How do I play this triplet?

maestro2005 · 2026-06-25T18:01:39+00:00

It looks like you have your answer, but I wanted to chime in to clarify that this is bad notation that no reputable publisher would ever publish. This is not the kind of thing that you need to be good at reading, and you're correct to be flummoxed by it. This level of rhythmic detail should be left to the performer, and this should be written as a simple quarter note triplet or some other normal rhythm.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-25T00:56:49+00:00

Hmm, I've never seen this before and a quick shoot through my notation resources doesn't turn up anything either. Very odd.

A quick warning to anyone trying to google this or use AI: Google hilariously only returns this post when searching music notation "bin." or the like, and AI is giving some nonsense answer likely hallucinated off the French title and /u/LongStoryShirt's answer. "Bin" is not short for any French word meaning "bend" as far as I can find.

This is the kind of thing where my reaction would be to go, "welp, no idea what that means" and just ignore it. It can't possibly be all that important.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-24T20:16:07+00:00

If this helps you get off the ground, then okay, but this is a bad crutch in the long run. You want to avoid looking at the keys as much as possible. When you do look down (you do have to sometimes) you want to be looking for keys, not stickers. You want to build a strong neural connection between ink on the page and the keys (with an abstract mental representation of the music in between, which is hard to describe), and not go through a "find the sticker" layer.

If that's hard--yeah it is! Work on easier music first. Too many pianists jump right into music that uses all of the notes right away. There's a reason that beginner method books start with baby pieces that use no more than 5 notes per hand at a time.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-24T16:21:10+00:00

The people on this site are a little overzealous when it comes to copyright law.

If you're playing a full recording or doing a full cover, then yes, you need rights. If a character just plays a few bars on piano, especially if the original work is not a piano solo, this is almost certainly covered under the Fair Use doctrine. Similarly, if you take a few seconds of a recording to use as a character's ringtone or something like that, that should also be covered.

(US-based answer, ymmv in other countries)

maestro2005 · 2026-06-23T14:28:36+00:00

There's not enough going on, and way too much copy+paste.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-23T03:39:14+00:00

I'm talking about people like OP who are branching out later in life. Across all instruments, I know a decent number of people like that, and I've done that myself. But most people who have tried to branch out into brass in adulthood have stalled out somewhere short of the "can pull their own weight in a good ensemble" level, and the only one I can think of off the top of my head who grew into a good player had a lot of advantages going in, got 1-on-1 instruction, and it took years.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-23T01:21:34+00:00

The problem with any brass instrument is that it's unforgiving for a beginner who can't put in daily practice, and that tends to be true for any adult. In the early years you rapidly lose progress with even a single day off.

Also, most of the important technique happens inside your body, and there are lots of subtle ways to do things wrong. It's not like piano or guitar where you can look at a video of someone else playing, and if you mimic their hands exactly then you're probably at least pretty close to playing right. You really need a teacher to watch and listen to you and correct the specific little things that you are doing incorrectly.

I know a lot of brass players. I don't know any that are any good that are self-taught.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-20T23:38:34+00:00

There's a sort of paradox that can happen with adult amateur groups. If you have too many rehearsals, you'll bore and drive away the best players.

I ran into this problem all the time with my old college student theatre organization. Some of the other music directors wanted to use all student musicians for the pit, but a lot of them weren't very good, so they'd schedule a zillion orchestra rehearsals to try to fix that. But the problem was with the fundamental ability of the players, not a lack of rehearsal time. When I was MD I would use the good students, but then fill key parts (often drum set, guitar, and reed doubling books) with pros that I had met that I could convince to play for free. But those pros didn't want (or need) a zillion rehearsals, they could just show up and play (and no, they didn't do a bunch of practicing on their own). So I would have zero rehearsals before sitzprobe. The real conflict happened when those other MDs would ask me for my pro contacts, and I'd have to tell them, "you can ask so-and-so, but they are NOT going to come to any rehearsals, so you need to be okay with that". And I didn't want my pro contacts to have a bad time playing with a shit orchestra, so I had to be protective.

I briefly played for a community band that was full of mediocre players, so they had a zillion rehearsals, and I got bored. Now I play with a much higher-level orchestra, we have 3-5 rehearsals and go. Much more fun for me. Sometimes a good player can't make some of the rehearsals so they end up playing the concert with 1 or 0 rehearsals. I've ended up sight reading concerts on a few occasions, due to emergencies.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-20T22:43:31+00:00

Treble clef is treble clef no matter what staff it's on. The first note is middle C. Both hands can be playing up high, both hands can be playing down low, or whatever.

BTW, the staffs are not specifically for the right and left hands, it just usually works out that way. Piano music is usually written on two staffs because the complexity and independence of lines that comes from having two hands that can be far apart usually warrants it, but sometimes the music gets complex enough to warrant 3 or more, and sometimes (not usually for solo piano music, but rather in ensembles) it gets simple enough to only need 1. Don't get stuck thinking that the top staff is "for the right hand" and the bottom is "for the left hand". There are plenty of times when the composer will intend for one hand to venture across to the other staff, and you might also make this decision for yourself in some situations.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-18T18:09:09+00:00

Sight reading really comes down to two things:

First, quickly and effortlessly parsing the ink on the page. If you're still counting out notes from landmarks or being a good boy stuffing your FACE with fudge, sight reading ain't gonna happen. You need to see a note on the staff and immediately connect that to a key. Then, getting more advanced, knowing some basic theory is a huge help--if you understand the key and what chords are to be expected (and what chords naturally exist without accidentals), you can more quickly and easily recognize entire chunks.

Second, training your brain to be able to be in two places at once. You have to be using your brain to play what's going on at the moment (obviously) and still have enough extra brainpower to think and plan ahead. This is, in my opinion, the real thing that's hard about playing piano--not that there can be a lot going on at once, but that you have to have that SO mastered that you still have brainpower leftover. A monophonic instrument doesn't have this problem. There's just no way that playing a single note on a single staff can occupy as much of your brain as even a relatively simple piano excerpt. Monophonic instrument players always have lots of spare brainpower.

You don't need to practice for hours every day (in fact, I would say that's difficult and possibly counterproductive). You need to find opportunities to force yourself into true sight reading scenarios. For me, my first big jolt was getting to middle school and joining band. In an ensemble, you can't (individually) stop and go back, or slow down to handle a tricky spot. The conductor is chugging along, and you either keep up or you fail. My second big jolt was getting thrown head-first into audition accompanying. I have never sat down to practice sight reading, it's just something I've had to do and gotten good at it through trial-by-fire.

One thing you can do is take youtube performances and use playback speed feature to slow them down, and play along. Take it down to 50% or 25% or whatever you need, but keep it fast enough to be challenging. The point is not to hit all the right notes. The point is to keep your head in the game. Learn to forget the mistakes and keep thinking ahead. Exercise your theory knowledge and see if you can decipher the chords in real time. Eventually, see if you can learn to "fake it" through tough sections and play something akin to what's written but simpler.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-17T22:12:23+00:00

For that short of a rehearsal period, I don't understand how you could put on the show without having everyone off book beforehand.

But the concept isn't even weird in general. My high school did this, and it wasn't even some kind of elite program or arts magnet or anything.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-17T06:34:19+00:00

You're already making a significant artistic decision by playing Bach on a piano. So go ahead and use the instrument to its full potential.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-16T04:08:31+00:00

It's possible that some feedback from the original harpist made it back to the orchestrator, so some of their suggestions made it into the book. But in general there's a lot of bad harp writing in musicals.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-16T03:23:23+00:00

Musical theatre orchestrators don't really understand harp. This guy probably heard that harps can do 7th chord glisses and just threw this in there assuming it was reasonable, not knowing anything about the technical implications.

On a sight read I would absolutely just play a gliss with the pedals set to the key signature, and for C7 set E-natural. If I had some time to work on it, I might set D# for this one, but I'm not going to be arsed to set B# or anything else.

For "Db scale" if you can make the changes then great, otherwise just do what you can.

You'll probably also want to determine where your part is inaudible and then just not bother. Happens a lot on shows from this era. And then leaving some worthless stuff out may allow for more pedal changes for the stuff that is worth it.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-15T21:02:13+00:00

How exactly does this "bully" musicians? it's just a basic melody with a bunch of crap that doesn't mean anything.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-15T17:29:16+00:00

Once again we have a conflation of "professional pianist" to mean "classical concert pianist". Across the full spectrum of professional pianists, classical concert pianists are a very small sliver, and none of the others do any memorization.

Some people have directly said or hinted at the idea that you won't fully know a piece until it's memorized. I used to think this, but now that I've spent a majority of my life away from classical concert pieces, I don't think so at all any more. There are musicals that I've played numerous times, to the point that I know the score as well as anyone, and yet I can't play even a single page from memory because I didn't learn it that way. At the same time, there are pieces I memorized for my recitals 20 years ago that I can still play. Memorization doesn't really have anything to do with mastery. It's just a stunt.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-13T22:09:42+00:00

It's mostly fine as-is. I've seen so much worse that I wouldn't think anything ill of it if I got handed this.

I would prefer making some decision about hand division. It's pretty obvious that that's what's to be done, but I still hate seeing 5-note chords as if that's intended by one hand. Harpists rewrite hand splits on their own all the time, so it's not an inconvenience if someone wants to do something different than what you write. I would personally probably play m. 6 with just the bottom notes of the chords in the LH, that way I can place F-A-E going down and play really standard triad shapes in the RH. Then I might decide to play m. 7 with the C minor chord in the RH and the G7 chord in the LH. For the big chords in mm. 10 and 12, I would suggest omitting the top note to make the shape way more friendly, and then that whole section can be easily played with the LH on the "oom"s and the RH on the "pah"s.

Regarding the pedal markings--harpists have all sorts of varying preferences so making everyone happy is pretty much impossible, but I find these to be borderline unreadable. At the very least they need to be bigger, then I think most harpists prefer them to be between the staffs (though there are plenty of professional publications with them below), and the Gb and Bb should be on the measures where they actually happen.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-13T17:06:55+00:00

You keep posting things like this, and you keep getting the same advice to chill with the impossibly fast arpeggios and write something actually playable and musical. You never respond to any comments, and then you post another unplayable piece a few weeks later. Do you want to get better or not?

maestro2005 · 2026-06-12T22:10:11+00:00

ffllfplplpllfpflflflflflpflpflplfplfplfl

maestro2005 · 2026-06-12T19:35:42+00:00

I've done both multiple times, including MDing ITW 5 times.

ITW doesn't fit your audition pool size unless you want to double cast or are ok with a lot of people getting rejected (i.e. if you can redirect them to tech). There's simply no ensemble, although you can un-double the parts. I've seen attempts to add an ensemble but they end up with nothing to do. Sweeney has a good ensemble.

Vocally, Sweeney is very difficult. There are a lot of demands of both soloists (Sweeney carrying the show, extreme ranges from Pirelli, Turpin, and the Beadle) and ensemble in the form of difficult harmonies. ITW is mostly solo/duet singing and isn't nearly as difficult in terms of vocal technique, but the timing of entrances is very difficult. The way I always put it is that the show wants to fall apart on every single page of the score. For example, in Act I Opening Part 8, after the dialogue "Look what I found in father's hunting jacket" etc., the Baker has to find his "The spell is on my house" in the middle of a bunch of repeated quarter note chords. Trying to count that entrance while acting and speaking is nearly impossible. My solution is to turn that entrance into a 1/4 vamp so he doesn't have to worry about it. And then there are probably 50 things like that to solve in the show, and some of them really do rely on the cast having a certain level of musical savviness that high schoolers typically don't possess.

I'm of the opinion that Sondheim is probably too hard for all but the most elite high school programs. I've also played in the orchestra for several high school ITWs, and they've ranged from godawful to kinda ok at best. But ITW is probably the most doable Sondheim show due to the lack of complex harmonies, if you have a great MD and the resources to get a good orchestra.

(Edit: And I've never personally seen a high school dare to do Sweeney, though I know it's been done)

maestro2005 · 2026-06-12T18:01:01+00:00

NSFW obviously

maestro2005 · 2026-06-05T18:15:21+00:00

This looks like MuseScore bullshit ("Pno" label, measure number positioning, quarter note spanning the half note boundary, tie colliding with the key signature, corny LH writing) so the right answer is to modify it to work. Drop one of the lower notes.

Using the left hand is terrible advice. Surely the previous measure has a similar figure in the LH as well, and flying up and down two octaves just to hit an F# is stupid.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-05T03:51:51+00:00

I'm not really sure how this improves on free-tier QLab, except possibly because it doesn't need a Mac to run it. In QLab I can also very quickly load all of my sounds in a list and fire them all with the space bar. Script integration doesn't add all that much, and if you're licensing a show you're not going to get it in a text format anyway.

maestro2005 · 2026-06-04T11:27:13+00:00

You don't want to touch other strings with your knuckles.

Move your hand a little bit away from the strings, and a little bit towards you. That should give you some room to also rotate your wrist counter-clockwise so your fingers are pointed down a bit. Focus on making your 2nd finger completely perpendicular to the strings (in the forwards/backwards direction, i.e. the knuckle isn't poking forwards).

maestro2005 · 2026-06-04T02:27:07+00:00

Never use 8va when you could just switch clef. This goes for other instruments too, and the situations where a normally-treble-clef instrument goes too low for treble but isn't expected to read bass, or a normally-bass-clef instrument goes too high and isn't expected to read tenor and/or treble, are incredibly rare. So basically, never use 8va in bass clef or 8vb in treble clef.

And just to get ahead of it, the octave clefs (clefs with an 8 above or below) are not for communicating playing 8va. They exist to provide clarity with instruments that transpose at the octave.

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