Welcome Bach everyone! Today's tip of the day is on how to use YouTube and other forms of recording to your advantage. Teachers will not normally agree with this tip because watching the video too many times may go against what he or she is trying to teach. For example, search "Bach Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude" and look at how many results you get. Think about how many variants there are in each performance, because no two people will play it the exact same. However if you use this the way I believe is the best way to do, you will increase efficiency in your practicing.
YouTube has now become a world wide business for almost anything you want to see. You can go on there and search for videos on the "Traxxas Rustler" and find several thousand videos (When searched on 5/23/12, I found 13,900!), and as stated above if you search for "Bach Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude" you will find a large number of people preforming it (On 5/23/12 there was 4,720). Keywords does make a difference, however that's a topic for the end of the lesson. Anyways, as I said, when you search for Bach's Prelude from Suite No. 1, you see there are almost 5,000 performances of that song alone, and rarely does the same video get re-posted, so the overall possibilities are varied greatly. One person could begin with the first phrase (the phrase almost everyone recognizes when someone starts playing) very well, but make a small mistake in the second phrase. Then take another video and that person might play it very well throughout, but not stick to the stylistics perfectly throughout. There are many possible differences, and that is the 1st reason why this is a good way to practice: Find a couple recordings that suit either how you imagine the piece to sound or how your teacher thinks it should sound and begin listening to them constantly.
The more you listen to a piece, the more familiar you feel when you see the sheet music. Just picking up the sheet music, you can see how "insane" it looks, or how much of a push in mental and physical level that the piece will push you but unless you already know the piece the sheet music will look a little foreign. It's like when you go to a new school: You can see from the outside of the building that there are few classes, or many classes in the building. You can also tell when you get inside the same thing, but you see more than you did before, but until you actually walk around the school and see for yourself where everything is and know where you should be, the place is pretty much foreign territory to you. The same applies to music. You hear Prelude and you hear that there is a lot going on, but the melody is pretty straight forward. When you get the sheet music however, you see that there is a whole lot more to the sheet music than you anticipated (most people don't know that the piece is almost entirely 16th notes). But just from hearing you know that it is fairly simple to learn.
Another advantage of this tip is when you see some people playing the music, it helps develop fingerings and articulations you may or may not have thought about using before. For example, watch someone preform the Haydn Cello Concerto No. 1, and see how many possible fingerings there are for some of the actual performance. Same rule applies to articulations, if someone wasn't aware that Haydn was from the Classical time period and thought he was from the Baroque era, the articulations of his music would be entirely different. However, by listening to the music you can tell that he wasn't from the Baroque era.
Remember that this is no substitute for practicing, this is simply a tool to make practicing easier, and more efficient.
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