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We've had Part 2 of the new AB Guide (turquoise blue) in the shop since last autumn. I found a Part 1 (pink) book, put the two next to each other on my music display this morning and both were sold by 3pm.

I find those new books quite unclear and not straight to the point enough anyway. The Rough Guide suffices, though if we do get a copy of the red book in then I'll have it just as soon.

I have a blue rudiments of music book too which predates the red one! See, I am really ancient

Today at the best little shop in Birmingham:

AAARGH! Not stickers on the front of the Beethoven - it'll leave marks!!! Get 'em off, quick - put 'em on the back or inside. How much are the sonatas? I like that edition even if people think it's old fashioned.

Those stickers don't stick to anything so don't be afraid. I couldn't tell you how much they are - I've forgotten. If you'd had asked me this morning as I've just been to the shop.....

I'm neurotic about bl00dy stickers...can't tell you how many lovely pieces of music I've bought which have been ruined by a Doris slapping a highly adhaesive sticker right in the middle of the front cover, removal of which rips a great lump out of the music.

I'm trying hard to get rid of the music I have so I can get a nice load of new stock in that's in better condition that can be sold at a slightly higher price. But it's important that the music community of south Brum actually know we're selling sheet music now.

Plus next month there's a brand new Books and Music opening in Harborne (in the west of the city). I say 'new' they've just moved from down the road and there's a wee delay between the closure of their old store and the opening of their new 'un.

We have two in Marlow; books & music one side of the road and miscellaneous on the other.

yes, it's just like that in Moseley, and Harborne (soon), Solihull. Kinzeeth only has a Books and Music.

I wish there was a big one in the city centre, like the sort of thing there is in the Northern Quarter in Manchester ('Oxfam Emporium') or the bookshop on Marylebone High Street or just round the corner from Tottenham Court Tube in London. There should be. Ten years ago there was a cracking B&M in Digbeth near the Old Crown and Turner Violins, but it disappeared without Tracey.

Memo, make pilgrimage to Marylebone B&M.

I can reveal that tomorrow afternoon I have an appointment with a piano teacher.

I have been making notes of things I need to ask her, I have edited it dozens of times for negativity so I now have half a page that is strictly factual and just concentrates on things that I need a little extra help with musically.

If I go in a negative frame of mind, then it will induce anxiety that I do not want - as will attempting to impress, or worry that I will make a good impression. If I just concentrate on thinking why I'm going in the first place....because I really really want to learn to play piano and ENJOY the experience.......then I'll think more constructively and give off more of a positive vibe.

This will be the first major test of my emotional awareness study and my own challenging of negative states of mind.

Go for it, boy!

I've certainly got plenty to think about after this afternoon. Proper lessons resume on the 11th March, meanwhile my orders are in on Oxfam's online shop for the sheet music she has asked me to get.

I've just seen an ad on Gumtree for yet another piano teacher named Joanna. I suspect that there may be parents the length and breadth of good old England who intend their kids do do well at music even before they're born and by the same intention; 'if it's a girl we'll call her Joanna'.

For those of you who don't know, Joanna is Cockney rhyming slang for piano. As in 'let's have a good old Cockney knees up rahnd the old Joanna and sing all these songs that won us the war like' My Old Mayn Said Follow The Vayn' etcetera etcetera, you get the picture.

My piano teacher is Miss Sharp. And there's a Mrs Melody who teaches the piano in my friend's village.

That's like having a politician called Balls, really...... Which reminded me of a Colemanballs book we have in at our shop....Mr Marks marrying Mrs Spencer, Mr Bols (not Ed) marrying Mrs Nutzmann, and an obituary of a man called Mr P J Posthumus.

Right I think I'll go and clean my bathroom. My piano needs a dust as well as it hasn't had one for weeks.

Your piano should be working too hard to accumulate dust!

My cats seem to like sitting on top of it, they are live dusters. However they replace dust with their own hairs, especially Sophie Anne.

My piano IS working hard...as a stakeout over the front garden for little Sarah Jane!

The trick is to cover the top with so much £rap that the cats can't sit on it. Works for me. Although if any customer of mine is reading this, I never said that...

Mine normally has crap on top of it. It used to be sheet music back in the day now it's Aldi receipts and books and things I've picked up from my shop on the key cover and half of the top, with Sarah Jane's space on the other half.

Will it not burst into flames or something with cat fur in it? (ANOTHER plus for the acoustic piano... )

The cat hairs get inside the key cover, which I don't understand as it's down all the time. They never get inside the case, and the thing only works on 12 volts anyway so it won't heat up that much.

Three weeks today......LONDON!!!

My toilet cistern is becoming a bookshelf. I only added 'How To Bluff Music Theory' just now.

One member of my wife's family has Andy McNab and Clarkson in his brown room. Yet there is the one place I would not wish to feel confrontational and militaristic. T S Eliot would be good lavatory literature....or Paradise Lost maybe???

(just glances up at the TV to see Ding Junhui coming back into the arena in Newport adjusting his flies).

Thirty books in our bathroom. And a fluctuating number of magazines. Hence sign on the door saying 'LIBRARY'. And a sign reflected in the mirror saying 'Ladies Toilet' which made me think about poor old TS Eliot and whether he got ragged at skool.

Yes, the penny's just dropped. (TS Eliot backwards). There's a cafe opening near me soon with the coffee spoons quote from The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock in graffiti form on a wall inside.

I thought I'd have a little joke today and put a biography of Enoch Powell next to one of Arthur Scargill.

And The Organist's Wedding Album is back out. Ooh, and in came a Welsh-speaking woman. How cool was that. The only place in Brum that offers service yn Gymraeg

An earlier copy of the self-help understanding and overcoming depression course came in today and I was pleased to be able to put it out on display. I'll ask Helen (shop manager) if I can stick a 'personally recommended by OB&M Moseley staff' sticker on it next week.

Oh this happened too. We had a copy of Dr.Alex Comfort's most famous literary work in and it got put onto a display thingy (but not by myself I hasten to add!) If only I'd had the shelf space, I'd have put out the hardback 'The Joy Of Organ Music' as it's STILL in the draw, along with the Einaudi. But my £1.49 classical CD promo still dominates my bay at the mo.

...now that would be good to put next to each other and take a photo of to stick on Twitter, never mind Scargill and Powell!

Young pianist who's nuts about pianos so much so she's attracted Elton's attention:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-no ... e-26153015

dave brum wrote: I thought I'd have a little joke today and put a biography of Enoch Powell next to one of Arthur Scargill.

There might be rivers of blood if they fight!

Gill the Piano wrote:

dave brum wrote: I thought I'd have a little joke today and put a biography of Enoch Powell next to one of Arthur Scargill.

There might be rivers of blood if they fight!

...or the fascist might end up getting thrown down one of the communists' coal mines!!!

In another life, they could well be in a gay relationship.....

Oh, by the way I now have the pink A Dozen A Day book along with the Classics To Moderns 1 as I made another trip to the music shop in Redditch today, and the postman brought me my Oxfam order. Now, roll on the 11th!!

Whilst I was shuftying around in the gloryhole for a particular user manual, I inadvertantly stumbled upon the user manual for my piano:-
It tells you everything you could wish to know, and then some, the reverb, the demo tracks, metronome, recording and connecting it to a PC. It even tells you how to fine tune each note.

What it DOESN'T tell you is how to play the bleeding thing.....

Good news: It's my favourite tonight, Curry.

Bad news: It's a supermarket one.

Good news, That supermarket is Waitrose.

Bad news; we're a day late for Pancake Day
Good news; got some ready-made batter
Bad news; it's from a supermarket
Good news; it's M&S.

Thank God for supermarkets...

Ah yes, Shrove Wednesday and Ash Thursday. There may be at least one theologian who can back it up. And it might just catch on.....

My mother in law on the other hand doesn't even know whether it's Pancake Day or Christmas Day.

Why? Is she dappy? Or uninterested?

Very dappy. But before she joined the dappy brigade, she was only interested in herself and herself alone.

It has truly amazed me the amount of endorphins my brain can generate by cleaning my khazi.

Really? Well I shan't be trying it...not even on mine...

Gill the Piano wrote:Really? Well I shan't be trying it...not even on mine...

You know as well as I do, cleanliness is next to godliness, but not in the Oxford Dictionary.

I bought 2 raffle tickets with a first prize of a flight for two to Barbados (it was organised by one of the local second generation Bajan clubs) from my fitness instructor, who is herself going there in July. It was only after I'd bought them I realised I don't have a blooming passport!

My fitness instructor couldn't believe it when I told her I had never been outside the UK in my life. 'YOU ARE JOKING ME!!!!!' she exclaimed in a big Brummie accent. She asked me if there was anywhere I'd like to go in the world and I said Guisborough, as the furthest north I've ever been is Whitby and Guisborough is just north of Whitby!!

You can get a passport when you're sure you've won the holiday...

The second prize is £300, that would take the both of us to Leeds for the Piano competition and pay for our B&B in the city and a couple of concerts. I'd be more than happy with that and I don't need a passport either. I might even bump into Clemmy Burton-Hill. The third prize is a hamper of Caribbean food which would also do nicely.

Because there's never always a piano available...

How does one define a 'scale pattern?' The red Paul Harris pre-g1 sight reading course tells us to 'watch out for scale-patterns' but does not offer an explanation or definition. I googled it and I got a load of gobbledigook that I know already (how scales are formed etc.)

I'm going to find this hard to explain without sheet music examples, but Good King Wenceslas has a few scale patterns. Have a good look at the melody and see if you can find sections of scales, repetition etc.

It can be as basic as noting that the first four bars are repeated, and from bar 9 to the end, the melody is contructed from descending, then ascending scales. If you take a few minutes to analyse the patterns in the music, it does help the playing bit.

Edited to add.....

Now that I am on my PC, I can type faster than using my tablet

Even something as simple as Twinkle, Twinkle little star has a scale pattern.

Starting on Middle C the notes are written - CCGG AAG_ FFEE DDC_ The FFEE DDC is a scale pattern. If I were to break this tune down to teach to my recorder class, I would point out the jump up from C to G, then the one note step up to the A than back down again to the G, then a descending scale (playing each note twice) back down to the C. I know this is a very basic example but by showing them to recognise patterns of steps and jumps, I am trying to give them tools to help them sight read.

Continuing on with Twinkle.......

The next four bars are - GGFF EED_ GGFF EED_ Two descending scale patterns here - two notes per step, then the first four bars are repeated. THE END!

Fiona

You mean like the Eastenders theme: CDEFG A F, and then immediately followed by FEDCC? Runs basically, notes in succession either going up or down??

There were plenty of those in Stage 5 of the red Paul Harris book that touched upon scale patterns.

With regards to Wenceslas:
In this interpretation, from the minim in b2 to the end of bar 4, then repeated as the end of b6 to the end of b8 would be a scale pattern?? Plus bb9-10, b11, b13 and b15 to the first minim of b16 would be four more I would assume!

Here is the page from the Paul Harris book. It offers absolutely no explanation as to what scale patterns are, but on the basis of what Feg said, the exercises are basically all scale pattern:-

Exactly. A scale pattern is a lump of a scale, really!

dave brum wrote:Here is the page from the Paul Harris book. It offers absolutely no explanation as to what scale patterns are, but on the basis of what Feg said, the exercises are basically all scale pattern:-

scan0001.jpg

Yes, the boy has got it in one!!!!

It is NOT rocket science

We are a wise man, now I'm educating myself to look at the TS and working out what I'm going to count I have an extra thing to chew upon. Something I read said something about 'looking at the shape' of the tune before playing. I think I know what they mean as in simple sub-Grade 1 piano music, I can 'see' a shape of arpeggios and scale patterns now.

dave brum wrote:We are a wise man, now I'm educating myself to look at the TS and working out what I'm going to count I have an extra thing to chew upon. Something I read said something about 'looking at the shape' of the tune before playing. I think I know what they mean as in simple sub-Grade 1 piano music, I can 'see' a shape of arpeggios and scale patterns now.

Heck, reading TS and KS first, is an essential basic before putting fingers to keys. No wonder sight reading was proving problematic

Feg wrote:

dave brum wrote:We are a wise man, now I'm educating myself to look at the TS and working out what I'm going to count I have an extra thing to chew upon. Something I read said something about 'looking at the shape' of the tune before playing. I think I know what they mean as in simple sub-Grade 1 piano music, I can 'see' a shape of arpeggios and scale patterns now.

Heck, reading TS and KS first, is an essential basic before putting fingers to keys. No wonder sight reading was proving problematic

And not only that, failing to count throughout the piece, instead just relying on ones knowledge that a minim is two crotchets, a crotchet is half a minim but two quavers etc. Counting through the piece brings the minims, crotchets et al all to life and enables me to concentrate more on the pitch.

Not having to worry about key signatures yet, the stuff I'm doing now is all in C major and transposed to G major. I have this to look forward to. In the meantime tho.....

I did tell you I was doing it all wrong, did I not?

dave brum wrote:

Feg wrote:

dave brum wrote:We are a wise man, now I'm educating myself to look at the TS and working out what I'm going to count I have an extra thing to chew upon. Something I read said something about 'looking at the shape' of the tune before playing. I think I know what they mean as in simple sub-Grade 1 piano music, I can 'see' a shape of arpeggios and scale patterns now.

Heck, reading TS and KS first, is an essential basic before putting fingers to keys. No wonder sight reading was proving problematic

And not only that, failing to count throughout the piece, instead just relying on ones knowledge that a minim is two crotchets, a crotchet is half a minim but two quavers etc. Counting through the piece brings the minims, crotchets et al all to life and enables me to concentrate more on the pitch.

Not having to worry about key signatures yet, the stuff I'm doing now is all in C major and transposed to G major. I have this to look forward to. In the meantime tho.....

I did tell you I was doing it all wrong, did I not?

Hmm, I'm sure there is a saying relevant here.......ahh,trying to run before you can walk, perhaps?

I'm glad to see that your new positive attitude is having positive results.