"Play Bach in just six weeks"

[superblonde]

I post this not because of the piano topic but because of the suggestion that “45 mins a day, 6 days a week, for 6 weeks” is all it takes, and also, it is a nice inspirational message. If someone knows how long this Prelude no 1 is… that might be the critical factoid here [edit: see bottom].. it sure must be easier than the Stage 3 solo to only take 45x6x6 minutes total! either that or this pianist-author is drastically underestimating.

The pianist James Rhodes tells Clemency Burton-Hill how anyone can learn to play Bach in six weeks.
BBC https://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170110-why-its-never-too-late-to-learn-the-piano
By Clemency Burton-Hill

10 January 2017

Is it ever too late to learn a musical instrument? According to the leading British concert pianist James Rhodes, the answer is an emphatic ‘no’ – and he has just written the book to prove it. The delightfully straight-talking How To Play the Piano is an elegant little volume that promises – with just 45 minutes’ practice a day, six days a week, for six weeks – to enable anyone with access to a keyboard to play one of JS Bach’s most beloved works, the Prelude no 1 in C major from Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

…

“Learning a musical instrument can unlock the door to a new dimension that many of us have forgotten even exists,” Rhodes begins in his opening chapter, and there is no denying the immense appeal of laying aside technology to engage one’s fingers and brain and soul in a pursuit that has nothing to do with email, texting, or social media.

…

Rhodes is careful not to over-promise. “Look, this book won’t have you playing Rachmaninov or Chopin etudes. I was well aware that if you set out with a book about learning to play the piano and you say it takes 10,000 hours, nobody’s going to do it, because for whatever reason, good or bad, it has become hard to find time to simply focus and work on something for yourself. Time is such a precious commodity. But it will have you playing some Bach. And the Bach is still challenging, it will still push you, but it’s as accessible as possible.” He continues. “And six weeks is an outsize estimate: if you have time to practise more, or you played a lot as a kid, it will come back quicker. And it will give you a proper insight into the music. Maybe that in itself will be enough, or maybe you’ll enjoy it so much you’ll decide to get a teacher and learn other things.”

Central to his approach is the beauty of the actual music itself. “I’m a big fan of taking a piece that you want to play and finding a positive way to work at it, not through scales and etudes and exercises, but by simply playing it,” he explains. The book breaks down exactly how to practise in this way, including his genius fingerings, which staves off the potential boredom and frustration that would lead many of us to give up. I tell him I could never face doing scales and arpeggios as a child and I feel no differently about them as an adult.

“Arpeggios and scales are never necessary!” he insists. “In any piece there will be technical challenges that you can work on using the music itself. I also loathe doing scales and arpeggios, but hey, I’m looking at this Mozart concerto that’s sitting on my piano right now, and it’s filled with scales and arpeggios. If you’re working on a piece and achieving something, it’s a great way to learn. Find a piece you love, and work on it through the music.”

Rhodes is evangelical about the joys of connecting or reconnecting with the piano, and beyond the book itself, his website https://www.jamesrhodes.tv/shop/how-to-play-piano/ has tutorials and videos dedicated to help you on your journey. The start of a new year, with all its attendant resolve, seems as good a time as any to take the plunge; our lives, after all, are not getting any longer. “Yeah. We’re not going to be lying on our death bed thinking, I wish I’d sent a few more emails and done a few more spreadsheets,” he jokes. “But you might well think: I wish I’d written that novel or painted that picture. Or learned to play that piece of Bach on the piano…”

As for his suggestion that scales are a waste of time all I can say is, my personal experience totally disagrees with that attitude, for guitar anyways, there is simply no way to easily and quickly learn the shred runs in Speed Kills for example, unless knowing the scales first, at any speed. Without knowing the patterns, the licks are just random, unrelated numbers on the tab… might as well be as mysterious as seeing a tab like |–43-81-93-72-46–| if the scale patterns are not known first, instead of easily understood |–12-14-15–| etc.. not to mention the riff won’t make musical-sound-sense without being able to hear the notes of the scale..

Okay here is the Prelude no 1 from the author’s web site. 34 measures with fingers numbered. reasonable in 6 weeks? who knows? and BPM?

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

Attachments:

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   James_Rhodes_How_To_Play_The_Piano_Bach_Prelude_Sheet_Music-page1.jpg
   

2. 

   James_Rhodes_How_To_Play_The_Piano_Bach_Prelude_Sheet_Music-page2.jpg
   

[Igglepud]

It’s all white keys. I believe it.

MY ROCK IS FIERCE!!!

[Igglepud]

https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=TxD-kAcsyJI

MY ROCK IS FIERCE!!!

[safetyblitz]

superblonde wrote:

As for his suggestion that scales are a waste of time all I can say is, my personal experience totally disagrees with that attitude, for guitar anyways, there is simply no way to easily and quickly learn the shred runs in Speed Kills for example, unless knowing the scales first, at any speed. Without knowing the patterns, the licks are just random, unrelated numbers on the tab… might as well be as mysterious as seeing a tab like |–43-81-93-72-46–| if the scale patterns are not known first, instead of easily understood |–12-14-15–| etc.. not to mention the riff won’t make musical-sound-sense without being able to hear the notes of the scale..

His point is that the traditional piano approach of doing endless repetition of scales and arpeggios isn’t required to enable most casual adult learners reach their piano-playing goals, and he’s right.

And on the guitar front, Joe Satriani, arguably one of the most “musical” sounding shred guitarists, warns against overdoing rudimenary exercises. One of his main pieces of advice to people is to spend the lion’s share of their time working on things that actually sound like music. Albert Lee says the same thing. I don’t think either of those guys would say “you don’t need to know the scales”, but they would say that once you “get them”, it’s a poor use of your time to repeat them exhaustively at the expense of working on repertoire. Failure to heed this advice is likely a major reason so many aspiring virtuouso guitar players get dismissed as sounding “like robots”. I have good friends who did degrees in classical music performance, and to them, one of the harshest things you can say about someone’s musical performance is “he’s just playing the notes”.

[superblonde]

Igglepud wrote:

It’s all white keys. I believe it.

Almost all white keys but most importantly it is repetitive arpeggio. I started practicing it a couple weeks ago (not 45 mins every day tho), and I marked up the sheet that he had on his web site https://www.jamesrhodes.tv/shop/how-to-play-piano/ so you can see the repetition of notes more clearly, here below. I dont know why he doesnt teach it by giving just the chord names with instruction to play the arpeggio.

Thats only as far as I’ve gotten so far.

He has a couple youtube videos demonstrating a few measures.

https://www.jamesrhodes.tv/shop/how-to-play-piano/ Lesson 1 Getting started bars 1&2 HD 1080p https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-u2f5UXFcc

I was going to buy the guy’s book then decided not to 😛 because, I didnt like his emphasis in his videos continually saying, “see, it’s so easy!” (it’s not easy) and it doesnt seem like he teaches it as an arpeggio which would make the most sense to me for learning it fast. Now, he might be a world class piano player, but I dont go to someone having a lot of trouble learning math and keep saying, “look it’s so easy! it’s so easy! just raise the exponent!” Ok, I might eventually buy the book anyways.. he has a totally rock n’ roll attitude 😀

(video below has profanity)

Music and the inner self | James Rhodes | TEDxMadrid

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

Attachments:

1. 

   James_Rhodes_How_To_Play_The_Piano_Bach_Prelude_Sheet_Music-page1-jcline.jpg
   

[safetyblitz]

Can’t remember the source, but that “see, it’s so easy” post reminded me of this math anecdote/joke:

Q: “Professor, I can visualize figures in 2-dimensional space and 3-dimensional space. I even get how you can sort of visualize figures in 4-dimensional space, or even 5-dimensional space. But how can you visualize a figure in, say, 6-dimensional space, or even higher?”

A: “It’s simple. I just visualize the figure in n-dimensional space, and let n go to 6.”

[Byron]

I more or less agree with the guy: one of the things that makes MM work so well is that you start out playing stuff that sounds like music almost from the very beginning.

 

[superblonde]

Ok so Rhodes is a bit.. off.. well, that explains some things I guess.
and here in this interview he reveals that he was doing ‘visualization exercises‘ for years as a kid (without realizing it)..

Lunch with …
Interview
James Rhodes: ‘I’d give £50,000 to anyone who could guarantee me a good eight hours’ sleep’
By Tim Adams
The pianist and author of a raw memoir of child abuse talks about salvation through music

Sun 18 Mar 2018 08.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/mar/18/james-rhodes-pianist-author-fire-on-all-sides-interview

… Music has been Rhodes’s enduring salvation. He is a pianist of enormous affective intimacy. His memoirs – the second is about his nerve-shredding life on the road and the breakdown of his second marriage – are accompanied by Spotify playlists of Beethoven and Rachmaninov. As he talks, he tries not to separate life from music in his head, an instinct that goes back as far as he can remember. “When I was eight or nine I had these tapes,” he says, “of pianists I loved and I would close my eyes in bed every night and listen to them and pretend it was me playing. My favourite recordings were of live performances, and I could hear the applause, and that was even better because I could imagine it was me they were clapping.” Those tapes literally kept him alive through those years, he says now, because otherwise, inside his head and outside at school “it was a f* war zone”.

He still lives with the physical and mental fallout of the abuse. Any scenes of sexual violence in films or books, for example, will cause him to throw up, he says, and he cannot predict whether he will have good days or bad days, but he has strategies to employ. On bad days, he suggests in his book, “if somebody looks at me funny, doesn’t reply to an email, unfollows me on Twitter, brings the wrong food order in a restaurant, I want to kill or be killed.”

…

He is on a mission to bring music to schools, where it has been squeezed out of the curriculum – in part because it is an antidote to our attention-deficit lives. He has written a piano tuition book with the aim of having anyone play with 40 minutes practice a day. He looks around the garden centre cafe: “In six weeks anyone here could be playing a piece of Bach!” he says. “And I think that has to be equally as rewarding as learning algebra. There was a time when there were more pianos than bathtubs in homes. What happened to that?” …

“There is a sense of achievement once you’re done playing,” he says. “But not for long. If in a concert where I have played 100,000 notes and put two grams of extra weight on one finger on one key, the whole concert is fucked for me.” How do you live for five minutes like that, he asks himself. “Well,” he says, “the answer is that you try to do it again.”

I'm an intermediate student of Metal Method. I play seitannic heavy metal. All Kale Seitan! ♯ ♮ ♭ ø ° Δ ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
And on the Seventh Day, Mustaine said: ∇ ⨯ E = - ∂B / ∂t ; and there was Thrash; and it had a ♭3; and it was good.

[Author]

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