Contrary To What I Thought, Scales Never End!

(Video at the bottom of post!)

Welcome to yet another week of my piano learning escapade! This week is going to be a little weird. In my blog post, I’m going to leave all of my writing to just this past week, but in the video following this post, I will be talking about this week AND the past week (since I lost my video footage for what should have been the video in my last weeks blog post).

So this week is a little slower than the last. Last week, I had pretty big breakthroughs in being able to play two scales and a difficult piece rather fluently, this week was all about a new different way to play scales – Contrary Motion.

What is Contrary Motion, you might ask? Well, it’s basically the opposite of how I had learned to play scales previously, which is in what is called Parallel Motion. In Parallel Motion, you play the same note in both hands one octave apart, either up or down the keyboard. So for example, in C Major, you would play C, D, E, etc. etc. in both hands at the same time all the way up the scale, and then all the way down. In Parallel Motion, you use the same fingers on both hands to play. This will make it so you’ll play C on the thumb in the same octave, and then in the right hand, you will play the next note up with your second finger (which would be a D), and in the left hand, you will play the next note DOWN with your second finger (which would be a B). This leads to a very different, but nice sound. It’s also rather simplistic to play!

Example of Contrary Motion. By Memoryboy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Outside of scales, I’ve started to delve into learning actual pieces of music! At the very least, small excerpts of music. I decided to try and learn the intro to “Everything In It’s Right Place” by Radiohead, which has a piano part that I am particularly fond of. I found a video on YouTube that used a program called Synthesia, and while the rhythms aren’t correct in the video, the chords are and that’s really all that matters to me, since I already know the rhythm. I’ve not completely finished learning the song yet, I’m still working on getting in my head, but it’s coming along and I should hopefully have it a lot better by next week.

This is all for this week. Hopefully next week I’ll have much more progress to report on.

See you guys soon!