Oh No! My Child Is Playing By Ear!

In the 2nd and 3rd year of Let's Play Music, students play and pass off dozens of repertoire pieces. During some daily practice, you'll likely have the experience of noticing, "Hey! She's not reading the music!"  You might feel a impressed, then a bit worried.

Is She Even Reading the Music??

In Let's Play Music, we train those little ears so incredibly well that most students become great at playing by ear.  They hear the song a few times, and they've got it! It's easy to accidentally forget to train the eyes, too.

Every student has strengths; some rely heavily on their ear skills and others are more visual learners.  Whichever type of learner you have, there are things you can do to bolster their skill in reading notation. 

How We Teach Music Notation

Just as a reminder, this is how we teach music notation (full post) in Let's Play Music:

1. Expose students to lots of simple tunes: so they can find meaning in what they decode. It's fun to realize you're reading something familiar.

2. Show how notes work: up, down, step, skip. Bells an keyboards are the best for teaching since each note has one definite physical bell corresponding.

3. Learn common patterns: quickly recognizing common patterns and chords is similar to quickly recognizing sight words. You can read faster because you recognize these melodies and chords at a glance.

4. Read anchor notes: Middle C, treble C, bass C and a handful of others are the first notes students can read, then go find on the keyboard. Starting from an anchor note, they can read the rest of the song with skips/steps.

5. Find any note: that's note-spelling. Musicians don't read a whole song that way, but at the beginning of each phrase or chunk, we check to make sure we're starting on the right note.

6. Start with success: Reading chords and reading familiar tunes means they will sound awesome from day one. It's very motivating.

7. In loving arms: The emotional atmosphere of our teaching has a big impact on how well children learn!

Don't Look at Your Hands

Sometimes in class we encourage students to look at their hands when teaching keyboard geography or tricky fingering.  Looking at the keys as she hears the sound they make also strengthens neural connections between those keys and the way they sound.  Looking at hands is not all bad!

But, looking at hands excludes the student from looking at notes, a skill necessary for note reading. It also means the student is linking their proprioceptive skill (ability to move body parts and know where they are in space) with visual input-- a habit we want to break.  

Don't worry, she learned to walk without looking at her feet. Eventually she can play without looking at her fingers.  

A gentle way to strengthen proprioceptive skill is to have her put her bubble-shaped hands gently on top of her head (so she can't see her fingers), then sing the bubble hand song so she'll tap the fingers without looking at them.

Covering hands by hovering a book or sheet of paper a few inches above is perhaps the best way to break a habit of looking down instead of up, but can be scary for nervous students.  At first it will be challenging and the student won't look at anything.  She'll be imagining her hands and visualizing the fingers moving.  Once she can move her fingers without needing to visually imagine it, her eyes and brain will be available to look up at the notes as she plays them.

Whenever possible, remind your child with a "DO" action instead of a "DON'T" action.  "Don't look at your hands" leaves a child with a few steps of interpretation...what should I do!?  Instead, remind "Keep your eyes up on the notes."

Matching Eyes to Ears

A big part of reading is wiring the brain to recognize that the written notes correspond to the sound coming from the keys.  Even if your child is already playing a song perfectly, it is still very valuable to follow the notes visually as they are being played.

A parent can sit next to the child and point a finger or pencil at each note as the student plays it.  

I recommend sitting on the child's LEFT SIDE so that your arm is not blocking notes to come- we want her to be able to see what's coming in her peripheral vision and start processing it before she even gets there.

A slightly more complex way of pointing is the V-Fingers. Hold your left hand in a "peace" sign and tip sideways. Now one finger points at the treble clef while another finger points at the bass clef, sliding your < left-to-right as the music plays.  This is a good way to point to music when students need to match up two-hand playing and time them correctly.

Another game for matching eyes to ears is laser beam eyes.  Tell your child to imagine lasers coming out of her eyes.  She can shine a laser onto each note as she reads it.  Only when the eye-laser is shining on a note AND the note is sounded will it explode and she can move on to the next one. It's like playing the game ASTEROIDS.  As she plays, watch her eyes to make sure they stay on the book, going note-to-note.

Books On Tape, PBJ Sandwiches

Now let's get to the crux of reading music.  Your child might have perfect laser-beam eyes AND play the song perfectly but still not prove that she's reading. What?!

If she can play the song by ear, having her look at the notes is parallel to enjoying books on tape and following along with a print copy.  You're looking at the words and you're hearing the words, which is helpful for learning to read, but you're not forced to decode the words.

Is it really surprising that kids 'cheat' on reading if they think they don't need to?

Imagine that I show you once or twice how I make a peanut butter sandwich.  Then I show you a printed step-by-step procedure and tell you it's your turn to make a sandwich. With a huge eyeroll you *completely* ignore my instructions and swiftly create a really tasty sandwich.  For some inexplicable reason, I'm shaking my head and complaining,  "you didn't even look at my instructions!" 

You're thinking, "Crazy lady, I can make a perfectly good sandwich without instructions."  Our awesome musicians are like you, awesome parent who cooks food. They CAN make great music without bossy instructions.

So, next time I take you in the kitchen, I hand you a new recipe.  "Today you can make my gourmet DoReMi casserole that you've never had before. It won't  DoReMi casserole unless you include all of the secret ingredients, so be sure to get them all."

THIS time are you motivated to read my recipe?  Those very strong ear students are the same way.  By providing them something novel and surprising and including elements of a game (did you notice where the melody had a tricky change?) they will be motivated to practice reading skills.  They cannot rely on the ear because they've never heard this new thing before.

Find Sightreading Material

Sight-reading is looking at notes, decoding, and understanding how to execute on the keyboard.

Even better: looking, decoding, and hearing in the mind, then executing. When sight-reading is most proficient, students are STILL playing by ear, right? 

I love my strong ear students because I feel like they are going to be some of the most gifted readers if I can just get them to want to eat casserole.  You know what I mean.

Not all kids and parents want more to do at home, but if you have a strong-ear child who could benefit from sight-reading exercise, you can provide new music notation that she hasn't seen, and likely only plays a few times. A constant, steady supply of new notation will do the trick.

I always give students sight-reading material that is a few levels easier than what they play for repertoire.  It is either simpler music, or I let them play just one hand, or let them play at a slow pace.  The material must be easy because I expect them to get it correct (or 99%) on the first try!

In class, Edna and Edison (those lovable puppets!) play sight-reading games with students, but maybe you need more.

• Songbook Snippets: Yes, your child can play everything in the songbook. BUT! If you pick a measure in the middle of a song and ask her to begin there... wow, it's suddenly sight-reading!  Jump through the book and play 2-3 measures of snippets.  Have a parent or sibling listening nearby see if they can guess which song is being played. Songbook snippets may be all you need to get your sight-reading boost.
• Songbook Staff: In the back of your book is a staff. Here's another copy (LINK) that you can laminate and write on with EXPO markers. Anyone can write some notes! Write a few and say "I wonder if this will be an interesting tune? Let's find out!" then have your child play it to see.  Erase and repeat a few times for each practice. Tips: Start with an anchor note your child can find. Move with steps and skips up and down. Include chords and intervals she knows.

• Teachers are genius at jotting out quick melodies. If you are struggling to come up with some, you could talk to your teacher and see if she's willing to write a couple to get you started, either on your laminated card or on a strip of paper.
• Purchase items for sight-reading like this book on Amazon, or these flash cards. This Dozen a Day series provides technical drills, but they are also great for sight-reading steps and skips. If she plays a different one each day, she will really have to read. 
• Recycle If you are in a musical home, you may already have some very easy piano sheet music, or might be able to pick some up at a thrift shop. Have your child play those tunes. Start with just one hand, or just snippets of tunes.  Just a 2 minutes of practice each day on reading can make a difference.

Skills Take Time

During the few minutes each day that you decide to work on just reading, remind your child that TEMPO can be slow. The goal of the game is to play the notes and rhythms correctly.  

Help keep sight-reading fun by presenting it as a game:

"I wonder what the composer is trying to say to us? Let's see if you can read his message."  "You did it! You solved the mystery!"

Eventually tie sight-reading and listening together. After playing a line of notes for the first time, ask your child to sing it.  Can she remember what she just played?  

Don't worry if she can't yet.  Beginning readers have the same struggle- they'll read a line of text successfully, "The dog jumped into the big old bag" but then can't repeat the sentence back...they were so focused on decoding that the meaning didn't sink in yet!  Over time, your child WILL be able to read and find meaning.

That's when you know it's time to introduce slightly more difficult music for sight-reading :)

Sight-reading is a skill that takes practice and focus to learn.  Since your child is already showing great progress with ear training, I'm confident that she will learn to read sufficiently as well.

Finally, for you, Parent: I probably wouldn't use this resource with my 6-year-old students, but advanced students and parents who really want to improve sight-reading might enjoy the sight reading mastery site, where you can learn to sight read by having hundreds of brand new compositions created just for you so you have something new to read every day!  Enjoy!

- Gina Weibel, M.S.

Let's Play Music teacher

In A Flash: Reading Notes on the Staff

"The treble clef spaces are easy, you see, 'cuz space rhymes with face and spells F-A-C-E!"  Are you humming along to this catchy tune? That means you and your 3rd year Let's Play Music student are on the way to note reading!

Why did we wait?

This is the final year of the program; are you surprised that we haven't drilled notes yet? In our post on learning to read music the LPM way, I explained that students thrive when they find meaning in the notes they read, understand how notes work intervallicaly, and are learning to audiate as they read before they knuckle down to the abstractness of notation.  Not surprisingly, laying a solid foundation takes two years of ear training and pre-reading skills.

Where are we going?

The goal this year is for your child to read notes with fluency. He will look at the notes and instantly know them. This skill is note-spelling.  "That's F. That's A." Any given individual note on paper can quickly be matched up to its given individual piano key.

The sad news is your child will shortly graduate from LPM. The glad news he'll begin learning lots more interesting and challenging pieces of music. Note-spelling is an important part of learning new music, and we want your child to master it.   In the article on reading music, I explained that being a fast note-speller does not guarantee fast sight-reading of new music.  Musicians use note-spelling to identify key notes in a chunk of music.  Then they use patterns, intervals, and chord shapes to fill in the remaining information for the chunk.  By now your student has had lots of practice with those skills, too.

This is the mix of spelling and intervallic skills I hear from my brain when reading music:  "Let's see…the first note is a D and I jump down a 5th…and then I do a run of baby steps going up…and jump down a 5th again.  Then I have to play.…treble E, and then down a 3rd and baby steps up."  So, I don't actually spell out very many notes but they are critical to know.

If you suspect your child is trying to spell out every note of every new song, put a stop to it! Encourage identification of patterns, skips, steps, intervals, and chord shapes supplemented with a touch of note-spelling to hold it all together and keep it in place.  Some kids are gifted note-spellers, but that skill cannot stand alone.

Do Flashcards Help Reading? 

A parent once asked me, "Why do we use flashcards, anyway? When we read music, notes are not singled out and jumping all over the place. Why should we learn to identify notes like this?" 

I sat down with a piece of new music and vocalized for her HOW I WAS READING IT as I played through.  As I revealed my brain's processing of new music, she realized that the few individual notes that I note-spelled actually DID jump around randomly. Unlike the flashcards, the note being spelled was sometimes embedded into a chord or at the beginning of a run of melody. I took a highlighter and marked only the notes that needed spelling for successful reading of the song and challenged her (and the student) to quickly spell and play them. Now they knew almost everything they needed to play this new piece of music, too!  The exercise looked slightly different but felt very much like using flashcards. 

Want to try it with some new music? Here is a free copy (link) of Bach's Minuet in G and I marked the notes I want you to note-spell in the first 2 lines. The rest of the notes will be discerned from intervals, steps, and skips. Just do one hand at at a time to begin. As you move from one note to the next, ask "What interval do I need to jump? Am I going up or down?"  

Let's Get Fluent

How fast is fluent? How quickly should students be able to identify notes? If a student is sight-reading and takes more than 1-2 seconds to play a note, she is going to struggle. 

We divide the process into two steps. First is saying the alphabet name of the note and second is playing it on the keyboard.  This year I challenge you to identify (say) all 27 note cards in one minute! 

To be fair, you may find this to be way too easy for your child, or incredibly tough. Teachers value the learning process and focus most on the process and continued success. 1:00 to 1:30 is still the reference to aim for, but the real goal is for students to shave a few seconds off their own personal best time at each practice.  Most teachers have an incentive club, like "In A Flash" club, to motivate students to improve their time each week. Your teacher might even offer a prize if you can improve your time by 0:05!

At Home
Most progress with note memorization will be developed during at-home practice. Here are some ideas to help you make great progress:

*On the Road: Like so much of what we're working on, daily work is best. Flashcards are special because they don't need to be at the keyboard! I keep a set in my car and my daughter knows that every time she gets in the car, she runs through the cards once before we turn on the radio.  Maybe you can put a set in your purse and find a way to plant flashcards into your daily routine.

*Less Singing: You'll quickly notice there isn't time to sing "All Cows Eat Grass" or some other verse for each card. Like all the best mnemonics, the song lyrics will slowly fade away from the mental processing as the notes develop a meaning of their own.  Students will start to only use lyrics on tricky notes, and eventually they have learned the note and stop needing lyrics. If your child is hanging on, encourage him to say only one word of the lyric ("grass", "boy", "apart") instead of singing the whole verse. Eventually just say the letter. The song is a means to an end.

*Tricky Pile: When I practice with my daughter, I give 2-3 seconds for her to say each note.  If she cannot, I put that card in a "do-over" pile, which we go through a few extra times that day. This way, she's not focused too much on being timed, and the tricky cards get extra attention.  

*Favorite Four: Some days we will pick out a small group of cards and really master them, flipping through the small pile over and over.  Of course you can use lines or spaces, but I find other groups, too.  For example, F is a note that my daughter always knows well, so we sometimes pick E, F, G, A and drill on just those for 3 minutes.  She learns the notes well by learning how they relate to her well-known F.  We might do the same with treble B,C,D,E since she knows treble C so well.  In the bass clef, we pull out F,A,C and learn to recognize them as the parts of the well-known F-chord, then we pull out just E,F,G,A in the bass clef.  You can choose any small groups you like, and take some time to really see relationships in the notes.  

*Pick A Card: Hold the cards facedown, fanned out. Let your child pick each card to read.

*Road to Success: Lay the cards out in a long line. The student walks along, picking them up and reading them. You can make your own tradition for what lies at the end of the road. It could be the road leading into our out of the practice room, or leading to snack time!  For another variation, have a student at each end of the road, coming toward each other very quickly. When they get to the middle, see who read the most cards!

*Memory: You will need both octaves of cards to be sure you have 2 of each letter. When flipping over two cards, shout out the letters as quickly as possible. They won't look the same- kids will actually have to read them to see if they are the same letter (from different octaves).

*Searching for… Lay the cards on the floor face-up. Say "I'm searching for….A!" and have her find it as quickly as she can, or have two children race.  Or give harder clues like, "the note a third above C!"

*Quiz Mom: Have your child quiz you. Get some wrong on purpose to see if she can corrects you! if she doesn't correct mistakes, say "oh no! I tricked you!" and you earn a point for each time you trick her.

*Sorting: First decide how to sort. I take a sheet of paper and write ABC, and on another DE, and another FG.  As quickly as possible, have her put the cards on their correct piles.  You can change this game by writing words with bold letters, like "GinA is Cool" should collect only G,A and C cards and "Boy BAnD" would collect only A, B, and D cards. The goal is to get the cards into place quickly!

*Wild Card: Beforehand decide one letter is a wild card, and decide to do something crazy when you get to it. It's fun to anticipate when it's coming.  We like to say that when we get to the wild (say, D) whoever notices it first gets to tickle and kiss the other person!

*Duck Duck Goose: This is most fun if you get other family members to play.  Spread the cards in a circle. Everyone walks around them while you say "Duck, Duck…Goose!" Everyone drops down and reads the card in front of them as quickly as they can. Don't be the last one to say anything! Laugh about it, cheer for the fast kids, then stand up and move again. Try to make Dad always sit at the card he can't seem to remember. That's always funny.

*Online Fun: You can drill with MusicTheory.net's online flashcards here or drill play a variety of music games at Tonic Tutor or try the easy-to use topics at Musicards.net. I'd love to hear about other online games you found useful!

*Ipad Fun: Practice with phone and iPad games like Music Tutor or  Noteworks. What are your other favorite apps for practicing note reading? There are dozens out there!

I hope you have some fun working on flash cards and learn to read them in a flash. Please tell us about which games you like, and share photos of your kids playing the games or practicing!

-Gina Weibel, M.S.
Let's Play Music Teacher

Learning to Read Music

Before I heard of Let's Play Music, I had already taught my dear little four-year-old son how to read.  Wow! That kid sure did (and still does) love reading books.

I had spent months at the library investigating different methods for teaching reading, searching for the one that would work for my family.  The reading method we eventually fell in love with had a few key facets that made it a huge win for my son (and all subsequent siblings).  

A short time later, a Let's Play Music teacher moved into our neighborhood and my little son began to take classes and learn to read music.  I was so ASTONISHED when I heard the theories behind the Let's Play Music method for teaching musical reading, I nearly fell out of my chair!  They were parallel to important truths I had found while teaching my son to read books.

 
1. Get Some Exposure

Not surprisingly, I taught my son to read books in his native tongue, not Spanish or any other language.  The work of decoding text is tricky, but the motivating drive is that when the laborious work of sounding out letters is done, the text is going to mean something that makes sense.  Since his infancy, I'd also been reading him story books and pointing out words to him.  By age three he'd had a thousand books read to him; when I proposed having him read the books himself, he had a good understanding of what that would mean.

If we went to music lessons as adults, we might expect to show up, have the logistics of note-reading explained to us, and get down to the business of hammering out tunes.  Before our little children can digest such a blunt approach to reading, they need exposure to melodies and tonalities and patterns that they will soon be reading, so that these melodies can mean something.

In my recent post on ear-training for perfect pitch, I discussed how a student can, with practice, be able to mentally "hear" the music as she reads notes on the staff.  The first step on the path to such excellence is practice hearing, singing in tune, and internalizing a large collection of musical tunes and patterns that represent the language of music.  Much of the work during Year 1 of Let's Play Music is designed to expose children to the language and patterns of music.  These activities in class are an important accompaniment to note-reading, so the students will find meaning as they decode, since they'll be decoding a language they know.

2. Learn How Notes Work

I taught my children the sounds that alphabet letters make and the sounds that the consonant clusters make before focusing on the names of the letters. Eventually it's important to know the letter names (an abstract concept) so we can talk about letters and discuss spelling and do intellectual things like that.  But when one is actually reading, he's not thinking about the names of those things...he is just focused on what they mean and how they work as a tool.  Letters are just tools that represent sounds; you don't need to know a whisk is called a whisk in order to make meringue!

In Let's Play Music class, our students are starting to read on the staff in Year 1 and they don't even know ANY NOTE NAMES on the staff.  Shocking? Not at all.  Your kiddo can become a pretty good note-reader by paying attention to the patterns of notes as they baby step and skip, up and down.  Being able to correctly and easily move from one note to the the next is the essence of reading music.  A student must quickly process the relationships between notes in order to read music; the student focuses on how the notes move and relate and work as tool BEFORE focusing on abstract ideas like names for notes.

Stepping and skipping patterns are the first relationships students recognize and perform.  The next fantastic tool will be the ability to quickly recognize intervals between notes, a huge focus in Year 2 (read more about intervals here and here). 

3. Learn some Common Patterns

In the English language, there are a bundle of common words that don't make phonetic sense to a four-year-old.  The word SAID is one of the first sight words my son learned by rote.  Once he had this word in his memory bank, he could effortlessly read it and flow easily past it, spending more effort on the tricky new words in stories.  Even phonetic words, once they are read many times, begin to meld into single items (instead of individual letters) in our fantastic brains.  We don't see the letters anymore- we see the WORD as a whole chunk.

Similar to the English language, the language of music also has some very common "words".  These musical chunks, or melodic patterns, show up ALL THE TIME in music.  The Let's Play Music program introduces the most common melodic patterns (mi-re-do, sol-fa-mi-re-do, sol-la-ti-do, sol-sol-do, sol-mi-do) as if they are sight words. Experienced students will read three or four notes as a cluster of notes; they quickly internalize the pattern represented and play it as a "word" instead of individual notes.  This ability stems from both mental repetition and muscle memory from playing these patterns and handshapes frequently (blog post on muscle memory).

A skilled pianist can sight-read music (play through something brand new) by quickly finding relationships and by looking at "chunks" of notes at once.  During measures of music with unusual patterns, he'll have to slow down and carefully pick out the notes.  Is it amazing to read music without being fully focused on each individual note? Not more amazing than how your brain interprets this entire sentence of English text, only slowing down when it comes to an unusual word, like abecedarian.

4. Learn some Anchor Notes

So, midway through Year 1, your student can play melodies of steps and skips correctly, but it only comes out as intended if the student begins on the correct note!  Every note on the staff represents exactly one white or black key on the keyboard; it's critical to find THAT ONE KEY.

It's not necessary to painstakingly match note-to-key for every single note of the piece if the student can accurately work through the rest of the song by following patterns of steps and intervals.  It will be necessary, for him to learn to check at the beginning of each "chunk" he reads to be sure he's in the right place.

Before teaching all the notes on the staff, Let's Play Music teachers introduce some anchor notes. In Year 2, students learn Middle B,C,D, Treble C, and Bass C, and quickly match between the staff and keyboard.  As they play piano, they check for accuracy of the first note in a "chunk", then play the remaining notes based on patterning.  This is very evident in the second year song How to Skip; the student identifies the first note of each measure, then plays skips up and down to complete the measure.

Anchor notes are these first notes on the staff that the student unfailingly matches to the correct key on the keyboard.  Any note now can be paired to its key by considering the relationship to the anchor ("Oh, I see the key I need is one skip above Middle C, and I know where Middle C is!").  Thinking in this intervallic way is not only a quick way to find the keys, but an excellent way to mentally internalize the distance between notes while your hand is likewise memorizing the physical distance.

5. Find Any Key


By Year 3 of Let's Play Music, your child will be ready to transpose (move Do somewhere other than C), ready to play complex pieces, and ready to build triads and chord inversions.  It's finally and absolutely necessary that we be able to intellectually talk about the notes. The mnemonic song Treble, Bass, Line and Space helps students remember the note names represented by each line and space on the staff. I call this note-spelling since the names are alphabet letters. Teachers will quiz students to be sure they can quickly identify these note names; students will need to do this in order to understand the theory of Year 3.

I sometimes see a division in Year 3 between students who can sight-read music well and those who cannot, and the fast note-spellers are NOT always the best sight-readers.   Fast note-spellers are sometimes tempted to name every note, then match to every key of the song while playing.  Note-spelling has its place in reading: to identify the first note of each "chunk".  The rest of the music should be read by looking for patterns.

6. Start With Success

A huge element that I love about our reading program is the way my children experience immediate success.  Most English words are not perfectly phonetic, but we learned a way to write them so they could be decoded phonetically: put a line above a vowel if it is a long vowel, draw a letter tiny if it doesn't actually make a sound, glue two letters together if they make a cluster sound, etc.  My son felt FANTASTIC when he was able to immediately start reading real content.  He still had a short list of practice words each day, but there was no reason to wait for months before letting him read real stories with meaning.  Intrinsic motivation was high! He could see that he was really reading, and he wanted to keep at it, and he read daily because he loved it.  

After a few months, the helpful hints and modifications to words were taken away- but by then he had internalized the many wacky phonetic rules of English and could still read the words, and correctly infer how to read new ones. Success!


In Let's Play Music, students begin keyboarding by playing chords.  They are still practicing daily at reading and playing melodies, but we want them to have immediate success at the piano, too!  By playing accompanying chords while singing the melodies, the student creates the harmony and the complexity of real music! There is no reason to wait months before playing something that sounds full and rich and big and exciting.  

I remember my own early piano lessons with my primer-level book.  For months I languished with small-sounding tunes, dreaming of one day playing some real songs. Nowadays, my students get the joy of success early on, and it motivates them to strive for music success, even long after they graduate from Let's Play Music.

7. In Loving Arms

I didn't mind teaching my son (and eventually his siblings) to read.  It was a commitment, for sure, but it meant that every day I would hold him snuggled in my lap for 15 minutes.  We made up silly games to get through the practice words and we had curious discussions about the silly stories he read. I shared with him my joy at seeing his progress and told him I would always welcome hearing him read me a story.  We took turns reading passages, and reading was our special time together.

Is it any surprise that reading music can be a similar experience for a child?  If you, Mom and Dad, don't read music yourself, take this opportunity to learn along with your child during your Let's Play Music years.  Sit at the bells or keyboard together and play duets, take turns reading melodies, and make up songs together.  Much of the long-term success of this early music education is wrapped up in your child's emotional experience with learning music.  

If I'm asked why the Let's Play Method of teaching note-reading really works, I can get right down to it and answer, "because the children feel loved." The Let's Play Music program was carefully crafted to help your child learn music AND hopefully help you build a strong, loving family at the same time.

-Gina Weibel, M.S.
Let's Play Music Teacher

EDITOR'S NOTE: I didn't set out to write a commercial for my favorite reading method, but I truly have loved using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and you can buy the book used for $5! Just to be clear, I have no evidence that other LPM teachers endorse this method. If you'd like to discuss it with me, leave comments below.  My favorite method for handwriting is Handwriting Without Tears, and of course my favorite method for music is Let's Play Music!

Musical Superpower: Perfect Pitch!

Now your child is enrolled in Let's Play Music classes and you're getting excited about the long list of amazing skills that will be taught during 3 power-packed years.  One fantastic super-power you'll see signs of in your child is perfect pitch.

What is Perfect Pitch?
Perfect pitch is also referred to as absolute pitch (AP).  Pitch defines how high or low a tone sounds; a person with perfect pitch can identify the tone without hearing a reference.  For example, if you play a note on the piano without letting your child see, and he correctly exclaims, "That was a D," he's able to discern the pitch! Amazing!  If you ask him to sing a middle C and he can hit it exactly, he's demonstrating absolute pitch.

Children who speak a tonal language (one where pitch of voice is an important consideration, like most forms of Chinese) usually have an easier time developing perfect pitch, although the tonal languages rely on relative pitch (the change in pitch during speaking).   It is still possible and worthwhile to improve pitch skills for all young children. In fact, it is recognized that although anyone can improve AP skills, only those who start very young can truly gain Perfect Pitch. Read a bit more about it in this BBC article.

Why is it useful?
All varieties of pitch training are useful in helping your child become a complete musician, the focus of Let's Play Music.  With some absolute pitch skills, a musician can:

* Sing a song in a requested key.  
* Provide the starting note(s) for singers or musicians singing parts.
* Listen to a singer or other musician, determine what key they are in, and accompany them with appropriate chord progressions. This is especially helpful when you're at the piano during the Christmas party and Aunt Martha starts singing and she doesn't know what key she is in.
* Identify if stringed instruments are tuned properly. This is especially useful if you're sitting around the campfire without a pitch pipe iPhone app.
* Correct themselves while singing or playing an instrument, especially when sight-reading. Those with AP are amazing at playing new music. 
* Read musical scores in their minds. It really is like reading a book with a soundtrack!

* Master brass instruments or vocal music easily: the slight contractions of throat, oral, and lip muscles determine the pitch; only your ear will give you feedback as to whether you've hit the note exactly. Most musicians/singers without AP use a piano to check if they are hitting the correct note.
* Have success learning a tonal language as a second language.

What can we Do?
In Let's Play Music class, your teacher has specific games and activities designed to improve absolute pitch!  As your child sings "Do Is Home" using Middle C, she's practicing trying to find that pitch without reference, and learning to check herself.  You'll love seeing improvement by the end of the year.

I recommend you download a pitch pipe app or a keyboard app onto your phone, so you can recreate this type of activity at any time.  More practice leads to improved ability!  One family made it a habit to sing "We Are Here" every time they arrived at a destination in their car (checking the middle C pitch with an iPhone app.)  

It's also easy to play pitches on piano (or piano app) for you child and have him identify which note he hears.  To make it easier for my beginners, I use only white keys.

Don't Have Perfect Pitch?
Most Let's Play Music students will be able to sing a Middle C when requested.  Most will not develop complete perfect pitch.  Are we worried? No way!  

In addition to absolute pitch (AP), we will be training your child's ear for relative pitch, ability to identify chords by ear, ability to hear chord progressions, and ability to discern and identify rhythms by ear. Although a fun and desirable skill, very few famous musicians and composers have AP.  Let's Play Music class will prepare well-rounded musicians who have the ability to hear and understand music.

Shelle Soelberg, creator of Let's Play Music, knew that some solid practice in AP would benefit all young LPM students and set them on the road to acquiring true absolute pitch.  As each of her own children completed the program over the years, they were perfect at hitting Middle C along with other graduates.  With a bit more practice, four of her children acquired absolute pitch by age twelve!  Soelberg told me, "we made pitch practice a part of our daily habit….nothing structured, it just became a fun thing we all started doing.  The piano is near the kitchen, so during cooking, meals, and chores, it was natural to try to sing a pitch and go check, or play a pitch and quiz the family."

Whether or not you continue to practice AP games beyond the Let's Play Music years, your child will be blessed for life to have an ear a bit more sensitive to absolute pitches.

Not in a Let's Play Music class yet? Don't miss out - find a teacher near you now!



-Gina Weibel, M.S.

Related Posts:
Intervals are worth knowing
Ear-Training: Intervals with Turtle Tom and Tim

Learning Chords: Use the Correct Fingering

The Password to Learning

I have four children, and at some point each day one of them asks to use the computer for something.  Since I'm usually elbow-deep in some other task, I answer, "okay- today's password to unlock the computer is PIANO."  And of course I change my password every day!

The other day, as I was leaving the computer to go jogging on my treadmill, I chose JOGGING as my password.  Hours later when someone wanted to use the computer, the password didn't work!  My teenage sons were diligent about trying every misspelling of JOGGING that I could have typed, switching letters, putting fingers in different positions- nothing worked.  Whatever misspelling I had used had been typed in TWICE by me to change the password, without my notice.  How could that be!?

Eventually even I was frustrated and wanting to use the computer again.  I sat down and typed JOGGING as fast I could, without thinking about it.  It worked!  What!?  I slowly replayed what my fingers had just done...J-O-G....G-I-N....A!  My name is GINA, so when my fingers felt me type "GIN" they finished with an A automatically and I didn't even notice it had happened. THREE TIMES!  My fingers are so used to typing the word GINA that it's hard for me NOT to type it once they've started the pattern.

What is Muscle Memory?

When our muscles learn a pattern of movement through repetition, our brains "chunk" that pattern into memory.  It becomes ingrained in our MUSCLE MEMORY and takes no effort to recall, so we can perform the physical tasks without conscious effort.  Our very efficient brains use muscle memory (or motor learning) to reduce the need for attention on activities that are repeated frequently.  Now that you've been driving your manual-transmission car for so many years, you can focus on things around you without having to think about shifting.  Now that you've been typing for so many years you can blog as fast as you can think up the words to share!

Muscle Memory at the Piano

Your second-year Let's Play Music student is hard at work learning the Red, Blue, and Yellow chords with right and left hands.  Your teacher (and booklet) demonstrate the fingering your child should use to play each chord.  It is crucial that you help your child learn these exact hand-shapes, even if your child finds something that initially seems easier (like using the stronger finger 3 instead of finger 2).  As your child progresses in music, these shapes will come up time and again- we want your child's fingers to automatically know exactly how far to move or reach to play these shapes!  It will make future piano pursuits SO much easier.  This is the same reason we insist that you use a keyboard with full-sized keys: your child's hand is memorizing exactly how far to stretch, and will forevermore remember the distance that "feels like" the intervals we've learned.

Once the brain has the "feel" for these chords and intervals memorized, that will free up the pianists attention to other things, like the progression of chords and the notes on the page!  Playing and sight-reading become easier when the pianist looks for common chord-shapes and melodic patterns, then lets her hands "do it" without having to think!

Practice Makes Permanent

You were hoping "practice makes perfect", right?  Sorry!  Only perfect practice will get you there.  Sloppy practice will lead to permanent sloppy results.  So, here's what your brain needs to help you wire in the best muscle memories:
1. Repetition:  Playing these chords and completing the Let's Play Music program should give your child enough repetition to have them stick for a lifetime!
2. Attention to Technique: Watch your child to look for bubble-hand, fingers touching keys, and correct fingering.  Remind your child it's better to have good technique and go slow at first.
3. Visualization: Muscle-memory is a brain activity! It's almost as powerful to THINK of doing this correctly as it is to actually do it.  When go on that spring break trip, bring along the keyboard image from your songbook and have your child "practice" on it.   
 
How To Help Your Child Learn the Chords

When first learning, movements will be slow.  Lots of mental focus will be required to engage just the exact fingers and to move them (or stop them from moving) just the exact amount.  Be aware that correct fingering is the most important thing at this point- NOT SPEED!  Lovingly remind your child to slow down and not go faster on chord transitions than she can go with correct fingering.

For the Right Hand Yellow Chord or the Left Hand Blue Chord, have your student practice sliding her thumb over one key, and then back home, without playing any notes.  Focus on keeping the other fingers in place, curved and gently touching their keys.  When fingers float up into the air, the child loses the muscle sense of how they must be positioned.  After warming up with finger-sliding, slowly transition back and forth between chords.

For the Right Hand Blue Chord or the Left Hand Yellow Chord, have your student practice extending the hand, all fingers sliding over into position, and then sliding back home.  This time the thumb is the anchor-it is critical the thumb remains gently touching the key or the pianist will have to look down at her hands to see where to set them.  Simply sliding back and forth helps the hand start to learn the exact distance to move!  After this warm-up, slowly transition back and forth between chords.

In this short video clip, I show a warm-up and some chord transitions, along with a simple game using dice to determine how many  times she plays each chord before transitioning.  At first I give extra beats during the transition, and when she gets better I'll expect her to transition and continue playing without missing any beats.

In this second video, I show a common error: playing the Yellow chord with finger 3 instead of 2.  I tell my daughter this finger is UNDER ARREST! or IN JAIL! and it's not allowed to leave the white key it is hand-cuffed (finger-cuffed) to.  In this video, I actually do restrain her finger from leaving the white key, but after this one time, I won't touch her hand again- I'll just say "put that finger 3 back in handcuffs!" and she will giggle and stick it back in place.

Teacher Kari Mickelson in Monroeville, PA, uses these soft hair-ties to label students fingers as a reminder for learning chords.  I like to paint the fingernails to help students with whichever chord we are working on. Give it a try!

What's Next?

As your child masters the chords, she'll be delighted to have fun sight-reading music with red, yellow, and blue chords! It will take very little effort for her hand to move into position and keep up with new music.  In the third year of Let's Play Music, she'll use these same hand-shapes to play chords in other keys AND to play chords with different inversions.  After graduating from Let's Play Music, she'll find these same chord shapes, intervals, and melodic patterns in written music everywhere and will have ease in playing them because her muscles have learned the patterns!  Okay, I think I'll set my computer password for as "muscle memory."  Good luck with your chords today!

-Gina Weibel, MS
Let's Play Music Teacher