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One of the trickiest things about playing piano can often be how to have your eyes looking at the music, at your left hand, at your right hand, all at the same time!
There is no easy solution for this, other than to try to make it easier for yourself.
In today’s little tutorial, I’m going to give you a quick fun practice session that you can do to help find your way around the keyboard and learn a little bit about piano intervals in the meantime!
So in the words of Mary Poppins, let’s start at the very beginning.
What is an interval (apart from that bit in the theatre where you can get up and stretch your legs or join an extremely long toilet queue!)?
In music an interval is the distance between two notes, let’s say middle C to G.
When you count the interval, you always include the note you are on and the note you are going to, so C to G is a fifth as there are five notes: C, D, E, F and G.
Music is obviously made up of intervals but we don’t need to count them all the time.
You do, however, need to know how to ‘find’ them. This is where you need to train your muscle memory so that it becomes automatic.
What’s the point?
Well, the more you play, the more you will be able to just know how far apart your fingers need to be to find a specific interval and this will help with your fluency and dexterity.
There are several different types of intervals, but this moves you into a much more advanced level, so let’s just stick to the basics and ones you are most likely to meet as a beginner pianist; the octave, the fifth and the third.
An octave is 8 notes (apologies if I’m teaching you to suck eggs here!), so would be C to C.
For most adult pianists with an average hand, this is approximately the span of your hand, for children it will be a stretch and some cannot reach an octave to start with, but that isn’t a problem.
To listen to an octave in music, listen to the opening interval in ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ – this is an octave
The next interval is a fifth, that is the C to G that I mentioned earlier.
Twinkle Twinkle little star is a perfect fifth.
The final interval is a third (strictly a major third in this case) and is C to E.
An aural example of a major third is ‘When the Saints Go Marching In‘.
Ok, so to find them, well initially you need your eyes open and just play each one from the first note to the interval you’ve chosen to look at, once you get an idea of this, try shutting your eyes, or use a blindfold. Can you now find major thirds around the keyboard?
Once you’ve tried this with all the above intervals, rope in someone to shout out different intervals and your job is to find them without looking.
Hopefully, the more you practise, the more your success in getting the interval first time will go up.
Let me know how you get on!
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