Are these strip things worth buying to learn piano?

[robcottam]

Hi, I'm trying to teach my son piano (I don't play anything myself) but I can't afford to pay for a piano teacher.
I've got some sheet music but he really needs to start from absolute zero. I've seen a book which promises to teach you in one hour(!) and there's the Idiot's Guide (which I don't think he'll appreciate ).
I'm thinking of getting some of these just to help him learn the note names



But will they actually help?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has taught or received piano lessons.

Cheers,
Rob C

[thomni]

cat doghouse elephant (the elephant and the cat don't go in the doghouse) and front door garage autos backdoor

that's how i learned it lol
if you can't afford the teacher, don't waste the money on buying more stuff then. hell, take a marker out and let him write them on there.

[robogone]

I'd say don't buy them. Those kind of things are generally not encouraged by teachers anyway as they promote laziness. There are some things that are better just learned without aids, and I think note names is certainly one of them.

[cryophonik]

Obviously, they won't teach your kid how to play, but they can accelerate the process. When I was a kid and first started taking piano/organ lessons, I used something similar to help me find the notes - they were colored stickers with the note names that went on the keys and the colors matched the notes in a music book. It was a simple little guide/crutch to assist in the learning process, and I didn't need to use it for very long. My son is 7 and has been taking piano lessons for about a year now. Early on, he would sometimes struggle a bit to find middle C, so something like these strips may have been useful, but his teacher apparently didn't use them as teaching devices. Personally, I think they're useful for absolute beginners, but your kid should (and probably will) outgrow them very quickly.

[Jafo]

If he can't remember abcdefg, he's got management potential.

Anyway, it's just pattern recognition, easily overcome with practice. Having learned and taught, I find that the real issue is one of understanding why the notes repeat and why we start on c instead of a. It's easy to explain octaves (especially if you have a guitar handy), but alas, I still don't have a good explanation for starting on c... it's probably some stupid modal Church music issue, immune to rationality, but I think it's just that they liked sad music in those days, so they made minor the default.

[rod_zero]

No I don't see how they will help much. It's important to learn to construct scales and have them at your fingertips.

I think the hardest part of learning piano without a teacher is to learn hand and body posture.

Get some videos "Freeing the cage bird" is a good one to avoid developing bad habits http://www.amazon.com/Freeing-Caged-Bir ... B0013C7YLM

some samples here:

There is this guy wich is pretty decent:

There is also the susuki method book wich is simple: http://www.amazon.com/Suzuki-Piano-Scho ... 0739051644

I woudl suggest you don't get your son to make the classic exercises (Hanon, Czerny) and focus on reading music and develop healthy technique.

Other resource that can be fun but I didn't used it a lot in the is synthesia http://www.synthesiagame.com/

[robogone]

alas, I still don't have a good explanation for starting on c... it's probably some stupid modal Church music issue, immune to rationality, but I think it's just that they liked sad music in those days, so they made minor the default.

I may be wrong, but I believe it starts with C because C is the mid note between the two musical clefs that are much more common than the clef notation that includes ranges of the human voice other than bass or treble.

[dea-man]

They should be of help for about 10 minutes, I would think.

[jancivil]

alas, I still don't have a good explanation for starting on c... it's probably some stupid modal Church music issue, immune to rationality, but I think it's just that they liked sad music in those days, so they made minor the default.

I may be wrong, but I believe it starts with C because C is the mid note between the two musical clefs that are much more common than the clef notation that includes ranges of the human voice other than bass or treble.

It's the other way 'round, those two clefs (G and F clef) are made to suit middle C, as the C clefs center on it while placing that line according to range.
Church music is where we find the precursor to 'accidentals', default being none or white keys and this is where C became central in practice. EG: what was known as Phrygian mode was called 'Mode of E', etc. The Greek theory it appropriated took G as basis, Gamma = Ut. Where the word 'gamut' comes from.

[MadBrain]

Wikipedia says that originally, in Boethius's theory, the standard range for a singer was A2 to G4, and notes were thus named A B C D E F G H I K L M N O (j hadn't been invented yet). When more notes were added, they were renamed A B C D E F G a b c d e f g aa bb cc dd ee ff gg. When G2 was added, it was written as Γ (gamma).

So note names start with A seemingly because at one time it was the lowest note in the singing range of some medieval priests. What I've understood about Medieval church modes is that they started on D (dorian), E (phrygian), F (lydian) or G (mixolydian), but that in some modes (such as lydian) the B was more often flattened to Bb than natural.

As for DO RE MI FA SOL LA (notice the absence of TI), those are much weirder and could originally denote either C D E F G A (natural hexachord), F G A Bb C D (molle hexachord) or G A B C D E (durum hexachord) - basically the hexachord was moved around so that semitones always occurred between MI and FA.

[Gamma-UT]

The Greek theory it appropriated took G as basis, Gamma = Ut. Where the word 'gamut' comes from.

That's not really true. If anything the system devised by Hucbald took A (in the second octave below middle C) as the first 'official' note of the scale and in doing so he ignored some key parts of the original Greek theory he was using. Like the Greeks the medieval music scholars didn't think in terms of octaves but first in terms of tetrachords, covering the interval of a fourth. Hucbald's system uses the same intervals, T-St-T, which maps onto ABCD/DEFG/GABbC etc. Except each note had a different name, running from A to aa over several octaves. At this point any real links to actual Greek theory disappear.

The monk "Pseudo-Odo" (nobody knows his real name) extended the range down a note to accommodate some melodies that went to the G below than bottom A. But he'd run out of Roman letters because the capital G was used an octave above. So he nicked the Greek G, gamma. Guido d'Arezzo applied the gamma note to his solfege system, which was instead based on hexachords. The system names notes from the chant "ut queant laxis". The "ut" is always the lowest note in the hexachord. The lowest, 'hard' hexachord in Guido's system starts on the gamma, so winds up called "gamma-ut". However, that is indeed where the word gamut comes from because a chant may need that extended range.

This probably is doing nothing for the OP. Don't buy the strips. It's like putting labels for "brake", "clutch" and "accelerator" on the pedals of a car. Within a few days you'll never forget which is which.

[JumpingJackFlash]

I find that the real issue is one of understanding why the notes repeat and why we start on c instead of a. It's easy to explain octaves (especially if you have a guitar handy), but alas, I still don't have a good explanation for starting on c...

What starts on C? Who says?

Some people think of it like that because of the modern prevalence of C major; there isn't any more to it than that really. If you look, most pianos don't actually don't start on C anyway.

it's probably some stupid modal Church music issue, immune to rationality, but I think it's just that they liked sad music in those days, so they made minor the default.

Nope; not sure where you got this from.

[jancivil]

Rather than the strips, have him note that the area with two black keys is the C to F part, and the area with the three black keys is F to C. Fill in the blanks. Stupider people have managed it.
I think a crutch like that is never a good idea.

[dea-man]

Besides, why pay for something like those strips?

I mean, if you really need such a "crutch", a little paper, scissors and a pencil, will get you the same item.

[Musicologo]

+1 to Jancivil "method".
When I was 7 my dad told me "C is before two black keys, F is before 3 black keys.". I've never forget that, the rest is just logic.