a wonderful animated chord keyboard. Just select the key name and quality and the keyboard will play the notes of the chord – blocked, then broken, then blocked again. There are several other parts of the site that I haven’t even fully explored yet, but I just keep uncovering more great material (and some not-so-great material, too, as one might expect with a focus largely on pop music…).

According to an e-mail I received from the developing team, “In the upcoming months we are looking to develop our website with more theoretical features and games that will improve the playing skills of our users.” Sounds fabulous! This will be a perfect resource, especially for students who love doing the Any Song Assignment!

Review and Giveaway of Chord Piano Is Fun!

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Don’t you just love it when someone else does all the hard work and puts together a systematic approach to teaching something that is just the way you would do it? Honestly, it’s pretty rare to find something that’s a perfect fit, but T.K. Goforth has done just that with her book, Chord Piano Is Fun!

The book begins with a fabulous introduction of How to Create a Major Scale, then moves into chords, scale degrees, chord inversions, key signatures, 7th chords, and more! All of this is introduced with the objective of helping pianists learn how to play from a lead sheet (a.k.a. fake book). The layout of the book is very clean, with lots of helpful images, and some of the most concise explanations I’ve read for various theoretical elements in music. This would be perfect for a student who wants to learn chording skills on their own, or for a teacher who is struggling to know how to introduce scales, chords, key signatures, and playing from a lead sheet to his or her students.

I love that the terminology used is accurate, but is broken down in such a way that even beginning students can begin to grasp the concepts. The one exception to this that I’ve discovered is the use of the term, “Family Chords” rather than “Primary Triads.” I could definitely work around this, though, for the value to be gained from the rest of the book. There is even a brief lesson on song-writing in the back that I think would be appealing to a lot of students!

The primary reason that I rarely use theory books with my students is due to a lack of relevance. The written material is divorced from the music that they are playing and it becomes more of a busywork assignment than a real learning tool. A book like Chord Piano Is Fun! is a wonderful approach to learning theory because what is being learned is immediately relevant to music and styles that the student wants to learn to play. I am excited to begin using it in my studio! And the great news is that you can win a copy for you or one of your students, too! Just leave a comment below and you’ll be entered in a drawing to win your own Chord Piano Is Fun! book! The drawing will end at noon (CST) on Thursday, February 17, and the winner will be drawn using a random number generator.

Monday Mailbag – How to Help Students Progress During Teacher Leaves

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I am due with my 3rd child in about a month and currently have 8 piano students. They are all in the Primer Bastien book, except 2, who are in level 1. As important as my piano students and their success is to me, my family comes first, so I have been thinking of taking a break for about a month to adjust to the new baby. I would love to get your input and advice on how to make this break time not hinder the progress of my students and what kinds of things to give my students to work on while I’m out. I welcome any suggestions and thank you in advance for your help.

Although I’ve never needed to take a maternity leave, I’ve taken breaks over the years ranging anywhere from a couple of weeks to three months (when I worked at a camp in another state for the whole summer). It is helpful to give students and their parents an idea of what they can do during the “off” time to keep learning. Here are a couple of suggestions:

  1. Purchase or recommend a specific book or two for each student with pieces easily accessible at their level.
  2. Give each student a handful of OWP Guides: http://musicmattersblog.com/2006/07/27/owp-guide/. Have them fill this out for each piece they learn on their own and bring them back.
  3. Give each student a list of Familiar Tunes: http://musicmattersblog.com/wp-files/familiar_tunes.pdf. Encourage them to figure out as many as they can by ear and check them off on the list as they go.
  4. Give each student a handful of YouTube Performance Evaluations: http://musicmattersblog.com/2010/09/23/youtube-performance-evaluation-free-worksheet/. They can fill these out as they listen to piano performances on YouTube.
  5. Encourage students to record themselves playing their own pieces and the listen and fill out a Personal Performance Evaluation for each one: http://musicmattersblog.com/2010/11/09/encouraging-students-to-listen-to-their-playing/.

I would love to hear suggestions from other teachers on this one! What sorts of things do you recommend to students and their parents that they can work on during time off?

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!

Spice Up Minor Chords

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Jermaine Griggs, over at the Hear and Play blog, recently posted 3 tips for spicing up minor chords. Not only is the information good, it is also displayed in such a visually appealing and helpful way that anyone can quickly understand what he is saying and give it a try. For a very visual learner like me, sites like this are a treasure trove! A great resource for teachers and students alike!

Are you a Betterist?

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Betterfly is a fast-growing site designed to help connect people who want to learn skills (Betterees) with people who can can teach skills (Betterists). According to the site, “A Betterist is a person who helps others learn, look or feel better.” And of course that would include us music teachers!

After being contacted by the Betterfly site staff, I set up my own profile. The process was very intuitive, with step-by-step instructions to guide the user from the moment I clicked the “Sign up” button. This is another great way to get and keep your name and studio visible to prospective students. There are lots of features on the site, making it a great free option for teachers who are still looking to set up a website for their studio. It also serves as a nice complement to websites already in place, as you can just include links directing visitors to your primary website.

There are some inconsistencies that are more annoying than they are problematic when navigating from page to page. I suspect that this will be streamlined as development on the site continues. I would also love to see an option to import blog posts from an external blog, similar to what GoodReads, Amazon, and Facebook allow. That would provide for lots of additional content on the Betterfly site without those of us who already maintain other blogs having yet another thing to try to keep up with. The most frustrating limitation I’ve run into thus far is that the only pricing option is a specified number of hours or minutes for a particular price. Many people, myself included, charge by the month or semester, not by the hour. There was no way around this that I could see, and you are required to enter pricing information. I really hope this gets changed pronto!

And don’t forget, if you’re looking to learn something new yourself, you can easily search according to name or area of interest. Now…how shall I better myself? :-) If you’re a Betterist in something, let me know and maybe we can connect!

Introducing My New Piano Student…She Lives in Germany

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Toward the end of last year some friends of mine who live in Germany contacted me to see if I would consider teaching their daughter piano via the Internet. Since I had a little bit of experience doing this with one of my students last fall, I decided it would be fun to go the next step and take on a full-time student this way. It has been a ton of fun so far! We’ve only had a couple of lessons, but it is working out marvelously!

As you can see, the video quality is great. Current bandwidth limitations still require pretty substantial compression of the audio, but I’m hopeful that that will improve as the technology continues to advance. The set up allows me to deal with technique issues (I could quickly see that the bench was too close in the shot above and had her move it back), fingering, accurate notes, rhythms, etc. – pretty much everything as if my student was sitting a few feet from me in the room.

In addition to what takes place at the lesson, it’s easy for me to e-mail supplementary resources and materials that she can print and use for various assignments. Thankfully, the practice incentive theme that I put together for this year has a ton of printable resources already organized so that I can quickly navigate to them and send them her way!


As you can see, it doesn’t take much to conduct virtual piano lessons. All I have is a TV tray, topped with a box and my laptop. My student and I both have Skype (a free online communication software) on our computers and a built-in webcam. If you don’t have a built-in webcam, you can pick one up at any computer supply store and it should work fine. And that’s seriously it! Imagine the many incredible possibilities that lie in the future with these capabilities! So, if you have the opportunity, I encourage you to just jump in and give it a try. You’ll be glad you did. :-)