Shift your attention from the notation to the keyboard and to the sound

Piano With Confidence is a project founded with the aim of offering a complete and compact methodology on how to properly master playing the piano by heart. The reason for it's creation was a methodological vagueness and fragmentation of available sources that deal with this topic, as well as an underrated methodical discontinuity that exists between playing from sheet music and playing from memory. The revolutionary component of this approach is that it naturally leads the player to master the composition by mental memory (not by analytical memory) before mastering it by muscle memory what dramaticaly increases the quality and depth of the knowledge. In addition, the project brings a way how to build a rational understanding of played pieces and develop general musical thinking (analytical). This material demystifies this area and makes it straightforward ability that can be achieved by systematical training. All this without a lot of theory with the aim of developing one's own personal musicality.

Playing from memory

There are two ways how to play piano. From scores and from memory. Of course, any playing from memory must be preceded by playing from the score. But being able to play from memory is not as intuitive and straightforward step as we might think. To be effective, you ought to do it the right way. And it is worth it to do so. In our opinion playing from memory is much more satisfying than playing from scores.

Piano With Confidence project brings a method how to learn individual piano pieces from memory in a completely effective way, the right way. It combines findings about musical memory with possibilities of current technologies. Learning itself is guided by Piano Trainer application which is a piano practicing harness.

The main idea is to liberate your eyes from constant glancing into notation and let you concentrate at what you hear and what you play. The application guides you methodicaly through the piece and teaches you to play it correctly from memory. Learning process has two phases, familiarization and practicing. Initial familiarization is done traditional way using notation, practicing is as much aural as possible. Learning process is similar to the way how you eat a food when you consume it bite by bite. The methodology uses approach called cumulative learning that puts the stress on preventing forgetting of what you have learned already what implies high effectivity of learning.

Understanding the language of music

Most of people perceive music passively. They listen to it and enjoy blending of tones in a rhythm. Even many of us, pianists, have it the same with the music we play. We hear tones, chords, recognize false tones, recognize melody going up and down, bass line, but this all is for us just a cluster of interesting sounds. We don't recognize by ear what is happening there.
You can play the way that you just press the right keys the right way at the right time and it is good. In fact real time interpretation works this way. And many musicians are happy just with it. But if you want to go deeper and further, you ought to start thinking about what you play, finding common patterns and priciples. Music itself is quite diverse. On the other hand we feel that there are some repetitive patterns in behind. Understanding these patterns can help us grasping the music we play more firmly. Here we present a rational way how to do it. Rational in two crucial aspects - in the aspect of diatonic context and in the aspect of harmonic structures. If we want to know what we are playing (and thus be more confident in playing it from memory), we have to study and understand the pieces we play through the prism of these two aspects. And to do it not only on level of whole chords (thus bunches of tones), but be aware that there is a need to do it on level of each individual tone played. It can sound scary, but it is the righ way. To move from the level of wholes to the level of details. This ability will then lead us to the level of wholes but with a tranformed perspective. With a perspective of understanding. Or we should rather say recognizing. Music is an abstract language, in fact there is no real understanding of music, there can only be a better grasp of it.

Last changes 2024/07/15 (see the News section)