Summer time is one of my favorite times with students. I still get to see them regularly but our schedule is much more relaxed. We’re not aiming for a challenging goal like spring recital or piano festivals and auditions so we can slow down and just enjoy playing the piano. Summer is when students have a little more time to play the music THEY want to play.
With the current pandemic, your piano kid may have a little more time on their hands and they may not have been able to see their piano teacher as much as you would like. Getting new music to play can be tricky when you, the parent, aren’t sure what to buy and you aren’t able to hop in your car and drive to the local music store.
Listen to the full episode here
There are online resources you can check out. We talked about how to select supplemental music for your piano kid back in episode PPP053. There are some great resources linked in that episode that you can still use today.
That show had more to do with picking solo piano music, songs written expressly for piano, for piano students who are learning to read music. Today I want to talk about music that your child has heard on the radio or in a movie or at church. Songs written for another medium but your piano kid wants to be able to play on the piano. We’ve got a solution for that!
Today I’ll be looking at two major online retailers of digital music: MusicNotes.com and SheetMusicDirect.com . I don’t have a professional affiliation with either of these companies. I’m not paid to talk about them. I just think they are great resources for piano parents to use so you can find music your piano kid would like to play in addition to their assigned pieces for lessons.
With both of these websites you can view a sample of the music before you buy and you can purchase, download, and print the music right at home. When you go to these sights you’ll find all kinds of types of music. Piano Solo, Piano/Vocal/Guitar, SATB or any combination (these a choral arrangements for Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass), and Lead Sheet
I want to sharpen our focus even more to lead sheets….
Digital Music Comes in Many Formats
Sheet music has everything written out, both treble and bass, lyrics, sometimes chord symbols. If you purchase a book or individual songs with the heading “Piano Vocal and Guitar” you will see even more information on the score. There are three staves per system: the lower two are connected by a brace indicating what the pianist should play. The top staff is written in treble clef and has the melody written out for the vocalist to sing. Above the three staves are chord symbols for the guitar player to use.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the piano part will include the melodic line with some added notes for harmony but many times the piano part is a true accompaniment and does not include the notes of the melody. Unless your piano kid is excellent at reading three staves at once, this way of playing a “song for fun” isn’t so much fun. It’s a lot of slow, tedious work.
Because there is so much information, essentially three musical parts, a sheet music score is usually pages and pages of written music. Many piano kids are allergic to turning pages. The full sheet music is more expensive.
A Lead Sheet is an abbreviated way of notating a melody and harmony. It condenses all the vital information from the sheet music into a single treble staff and chord symbols. The treble staff notates the melody, also called the Lead (If you Google “Who sings the lead in Hey Jude” – Paul McCartney….Frozen? – Idena Menzel), this is the part you sing; the melody or lead is the part that makes each song unique and different from every other song (This is amazing to me – and a topic for another show – the variety of melodies and styles and types of music we can get from 7 little letters and 12 different sounds on the piano.)
Because the information is consolidated and reduced, lead sheets are often one or two pages and less expensive. They are great to use when playing at weddings or church or family gatherings when you don’t want to turn so many pages and you might have multiple songs to play.
One more musical abbreviation I’ll mention here, though you won’t find these on Music Notes or Sheet Music Direct – chord charts.
Chord charts strip everything down to only lyrics and chord symbols; there is no music notation at all. These come in handy when you’re gigging and VERY familiar with the songs. Since there is no staff to represent the melodic line or even rhythm patterns, you either need to know the song well or have someone who knows the song and can sing it while you follow along. The advantage of chord charts is that you can reduce the song to the least amount of space. My husband, Duane designs chord charts so that everything is aligned to the far left, taking up less than half the page and when he leads worship at church he stacks each page in a way that he can see every song at once. Truth be told, he probably has all the songs memorized but likes to have the charts to refer to just in case.
You get what you pay for. If you Google chord charts for a song your piano kid wants to play, first of all, you might find things for free but you will likely get a terrible and inaccurate chart because anybody can put anything on the internet. Just like you wouldn’t site Wikipedia as a source for your high school research paper, you can’t rely on the accuracy of homemade chord charts. The chords may not be aligned with the correct lyrics or the chords are just plain wrong.
Another thing you can “get” when you search for free music online is “in trouble”. Anybody can put anything on the internet, whether they are the owner or not. Stealing music is just like stealing anything else. Even if you never get caught, you’ve made a negative mark on your character. Back in episode PPP198 we talked about the etching of character. Aristotle said the development of character comes from making 1000 choices and then making 1000 choices again. Each choice you make, for the good or the bad, makes it easier to make the next choice.
I’m going to step off my soapbox for now and move on. I think we could dedicate an entire show to copyright rules. (let me make a note of that…)
How I Use Lead Sheets with My Students
Lead sheets are a way to give a piano kid a quick win, but they can be a little intimidating. At first glance, a lead sheet can look like too much information and too little information all at once! So let’s talk about three ways to approach a lead sheet.
Piano Geography – Lead sheets indicate when the harmonies change in a song by writing chord symbols, capital letters, above the corresponding lyric. Students as early as their first year can follow those letters to find the appropriate piano key. Even if the harmony includes sharps or flats, children can usually catch on pretty quickly because they are focused on one thing – finding piano keys.
(Side note for parents: if you aren’t familiar with the names of the piano keys, listen to episode PPP003 or, better yet, ask your piano kid to teach you!)
A couple of years ago I had a student who loved Disney’s Moana. She loved watching clips on YouTube. With a little help form me, she was able to play the letters of the chord symbols along with the YouTube video for “How Far I’ll Go”. This built up her confidence in finding piano keys quickly. More than that, she learned to feel the pulse of the music so she would know when to move to the next piano key. Even more than that, we had a ball playing and singing along!
Another student has a great ability to pick out melodies by ear but she doesn’t take time to listen to the bass line. Using a lead sheet gives her an basic outline of how the harmonies change without slowing her down to read a written bass line.
I love the slow down feature on YouTube (click the gear at the bottom right of the video on your computer or click the three dots at the top right on a mobile device to change the playback speed). This comes in handy when you want to zip through a boring tutorial video and it’s very handy for slowing down music videos so you can play along. Changing the speed does not change the pitch or key of the music!
Neither student has learned much about constructing the full chord yet and they would be frustrated to have to stop and figure chords out when they just want to play the song. The capital letter indicated above the staff is the root of the chord, you don’t have to worry about major or minor or extensions of the chord (yet another topic for another day!) The root of the chord is often what the electric bass player plays in a band. If you follow him (or her, shout to my friend, Linda Thompson, who is an excellent bass player!), you will be able to follow the chord changes.
Melody Line – Some students haven’t developed their ear to the extent of picking out tunes on their own so reading the melody line helps them get started. Why wait for their ear to catch up before they start playing songs they enjoy? Using the notated melody line helps a student start associating the movement of the melody with the movement of the notes on the staff.
The rhythms are often much more complicated on lead sheets than in the music they study in their piano books but because they are familiar with the song, they already know the rhythm patterns; they are essentially playing the rhythm by ear. I often compliment them on their ability to use both eyes and ears to “read” a song.
A lot of times, students just want to play the “hook” or the main theme of a tune. Using lead sheets gives them a quick win and allows them to keep going with the song if they choose to.
Some songs these days are not very interesting when it comes to the melody. A couple of songs requested by students this year are “Old Town Road” or Taylor Swift’s “Out of the Woods”. Both these songs are more rhythmic than melodic. They are more like sing-speak. To play the melody of songs like these might be fairly satisfying for your piano kid but you might want to grab your ear buds and listen to another one of my podcast episodes (!) or go to another room while they’re practicing because the music can get a little monotonous., in my not-so-humble opinion.
I say all that to remind you to listen to the music with your piano kid before you buy to see if it will translate to the piano well.
Creativity within Boundaries – If a piano kid has a more solid understanding of left hand patterns and deciphering chord symbols, following a lead sheet gives them the outline and basic harmonic structure of the song without dictating how it should be played. When you see a chord symbol, you have an endless amount of ways you can play that chord.
As long as you use the root of the chord – as a single note or an octave – you can add additional chord tones at your discretion. Adding the fifth in the middle of the octave is a very common way many performers interpret chord symbols.
As long as you count and maintain the same chord for the correct amount of time, you can adapt the rhythm to anything you like.
It’s like having a coloring book with lines marked for you but you get to choose the colors you use….and you could even go outside the lines a little if you want to.
Resources mentioned in today's show
What do you think about using lead sheets?
Have you used them in the past?
Do you have any questions about using lead sheets?
Let me know in the comments. I’m looking forward to helping you and your piano kid have fun with lead sheets.
Resources mentioned in today's show
Social Sharables
Click an image to share directly to your pinterest account. Download an image to share in your social circles. If the image isn’t branded, please link back to this page and help us spread the word about all the great resources at Piano Parent Podcast. Thank you!
Thanks for listening!
To share your thoughts:
- Leave a note in the comment section below
- Ask a question at pianoparentpodcast@gmail.com
- Share this show on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest
To help out the show:
- leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Your ratings and reviews help other piano parents and teachers find the show.
- Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podbean, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More
