by Tania Gleaves on February 8, 2010
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Intimidated by online sheet music? Want to learn how to use them effortlessly?
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Don’t Be Put Off By Its Format.
Sheet music on the Internet can be a little intimidating to the beginner because it incorporates some pretty advanced technology with an age-old format. Most of us are used to interacting with sheet music offline as single pieces of paper or pages of a large, flat book. On the Internet, there aren’t any pages to flip or sheets to mark or lose. Instead, we’re presented with a format that’s completely digital and behind a glass screen. The first question that seasoned musicians may have is, “How in the world am I supposed to use this?!”
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It’s All In The Software
Well depending on the resource that you use, your sheet music may be HTML or it may be a PDF file. It could be a Java applet or it could be a flash file. In order to see sheet music online, you’ll need software that’s capable of showing it to you. If your computer can view webpages with ease, then viewing HTML sheet music shouldn’t pose any problem at all. You may run into problems however if the music is encoded into some other format. The good news is that most web browsers are capable of displaying java applets or flash files without any intervention on your part and sometimes, without even having to know what these things are!
If the composition is presented as a PDF file, you may need to install Adobe Acrobat Reader. Adobe Acrobat Reader is software designed to open PDF files as soon as they’re detected on the Internet and most computers already have the reader installed on them. If you try to access a PDF file without having the software that opens it, your computer will prompt you to download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader onto your computer. Once installed, you can view all the sheet music that you want regardless of your computer type because Adobe Acrobat Reader works on both the PC and the Mac.
Patience Is Rewarded
Installing new software just to see more software may sound like a hassle, but the rewards are many. There are tons of files available on the Internet for many piano genres including over 30,000 compositions and 1,200 composers like Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Mozart and Schumann).
Once you have the actual music notation on your computer screen, you may have several options. Again, depending the resource that you use, you may be able to hear it, print it, or even save it for later use. Since it’s too inconvenient to try to play a musical composition displayed on the computer, you’ll want to print out the songs that you find and play them way that you would play your music offline.
Watch That Inclination To Share
Just be careful about distributing what you find. Some of the music that you’ll see will be in the public domain, which means that you are free to distribute it to anyone you like. But some of the music will be copyrighted, which means that only you may use the music that you print. Always read the service agreement of the resource that you use before downloading, printing, and distributing what might be copyrighted material.
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by Tania Gleaves on February 7, 2010
Clueless about relative pitch? Want to learn all about it?
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The Sound of Chords
Unlike perfect pitch, which is the sound of single notes, relative pitch is the sound of chords. A chord is a group of notes that when played together, create a new sound called a harmony. This harmony can be major, minor, or any one of the many derivatives and the reason that relative pitches are called such is because they’re dependent on the relationships within a chord’s notes.
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What Makes Musichttp://www.piano-lessons-central.com/ear-training/relative-pitch/
Since a large part of learning how to play the piano entails training the ear, it’s important that you spend some time training yourself to “hear” the song’s chords and chord progressions rather than a simple tune or melody. Similar to color, relative pitch creates new sounds. When colors are mixed the way that notes are played together, we get new colors or in our case, new sounds.
The ability to readily recognize relative pitch is extremely helpful in composing new music and if you want to write your own music one day, you’ll need to learn how to recognize the structure of a song as easily as you can recognize words. This of course is done with the help of practice. Consistent practice will help your ears “opening up” in such a way that identifying the structure of any song becomes almost natural.
The Physics Of Music
As you’ll soon discover, your body plays a significant role in your ability to play piano and this time, we’re not talking about posture. In this regard, we’re talking about the vibrations that it produces and the way that your body processes those vibrations.
Since all sounds are waves, your body responds to the sound waves that come from your piano. It will absorb some of those waves and it will even repel some of them. Either way, sound waves create physical feelings that your body experiences after being exposed to them.
Non-musicians may interpret these feelings emotionally and thus attach emotive connotations to certain kinds of music. But this is because they don’t understand the physics behind the music. All the properties of music are based on physics (vibrations, frequency, travel though space, etc.) and once fully understood, they can be manipulated to push music to new heights.
Pitch Preferences
Just remember that surprisingly, harmonies are not cross-cultural. Sounds that may “feel good” to Americans may not create the same effects for Africans, Mexicans, Asians, or even Europeans living in Sweden, Spain, or France. Cultural groups grow up with preferred harmonies — harmonies that account for varying preferences in music and if you’re going to write music, write for a specific audience.
The success of the latter of course depends on your exposure to the music of different cultures. Even if you have no intentions of playing or writing music for a foreign group, it’s still interesting to learn how that group interprets and appreciates the music that it favors over your own.
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