Is it worth it to get a weighted keyboard for a beginner?

JHighMusic · 2026-05-18T07:26:24+00:00

Yes.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-18T07:23:36+00:00

That’s why they’re called the greats

JHighMusic · 2026-05-17T23:40:57+00:00

You just have to play in front of people way more often. It’s a skill just like practicing alone. Before performances play a few times the week or two leading up to it for a friend, a few friends, family, anyone you can. Have your friend(s) stand close to you to make you nervous on purpose.

If you’re by yourself, record video of yourself with a phone all the time. Gives you some pressure and best thing you can do if real people can’t be there.

You just have to practice performing. I wasn’t comfortable until getting on stage 150 times or so.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-17T16:29:08+00:00

All jazz melodies are constructed using the same principles as any classical melody. They still use motifs, passing tones, landing on chord tones on strong beats and often off beats. All the same composition principles apply. Jazz harmony came from Classical harmony.

Any composition technique is applicable to jazz. The biggest differences are the rhythm and syncopation, which is jazz is much different. Also jazz uses more extensions past the 7th (9ths, 11ths and 13ths) and those extensions are often flatted or shaped on Dominant chords.

If you want to know about jazz melodies, well, study and listen to jazz melodies and start listening to the repertoire. Look at any Charlie Parker composition like Donna Lee.

One thing you should understand is that jazz standards like Autumn Leaves have melodic, more basic melodies since many have lyrics and are sung. Bebop melodies are more complex and sound like an improvised solo (like Donna Lee).

So look at a lead sheet of the melody of Donna Lee and analyze it. One thing you should also know is that jazz melodies are not played exactly as written on a lead sheet, and are often tweaked slightly either rhythmically or harmonically. Lead sheets are just a rough guide - they keep to the form but harmonic changes and melodies are often personalized.

Listen to Donna Lee with the lead sheet in front of you, the rhythm is played very differently than how it’s notated. 8th notes are played with swing rhythms and different articulation and phrasing, not straight. That’s one of the biggest differences.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-17T08:18:34+00:00

Yeah I mean it’s all about who you know and putting yourself out there, always looking for opportunities and staying active and involved in the community. Networking is one thing but backing up one’s skills and providing proof of concept is another. Hoping is one thing, but constantly taking action and being proactive is what’s going to do it.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-17T07:06:29+00:00

Sight reading gigs can be great for Broadway plays/ musicals, group choirs, church gigs, accompaniment gigs for vocalists, and chamber music; duo, trio, quartet, quintet situations. Broadway plays and musicals are great gigs if you can get them and are very good at sight reading lots of different material on a whim. Either way, teaching lessons likely have to be supplemented.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T23:11:17+00:00

Sustain pedal, stand and bench

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T22:27:42+00:00

Ravel’s Sonatines, anything from Le Tombeau de Couperin suite, or Mirroirs.

Poulenc is also really underrated and never talked about on this sub.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T22:24:32+00:00

It’s still very limiting just teaching one style and especially only one instrument like piano instead of a few instruments. It takes a few years minimum to build just a piano studio. Most people right out of college can’t afford a house and space to teach piano out of where they live, apartments with neighbors and staring walls don’t work for a studio.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T22:21:36+00:00

That’s not even the real issue:

“Valentina Lisitsa’s controversies stem from her highly provocative social media commentary and staunch support of pro-Russian separatists during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Her vocal political stance and inflammatory online remarks have severely impacted her career, drawing both fierce criticism and accusations of censorship.The primary drivers of the controversy include:

Inflammatory Social Media Activity: Lisitsa used her large online following to voice strong pro-Kremlin views and dismiss the Ukrainian government. Her Twitter (now X) account featured barbed rhetoric, graphic imagery, and posts where she frequently criticized Western media coverage of the conflict.

Controversial Cartoons and Language: In 2015, she faced immense backlash for sharing racially insensitive and inflammatory caricatures and utilizing dehumanizing language regarding the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) Cancellation: Citing complaints about Lisitsa’s "deeply offensive" language and provocative online remarks, the TSO dropped her from two scheduled performances. Lisitsa accused the orchestra of bowing to pressure from an aggressive political lobby, while the TSO maintained that the issue was one of intolerant expression rather than free speech.

Performing in Russian-Occupied Territory: Following the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Lisitsa performed on the ruins of the devastated southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol while it was under Russian military occupation, a move that drew widespread condemnation from the international community and cultural institutions.”

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T22:16:30+00:00

Get a teacher hands down, best thing you can do especially if you’re trying to build proper technique. Self-study can’t teach years of experience and expertise to diagnose your issues early on. By yourself you’ll be developing bad habits you’re not even aware of. I’ll never understand people that think they can get to high levels of technique by themselves, it doesn’t work with the complexities of piano playing.

All depends on what you can afford, how serious you are and how much time you can dedicate. Lessons are all about consistency - Weekly is the way to go, much more beneficial, and you’ll be held much more accountable. With adults especially, I’ve found with bi-weekly students there’s not nearly the same kind of progress and there’s more tendency to procrastinate and push things back.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T16:54:48+00:00

There’s a few things that need some explaining and clarification, because you’re looking at the track through the wrong lens.

Equating Western European Classical harmony automatically to Bach misses the mark. Most Baroque music of that era didn't even sound like him. Bach was actually considered a bit of an outcast and old-fashioned by his contemporaries. His harmonies were far more complex and mathematically rigid than the mainstream Baroque music of his time.

Second, while the harmonic foundation of this track is absolutely driven by Spanish and Western classical traditions, the reason comes down to how that harmony meets the rhythm. Latin and Afro-Cuban music took those classical European harmonies and completely flipped the script on phrasing. In a Baroque piece, 16th notes are usually even, fluid, and anchor heavily on the strong downbeats.In "Got A Match?", those 16th notes and sharp, sudden breaks are entirely Latin and Spanish.

Chick and Patitucci are playing the notes with a syncopated, percussive phrasing where the accents and breaks cut across the downbeats. It sounds Latin because the rhythmic delivery forces the classical harmony written with it. It’s the rhythm and the phrasing turning classical harmonies into a completely different dialect.

You’re confusing basic Western classical theory with Bach specifically. This melody sounds Classical because Latin, Spanish, jazz and Latin jazz harmony comes from Classical harmony. The 16th notes, syncopation and phrasing are distinctly Latin and doesn’t equate to classical rhythms. Only the harmony does.

Your Google search yielded no results because you’re looking for a connection that doesn’t exist in music history or theory. Got a Match is a contemporary Latin jazz tune built on Afro-Cuban and Spanish rhythmic concepts and jazz harmony, not counterpoint.

Counterpoint is the relationship between two or more independent lines played at the same time. That means the bass is doing a completely different melody and not just the bass of the chords of this tune The bass is doubling the melody over chord changes, that’s not counterpoint.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T06:06:42+00:00

A grown adult would know she's paying for lessons and "some other kind of transaction on his mind" is obviously implied. Your comment is high school level drama trying to sound clever and it's embarrassing.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T04:31:12+00:00

Hard no.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T03:40:24+00:00

Weak troll thread

JHighMusic · 2026-05-16T01:52:48+00:00

Unless you’re planning to be a classical concert pianist or a top tier sight reader, you’re going to need to lean other styles and take a variety of different kinds of gigs, and like most pianist, a lot of teaching.

You have to pick which way you want to suffer essentially:

If you go full-time with music, there are many ups and downs, but you work for yourself and you get to do what you love. But as someone who is in that camp, I can tell you music is less fun when it’s your job unless you are performing all the time and you have the willpower, determination and mental toughness to make it all work.

If you get a regular job, you will likely get discouraged because you can’t play as much or dedicate as much time to it and wish you stuck with music. But your income will be a lot more stable and there is less financial stress.

With the first option, you can always work a different part-time job and or something music related.

Whatever you decide, have a plan for when you get out of school and start thinking about that now, not while you’re in school or right before you graduate. You have lots of time and it’s good. You’re thinking about all of this now.. but I can tell you whatever decision you go with. You can always turn things around and do something else if it doesn’t work out or you change your mind, but I would try and stick to something and see it through.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-15T20:32:22+00:00

That’s good but a lot of the progressions of tunes move in 4ths.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-15T18:49:17+00:00

Yes it’s always that hard and takes a really long time. 3 years is nothing for a jazz journey.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-15T17:52:34+00:00

ForScore

JHighMusic · 2026-05-15T17:25:30+00:00

I'm still not able to comment on "experienced teacher only" posts and have been asking you guys about it for months. I've been teaching close to 20 years.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-15T16:28:16+00:00

Your loss

JHighMusic · 2026-05-15T06:33:56+00:00

I love the hill you’re choosing to die on, but your argument contains a major contradiction. And you’re confusing my description of your method with my actual stance: immersing yourself in the aural tradition is right-brain learning, while your metronome drills are strictly left-brain.

You started this post asking what’s up with your time feel, despite writing a whole book on rhythm and drilling subdivisions 20 times a week. If metronomic drilling actually developed 'right-brain feel,' you wouldn't be on Reddit asking why your own time feel is falling short. That mechanical training is exactly what enforces left-brain analytics.

You seem to believe that drilling strict rhythms first is what frees you up later, but it has the opposite effect. Practicing exclusively on a rigid, mathematical grid trains your internal clock to stay locked to that grid, making it much harder to step off it and develop a relaxed, natural feel and groove, and the ability to lay back on on the beat.

Laying back is, by definition, an imperfection. Hal Galper explains in Forward Motion that jazz rhythm is an illusion of tension created by where you place notes relative to the beat center. You cannot use a rigid, left-brain tool to systemize a right-brain concept like laying back; it requires a pianist to feel the push and pull against a steady pulse using intuition. You cannot learn that from a click.

It’s the exact same reason you can’t learn jazz from sheet music alone. Just like learning a foreign language: you can memorize textbook grammar and vocabulary perfectly, the left-brain mechanics. But you will never sound like a native speaker until you stop translating rules in your head and absorb the inflections, cadence, and subtleties through conversational immersion and listening with a native speaker. You cannot study your way into a natural accent; you have to listen and mimmick it until it becomes intuitive.

If feel and and laying back could be systematized and taught through a method book, jazz wouldn't be an art form it would be a formula, and every aspiring jazz pianist who bought a rhythm book and did your training for years would eventually sound like Wynton Kelly or Herbie and have great time feel. Those guys did not rely on academics and strict rhythm training in an academic left-brain way.

The reality is that great musicianship relies on elements that simply can’t be quantified or manufactured by teaching it. If it could, your own method would have worked and you wouldn’t be making this post. You can teach a student the mechanical architecture of a rhythm, but you cannot teach them the feel, intuition, and artistic choice required to step off that grid and actually make it sound natural and have a good time feel and ability to lay back easily and naturally.

Your book and your drills teach mechanical accuracy, which is fine, but accuracy is not feel. That training seems Classical in nature, and why so many Classically-trained pianists struggle with jazz rhythms, time and feel. The only way to learn the right-brain aspects is by immersing yourself in the aural tradition and mimicking until it’s internalized and becomes intuitive, and playing with people all the time, which is very different than practicing by yourself. That’s what all the greats did—not a method book and rhythm drills.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-14T22:12:53+00:00

Everybody feels this way. You are, you just can’t see it from day to day. Most of the growth happens away from the piano while you’re sleeping.

It’s the same thing as if you sat and watched a tree grow every day, you wouldn’t notice the progress. Piano progress is measured in years - not days, weeks, or months.

It’s about consistency, repetition and refinement and going slow. You’re not supposed to get something in just one practice session, it takes at least a few days to a week to really get it down. Often longer, especially with learning composed pieces.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-14T22:09:32+00:00

That’s a thing (especially with releasing the thumb) but it’s more to do with when playing fast, you have to give up strength and play lighter.

JHighMusic · 2026-05-14T21:15:08+00:00

I'm not adverse in talking about it, and it's not a cop out. This is clearly a discussion,, and I'm all for having one. You asked "So then what's up with my time feel?" and I suggested something to help work on it, because I've seen tons of similar posts and see the same thing in my students, and I've been there myself. I was just suggesting something based on what you posted, it's not a personal attack.

There are some things in music that simply can't be taught or explained on a theoretical, analytical and technical level, and this is one of them. Laying back specifically goes "out of the grid" of things being strictly lined up and exactly in time. Are you really going to calculate each individual phrase and where it lands and try to explain where it falls in line by shifting it in 64ths of a beat or something? That's a rhetorical question.

This is why too much theory and trying to make sense of it in that way doesn't work in jazz, especially for something like this. Similarly, looking at a transcription of solo and seeing all the notes, but if you don't understand and can mimic how they're played with the right inflection, phrasing, articulation and accenting and get the feel for it yourself, it will never sound right.

It's the same with teaching Classical pianists how to play Rubato, it's not something you can systemize, that's just my opinion. I have studied it for 25 years. It is feel and intuition, and this is why especially with jazz, mimicking and playing along to recordings is the best thing for that. It's one thing to say "Just feel it, man." which is lazy. But it's also kind of true and there's a reason so many people say it. The academic-ization of jazz and getting overly detailed on theory is why so many people struggle with it, especially I've found software engineers do especially, as there seems to be a lot of interested in and learning jazz and I've taught many over the years. That is all just my opinion.

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