Episode 95 - It's not a race

Welcome to episode 95! I'm David Reidy, an old bloke getting around to learning the piano, finally. In this week's show, I review a new book about scales and arpeggios, discuss piano racing, and suggest one of my favourite YouTube creators who is back from a break.

Listener Feedback & Progress I received an email from Chris, an adult piano learner, with some great suggestions for my learning and the podcast. It is genuinely gratifying to hear from listeners, as it's usually just me in the room when recording. In terms of my own progress, choir rehearsals are going well for our July performance. The singing has unexpectedly helped me translate my treble clef reading to the bass clef.

Review: The Piano Scale Book I recently picked up The Piano Scale Book by Ben Andrew, a new release from Hal Leonard. It simplifies conventional classical scale learning using practical, colour-coded keyboard illustrations for fingerings. The book includes digital resources with 87 Synthesia-style videos. If you need to brush up on scales, it's worth a look. Grab a copy here: https://amzn.to/48twBrh.

Essay: It's not a race After watching a Rick Beato video on Spotify's top downloaded tracks, I was reminded how lucky we are as hobbyist learners to not have pressure to meet others' expectations. We don't have strict deadlines, just the goal to get better as time passes. Music for enjoyment shouldn't be turned into a race with no meaningful finish line—a lesson we should keep in mind for both ourselves and younger learners.

YouTube Recommendation: Tom Scott Tom Scott, one of my favourite educational creators, is back with a new series called England. The first episode is a fascinating look at a traditional bell foundry. His videos retain that great low-tech feel and are not AI-generated. Check out his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TomScottGo.

Progress SegmentThis week features a selection of scales to help with my choir singing, recorded on the Kawai NV10 with Pianoteq 9 emulating a Shigeru Kawai SK-EX grand piano.

The contents of the podcast were entirely generated by David Reidy, but these show notes were created by Gemini.

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• via email at david@pianofinally.show; this is probably the best option
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Some of the links to books and other items mentioned in the podcast may affiliate links for Amazon or other providers. If you use one of these links, a commission may be paid to me at no additional cost to you. Thank you if you use a link. 
All reviews of products, websites and services are unpaid, and no sponsorship has been received for any content on this podcast.

Transcript

Episode095: 0:00

G'day everyone, I'm David Reidy. Welcome to Piano Finally, a podcast by an old bloke who's getting around to learning the piano, finally. I'll review a new book about scales and arpeggios, discuss piano racing, and suggest one of my favourite YouTube creators who is back after taking a break for the past couple of years. If you're new to the show, I hope you find all that interesting And if you're a regular, I hope you're enjoying the content too If there's something you'd like me to have a look at or talk about Drop me an email at david at pianofinally.show During the week, I received an email from Chris Who is also an adult piano learner He told me a bit about his piano journey And a course he has found particularly beneficial for his learning He also gave me some suggestions for my own learning and for the podcast. I've followed up with those suggestions, and you may be hearing the results in coming shows. It's really great to hear from you, the listeners. When I record the podcast, it's just me in the room, and at the moment the 3D printer in the background. And although I see the download numbers for the show, I'm never really sure that anyone is listening. So hearing from you is really gratifying. I'm writing and recording the podcast this week on Saturday, as it's another Sunday choir rehearsal tomorrow. There are currently 18 songs on the program for the performance in July, and we've learned about half of them completely and are working our way through the rest. Adam, the music director, is pretty pleased with the progress and thinks we'll be ready in plenty of time. Auditions for the different solo parts are happening in the next few weeks as well. I have not put my name forward. The singing has really helped me with reading the bass clef. Before the piano, I'd only played instruments which had treble clef notations, so I was continually reading the bass clef with the treble note positions. This week, the opposite happened. I found myself reading the treble clef and putting my fingers on the equivalent bass notes. Real progress. Now, I just have to remember to get it right every time. Scales are one of those things that it is probably important to learn if you're going to properly master the piano. They are really useful, but they're not the most exciting part of learning, though they do open a lot of options if you're good at them. Similarly for arpeggios, they make chords make more sense, and most music is based around them. Scales have been around for a little Pythagoras wrote about them, so you would think that there wouldn't be anything new to say. But there is a new book that has just been released that has a new way of teaching them. No, it's not some new fingering system. It's a way of making it simpler to learn the conventional classical method of playing them. The book is The Piano Scale Book by Ben Andrew. It has only recently been published by Hal Leonard. I heard about it on Stefan Wyatt's Piano Tips YouTube channel. The book covers pretty much everything you need to know about playing scales, the major scales, the minor scales in both melodic and harmonic varieties, with their enharmonic equivalents where that's relevant. It also covers chromatic scales and arpeggios. All the scales are set for two octaves, with a warm-up section containing some one-octave scales to get started with. In coverage, it is no different to almost all the other scales books, but the twist is the way Ben explains how to play each scale. Each scale gets its own page with instructions for right hand ascending, right hand descending, left hand ascending and left hand descending. The instructions for each are given by having an illustration of the keyboard with the keys colour coded by which finger you need to use. Thumbs are coded in red, little fingers in yellow and the middle fingers in blue except for scales which start with the ring finger in which case it gets yellow. Once you get the hang of it which only takes moments following along is really simple. If you wear nail polish you could even colour code your own fingers to match. The book is aimed at adult learners or more advanced younger learners because although it uses colour effectively it is for practical purposes rather than decoration. At the front of the book is a code which gives you access to the digital resources accompany it. You'll need a free Hal Leonard account to use it, but the resources include 87 videos covering every scale and arpeggio in the book, and a full digital copy of the text. The videos are the common Synthesia type where coloured blocks fall towards the keyboard, and the colours match the book of course. If you're still learning scales, or even if you just need to brush up, the Piano Scale book by Ben Andrew is a publication you should have a serious look at. I got mine through Sheet Music Plus, as I couldn't find it at a local supplier. I'll put a link to Amazon in the show notes. It's an affiliate link, and if you use it, apparently, I'll get paid a small percentage. I'll believe it when I see it. It's not a race. I was watching a Rick Beato video a few days ago, in which he gave his comments about the current top 10 most downloaded tracks on Spotify. I generally don't listen to Spotify. At the moment, I'm mostly listening to songs we'll be doing at the concert in July, so I hadn't heard any of these. Also, without exception, they're not the type of music I listen to. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't anything that sounded particularly interesting, except for one track that was over 15 years old. Importantly, though, this wasn't a best-of list. It was a most-downloaded list, which is objective and doesn't rely on some other individual's taste for a song to make the list. Instead, it's the average of a few million people's preferences that decides the ranking. Luckily, I don't have to worry much about such lists. I'm not making music to make money, and so there's no pressure on me to meet others' expectations. And this is a really good thing. I want to get better at the piano and at singing, but I also have other commitments and things that need doing, like maintenance and cleaning around the house, so I don't often get a chance to put as much time in as I would like. This used to annoy me a bit, but I've come to realise that it's not something I should be overly worried about. I don't have a timeline for learning the piano. The only upcoming event will be Devi's showcase later in the year. The date hasn't been announced, but I'm going to make sure that I get it right this year. And even that date isn't a deadline. I'll get to choose the piece, along with Devi, that I play, and I can ensure that it's one I'll be able to rehearse properly before the showcase. Beyond that, the only goal is to get better as time passes, which means there's no pressure. I think we need to take this into account when we have others around us who may be learning an instrument. I mean people who are learning for enjoyment or their own entertainment, not as a career option. I think that, within reason, every child should have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, just as every child should have an opportunity to learn their native language, another language, maths, science, cooking, textile crafts, basic home duties, and any of the hundreds of other activities that go to making up a fulfilling life. I'm listening to a performance of Dvořák's Ninth Symphony on Stage Plus while I'm writing this, and there are a whole lot of musicians who, as children, did choose classical music as a career. But there are many times more kids who are content just to play enough to make them happy, and probably even more who decided it wasn't for them. For the former, music did have goals and deadlines, and it was even competitive as they gained positions in professional orchestras. But this wasn't the case for the others, or at least it didn't need to be. Those young musicians probably don't need the added pressure of turning something that could become a lifelong source of enjoyment and accomplishment into some sort of race. A race in which there is no meaningful finish line. When I took up the piano, I didn't set an end point. It's not as if anyone who learns the piano for enjoyment says, OK, once I can play Chopin's Waltz in Db Major in two minutes, I'll sell the piano and take up origami. If there's no finish line for us as adult beginners and players, then we probably shouldn't be forcing finish lines on younger learners for whom playing an instrument should be a source of joy, not another thing in which they are forced to compete or compare themselves against others. There are many who say that in life the journey is more important than the destination, and in this case there really isn't a destination. I think that we need to keep that in mind, both for ourselves and for the young people whom we are helping on their musical journeys. Tom Scott is one of my favourite YouTube creators. For 10 years, he put out weekly videos on a wide range of topics. The videos were well made and mostly educational, and I still show parts of them when I'm teaching science. Two years ago, Tom decided to take a break and stop producing new videos. At least that was how it appeared. A couple of weeks back, Tom returned to YouTube with the announcement of a new series of videos. The series is called England. and in each episode Tom looks at something interesting in each of the English counties. So far the closest any of the episodes has got to music is in the first one where Tom visits a bell foundry to see how bells are made. Big bells, like the ones in church towers. It's a great video and shows a process that doesn't appear to have changed much in the past hundred or so years. The production values are good and the videos retain the slightly low-tech feeling of Tom's earlier work. The following episodes have Tom paragliding over England's smallest county, learning how forensic investigations work, and learning from some mine rescue workers. I'm watching the episodes on Nebula rather than on YouTube, because Nebula pays the creators more than Google does, and the videos are ad-free. The videos also come out earlier, so not everything may be on YouTube yet. There are many excellent videos on Tom's channel from the earlier years, many of which do cover musical topics. It will keep you busy exploring for hours, and nicely, none of it is AI-generated slop. I'll put a link to Tom's YouTube channel in the show notes. As I said earlier, I'm doing the show on Saturday this week, although I will still release it on Sunday evening. So the Sunday choir rehearsal is still to come. Later in the week, piano lessons with Devi will start again on Monday. I have a singing lesson before that, and with a slight change in schedule, the afternoon is now a lot less rushed. And of course, there'll be choir rehearsal again on Thursday. School is back from Monday for the teachers and Tuesday for the students, with new science topics across all the years. Saturday next week is ANZAC day, and once again I'll be driving the school bus to take members of the Hawkesbury District Marching Band into the city for the march. It was an interesting day last year, and it's nice to be a small part of a tradition that's over 100 years old. If you'd like to contact me, email is the best way. You'll find me at david at pianofinally.show and the website at www.pianofinally.show. In both cases, Piano Finally is all one word. The show is also available on Spotify and as an audio-only stream on YouTube. You can subscribe via any popular iOS or Android podcast application or from directories such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. I also post an excerpt and link for each episode as an Instagram Reel. If you're learning an instrument or singing, let me know where you are in your journey. What's going well and what are the challenges? How are you managing getting everything done? What are you putting off so that you can practice? And so until next week, I hope your piano stays in tune and you enjoy your time at the keys. Something different this week. I've been going back to scales based on the Ben Andrews book I reviewed earlier. I'm working through practicing the music for the choir and really wanted something that helps with the singing. Being able to play and sing along with the arpeggios should be helpful, so this week I'm including a selection of the scales. It's not very exciting, but I do think it's helping. The music was recorded using the Kawai NV10, Pianoteq 9, emulating a Shigeru Kawai SK-EX grand piano in concert mode via Cubase 15, and all of that on a Mac Mini Pro. piano plays softly