This week, I engaged with my learning project with attempting the correct timing of the song “Piano Man” by Billy Joel. Over the last few weeks, I have just been playing the song without thinking about the correct timing. This song is to be played quickly but in ¾ timing. This means that there are only to be 3 beats per measure in this song. This week I used a blog post called, “Improving Your Rhythm At The Piano”.
I started with the first tip that Emily (author of blog post) recommended in her blog. I started by counting out loud while playing the song. This helped me keep the beat and play the notes on the right beat. I did notice that my counting would slow down when I got stuck at certain spots which did not help me truly keep the time with the song so I went searching for another option.
Another tip that Emily mentioned in her blog post was to use a metronome. I don’t have a metronome just laying around at home so, alternatively, I downloaded a metronome app from the Apple Store onto my phone called “Smart Metronome & Tuner”.
I had to do some research (good ol’ google search) to find out the tempo (BPM) the song is and found out that it has a tempo of 178 BPM. I played that on the “Smart Metronome & Tuner” app and realized that it is extremely fast and isn’t doable for me. I researched the tempo more and found out that it can actually be played half-time at 89 BPM. I put that number into the app and felt much better about that.
With the help of the metronome app, I was able to play the parts of the song I learned on beat with the correct timing!
Next week, I want to be able to play the intro of the song fluently and on beat with little to no errors!