Counting in Piano for Children

Series Summary

Proper counting is a crucial aspect of playing any piece of music the right way. If a song calls for a whole note and the person playing it does not understand how long the note should be played, then the song will not sound right. Regardless of how well your piano student knows the keyboard or the bass and treble clefs, they have no future as a musician unless they can learn to count accurately. The dynamics of any sort of musical interaction, from a duet to a band to an orchestra rely on a common understanding of time keeping.

In this series of free piano instruction videos, our expert instructor Hope Wells demonstrates a series of counting lessons for your young musician. Broken down into simple songs with familiar melodies, these lessons provide the opportunity for Hope to point out problems and offer encouragement to her student. If your child can get the timing down for these basic pieces, they may very well have a future in the music business. Playing weddings and cocktail parties? Perhaps. Or maybe, just maybe, they will become a pop star and make you rich and famous. But they won’t get anywhere without proper counting skills.

Video Transcript

"My name is Hope Wells and I will be bringing with me, my friend Shia. She is a student, at California Music Academy, and has been my student for almost a year. When she came to me, she was five years old and had never had any music before and now this child can play amazing things. I think that the first thing that she's going to play for you, she'll probably play "Part of Your World," from Little Mermaid, which is like her new favorite song, in the whole world. She's really great and counting and you'll probably see that. She's just learning flats. We already learned how a flat works. This week we'll hopefully get to sharps, I'm really hoping that we can learn how to do sharps, on her. The other thing, that she is working on, is being able to change positions. She knows middle C position, she knows C position, she knows G position and it's a little dangerous because she, sometimes, reads only be finger number or by spacial position, which as I talked about, can be good because I need her to read up and down but I don't need her to read by finger number. So, we're going to work on all of those things. I will probably have her name some notes for me today, so you'll just have to wait and see. Thanks"