cindy@ada-uts.UUCP (09/20/85)
I studied piano from 4th thru 8th grades when my parents told me
that they wouldn't pay for lessons if I wasn't going to practice. I
decided to quit at that point because I really hated practicing. At
the time it seemed like the correct decision, but now I'm sorry I
didn't continue. I've thought about this recently and have decided
that it wasn't the playing that I disliked, as I'm an avid dulcimer
player now and really enjoy my music, but perhaps it was the fact that
I was bored with the material. My style was probably not the best, but
I found that after the first day of practice for the week, I had memorized
all the new material, and was ready for more! Spending an hour a day
for the next 6 days playing them over and over just got to be too much.
I would suggest that you make sure that the practice is challenging,
and /or fun. Try to find out why the child doesn't like to practice
and try to remedy the problem. And from my own experience, don't make
her do it if she really doesn't want to, do try to encourage her not to
quit. I wish now that I had kept it up.
NET: {harpo, allegro, bellcore, ihnp4}!inmet!ada-uts!cindy
----------singer@spar.UUCP (David Singer) (09/25/85)
One effective method of practice for hard bits is M&M practice. You start with say 6 M&Ms on the left hand end of the keyboard. Each time you do the tricky bit right, one goes to the right hand end; getting it wrong, one goes back the other way. When they're all on the right hand end -- you get to eat them! It takes skill to find passages which are within reach, to make it an achievable challenge. One inducement to practice is choice of music -- I never really got into it until I discovered Mozart, and then no-one coujld stop me. A little later it was Bach. My brother had a brief but effective fling with country. How much music does the child hear, that they like and could learn? The 'Gosh, I've just got to be able to play that' is one of the most powerful incentives to practice I know (and yes, there are recordings of 'easy' classical music -- I don't know about other genres).
dave@cylixd.UUCP (Dave Kirby) (09/27/85)
Before anyone even thinks about learning to play the piano, he should be informed that he will spend about 2 years playing the dinkiest music he has ever heard. After 6 weeks it will become almost unbearable. It is not a pleasant experience to spend hours learning something that sounds stupid when you play it before Grandma. After the second year, one gets into some better-sounding songs, and can begin learning more modern popular music. The first 2 years are necessarily filled with dinky songs because the songs must be easy to play and therefore must have very simple melodies and (especially) rhythms. It is important that one realises this before he commits to piano lessons. The first two years or so are the hardest. A child should be encouraged to play around on the piano, "picking out" the melodies of songs he has heard and likes, starting at day one of the piano lessons. Unfortunately, many piano teachers discourage this, because they are teaching the student to TYPE the music instead of PLAY the music. As a result, most piano students can play music if it is written down, but they have never learned to LISTEN to what they are doing, and are nothing more than just typists who use an 88-key keyboard. I have seen too many music students that can play the most complex and difficult music from a sheet, but when asked to improvise "Happy Birthday" they are totally lost. I say all this because I know from experience that there are "good" piano teachers that teach piano, but not MUSIC. Students of these teachers are most miserable when they practice, because they haven't learned to love music-making. My piano teacher was unique in that she would allow me to play the music by ear, instead of insisting that I always play exactly note by note. Under her I learned to UNDERSTAND what I was playing, because I added my own embellishments to the music. Then, after I had played the piece for her by ear during the next lesson, she would say, "That's real good. Now let's do see if you can do it exactly by the music, and then we'll go on to another song." Because of this, I enjoyed piano. She allowed me the freedom to enjoy what I was doing, but she also gently disciplined me to learn the techniques of playing note-by-note. This is the kind of teacher to look for, and they are few and far between. But if you can find a teacher who has this ability to instill love for music in children, you will have very little problem getting your child to practice. So this 832@burl.UUCP> <221@drivax.UUCP> <842@burl.UUCP> <240@investor.UUCP> <233@drivax.UUCP> <249@investor.UUCP> <239@drivax.UUCP> Reply-To: pls@soessx.UUCP (P.L.Sullivan) Organization: AT&T Tech-NS, Atlanta Lines: 17 Keywords: 10 Summary: pipe size In article <239@drivax.UUCP> alan@drivax.UUCP (Alan Fargusson) writes: >> How big is the pipe? I read somewhere pipes use the root file system, > >Pipes use an inode on the root file system. They are limited to 5120 bytes >on System V, and 4096 on some other systems, by code in the kernel. On System V, pipes are 10 physical blocks long, with the 11th thru 13th block pointers reserved for pipe activity des