Congrats on your final lesson of 2022! I’m very proud of all your growth this year. In the folders I sent home with you there’s a BINGO sheet of fun piano activites to apply to any piece of music you want. Get 5 in a row (or a blackout!!) and bring the sheet in to show me at our first lesson of 2023 and you’ll receive a small prize :D Happy Holidays!
Isabella
You’re working on Dance Band and Frogs on Logs. Frogs on Logs requires you to “hop” your hand up the piano each time a circled finger number appears above the music. This piece uses fingers 2, 3, 4. As always, I encourage you to play along with the recordings by scanning the QR code with a tablet/phone if you can!
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. I am so impressed with how steady you play this! Great work. If you need the notes for the sections you already know, please refer to last week’s homework, but your starting note is G.
The new section we learnt today: “then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say” goes like this:
AACAGEG FAGFE DEGABBB CCBAGFD
The pieces I gave you in your binder are Pop Goes the Weasel and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Pop! is easier and shorter. Super is very fun and a little longer – watch a YouTube video to see the clip from the 1964 Mary Poppins movie, it’s so fun! Enjoy :)
Jadon
In your binder I gave you the End Credits piece from Interstellar and Arrival to Earth from Transformers. Try to challenge yourself to read them off the page rather than learning off YouTube – it will only get easier by doing it :)
Next year we will begin a new book: Alfred’s Basic Adult All in One Book 2 or Faber’s Adult Piano Adventures All in One Book 2.
They both will continue your skills.
Marco
Great job with your christmas pieces! Keep working on putting We Three Kings hands together right up to Christmas:)
For Never Gonna Give You Up, it is not difficult note wise, the rhythms look more complex – but because you know the song so well your ear can fill in the rhythms! When there are triads, try to figure out what they are and right them in. Since this is a pop song the chord progression will repeat and get easier to expect as it repeats.
Mission Impossible. The trickiest part of this will be reading the low notes. Use the landmark notes you do know to figure them out. This piece is in 5/4, which means there are 5 quarter notes per measure. Sing the melody and clap each quarter note and you will quickly figure this out. Emphasize beat 1 to make it easier on yourself.
Have fun and don’t feel pressured by these! Even isolating a few bars and playing them is awesome and we can build on it in the future!
Daniel
You are now encouraged to play Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer :)
I Saw Three Ships – Ideas to make the pulse consistent hands together: Play LH while singing RH, play RH while tapping the LH/or reverse, record one hand to a click track to play along with etc. Keep in mind that with a click track, you’ll want to hear 2 clicks per bar as this is in 6/8. It’ll be, click 2 3 click 5 6.
Four Wheel Drive – quarter notes need to be really steady and on the beat. Notice how there are lots of ties over the bar line? To help us be able to perform those we must have the notes that ARE on the beat, really accurate. I encourage you play along to this video, there is full speed and then a slow version at 0:52.
Shelton
Boogie and Starlit. Boogie is all skips (line to line or space to space on the staff) except for the two spots we circled. These skips will be white notes that aren’t beside each other.
For Starlit, only play up until the star I drew. These two musical phrases are like two sentences. Keep everything that is connected by the curved line connected on the piano too. This means there should be no “holes” in the sound. We do this by using our fingers like when we walk – there is always one foot/finger touching the ground.
The pieces I gave you in your binder are things we can grow into. You know the notes for the RH of the Imperial March, and I can teach you the other ones in the new year! For Bahay Kubo, the opening note is G and then you can use a combination of using G to figure out the other notes and using your ear to determine the melody. Have fun with it! No pressure:)