Sheet Music Guy !

During my time making content for this site, I’ve gained a lot of respect for performers. A good performances appear effortless, which really hides the amount of work that goes into them……whether it be for a piece of music, a dance, a speech or a presentation. In making the videos for this site, getting a good performance of a 3 to 3.5 minute song takes an average of 1.5 hours, and even then there might be edits involved. If you do the math, that’s about one quality performance out of 30, leading to a rather pathetic batting average of 0.033. Real performers have one shot. One. How do they do it?

Well, although I’m not quite there yet, the fact that I’m taping myself and reviewing the results quite closely really gives me a good idea of what works and what’s important. Based on these experiences, I believe all good performances in any medium are based upon the same fundamental structure, which I will attempt to outline here.

Although it’s numbered, keep in mind that this is not a list. The numbering denotes importance, but it’s built like a pyramid: To do #1 properly you need to achieve #2, to get to #2 you have to be proficient at #3, etc.

Anyways, here we go!

1) Passion

It should come to no surprise to anybody that this is at the top of the list. Any successful person you talk to, regardless of whether they are in the performing, artistic or corporate community, will emphasize having passion for what you are doing to be a key to success. Even if you execute flawlessly in a performance, with perfect tone, rhythm and phrasing, if you’re not doing it with heart, your audience will be able to tell. Even with all that work, a performance with no heart at the very best can only be good. Similarly, if you perform with enough passion and conviction you can actually override any technical shortcomings that you might have. In short, having passion and doing your thing with meaning and heart is by far the most important part of any performance.

The really cool thing is, when everything about your performance is spot on and you’re really putting your heart into it, you can feel it for yourself as you’re still playing it. Your own performance will have an emotional effect on you, as you’re still performing it. For me, when I’m doing a take and it gets there, I know that this take is the one….and assuming I don’t psych myself out before the finish, that one take will almost always shine above the rest of them when I’m reviewing the final tape.

2) Rhythm

As opposed to #1, I don’t think Rhythm receives nearly enough attention that it deserves. Any type of performance, whether it be music, dance, a speech, presentation, or comedy, will have a natural rhythm. Once the rhythm is established with the audience, the performer can play with the audience’s expectations of the rhythm, for dramatic effect. However, if there is no clear sense of rhythm to begin with, then there’s no rhythmic expectation to play with, which means it’s much harder to be emotive. Your audience will be so distracted in trying to lock into your rhythm, (which doesn’t exist,) that the rest of the performance will be meaningless. Rhythm is key.

Rhythm comes from within, not from without. For example, say you start nervously, and your heart is racing. If your heart is racing, your internal rhythm is going way too fast, and whatever it is you’re doing will sound like you’re rushing through it. The thing is, anything you do after that point to try to slow yourself down will actually come across that way exactly; that you are trying to slow yourself down. You can actually hear yourself actively fighting to pull yourself back in. It’s like reigning in a pack of wild horses, when those horses should have been going the correct speed to begin with. My old piano teacher yelled at me about this for years, and only now do I understand what she’s been talking about. That’s why they always tell you take a deep breath and calm yourself before doing any big public presentation. You have to calm yourself down and set your internal clock to the correct rhythm before you start. Otherwise you’ll spend the rest of your performance trying to fix (or find) your rhythm, when you should be focused on more important things like performing with heart.

For me, I know from watching my own tapes that this is one of my bigger problems, and stops me from getting into #1. For faster songs especially, I have a tendency to just run faster and faster. The first 5 takes or so of any performance I do are always garbage, just because I’m still nervous and have to adjust to the fact that I’m being taped. My tempo is all over the place. The horses are crazy. After that, I usually spend about 30seconds to a minute before each take just sitting, focusing, and setting my internal rhythm, before I can actually begin.

3) Know Your Content

Ideally, you should know your material like the back of your hand. This way, you don’t have to think about the content of your performance, and can focus your energy on the important stuff (heart and rhythm). If you’re playing a piece of music, you shouldn’t have to think about the notes. If you’re doing a speech, you shouldn’t have to think about the words or the topic. All the content should be automatic, and to get it to be automatic, you have to drill the content into your head by practicing endlessly. Eventually, you will be good enough to fake it, but that comes from experience, and experience usually comes from….well….practicing endlessly. Practicing endlessly is unavoidable, unfortunately. On the bright side, getting the content down is guaranteed if you practice enough and put the work in, while to achieve #1 and #2 need you to get to a certain ‘place’ come showtime. Knowing your content is actually the easy part, because all you need to do is put in the hours.

The consequence of not knowing your content is that you will instantly lose your focus on the performance, because you will at some point forget what to do, and panic to figure out what note (or word, or dance move) is supposed to come next. Even if you do find the right note, you still have to get back your focus and back in the groove, all while you’re still playing the piece in question. Not only is it hard to get back, but you’ll find it wasn’t as good as it was before you stumbled, and you’ll still be a little shaken up from the incident. Put the work in. Know your content.

For me, it takes about 2 weeks of spare time to come up with a SheetMusicGuy performance. A few evenings in the beginning go towards making the arrangement. One weekend afternoon goes to taping the performance. The rest of the time in between goes to practicing my own arrangement, and drilling it into my own head, so I don’t have to worry about the notes I have to play when it comes down to the taping. If you look at it that way, most of the actual time spent is in learning the content.

4) Technical Ability

Your technical ability your level of mastery in the medium of your performance. This is the foundation upon which everything else is built. If you’re a pianist, this is how well you play the piano. If you’re giving a speech, this is how well you speak English. The better you are at your medium, the more tools you have in your toolkit, and the better you can execute on all the other steps above.

When choosing the difficulty level of a piece for an upcoming performance, the best advice I can give here is to aim low. For music, pick pieces that you are very comfortable playing. When in doubt, pick something easier, especially if you don’t have too much time to learn it. Save your ambitions for the other things on this list that are more important. If you choose something that is too difficult for your skill level, you will put all your efforts into just hitting the right notes; you won’t be able to even get to the important emotional stuff.

This is not to say that you should not play challenging pieces, because if you do that, you’ll never get better. Play challenging pieces for yourself, on your own, so you can continue to grow your skills. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t perform those challenging pieces until you reach a point where you don’t find them technically challenging anymore. By then you will be playing even harder pieces on your own anyways. This phenomenon is widely known in the scientific community as “Leveling Up”.

I feel that the technical difficulty of a performance piece should be about half of your total technical ability. When the spotlight’s on you and the cameras are rolling and everybody’s watching, you’re going to get a bit nervous. You will have a to focus on, and you don’t want the difficulty of your content to be one of them.

The arrangements I have on this site, for me, have an extremely low difficulty level….and it still takes me a few hours to film a 3 minute song because of all the other factors at play. Pick something easy, keep your content simple, focus on the more important stuff.

Tone and Showmanship

A couple of other important factors I want to mention are Tone and Showmanship. Tone falls under Technical Ability, as it is a key tool in your tool kit for you to use to express yourself…..especially in public speaking. It should also be part of Knowing your Content, because part of knowing your performance piece is knowing the appropriate Tone to be used, and when to use it.

Showmanship can fall under Content, because you might consciously choose to add certain physical elements to your performance as part of the piece itself. A public speaker may plan to use certain hand gestures, and a Rock Star might have a few “Rock Star Moves” that they may choose to deploy at certain parts of a song. Alternately, Showmanship might also fall naturally under Passion, because once you get really into your performance you are bound to naturally express yourself in some way physically…and the audience is sure to pick up on that. Either way, it’s not a bad idea to have a few ‘moves’ in your toolkit that you can use when you see fit…whether it’s planned or in the spur of the moment.

I wanted to highlight both Tone and Showmanship because they are essential parts of a good performance, although they already fall into some of the categories above.

And that’s it! I hope this article has been able to help you with some part of your life, or at the very least provided a nice distraction from your day at work / school.

Thanks for reading!

Video:

MP3: Maroon_5_-_Makes_Me_Wonder_(www.sheetmusicguy.com).mp3

Sheet Music: Maroon_5_-_Makes_Me_Wonder.pdf

This song is off the Maroon 5 disc, “It Won’t Be Soon Before Long”, which includes a bonus DVD. They also have a remix CD out now, “Call and Response”, which I’ve heard is actually pretty good!

As for this performance, I know it’s not my best, but the arrangement is really really fun to play

Work on that rhythm!!

Video:

MP3: Jay_Chou_-_Stranded_Vs_Maple_(www.sheetmusicguy.com).mp3

Sheet Music:
Jay_Chou_-_Stranded_Vs_Maple.pdf
Jay_Chou_-_Maple.pdf
Jay_Chou_-_Stranded.pdf

“Stranded” is taken from his “Qi Li Xiang” album.  “Maple” is from “November’s Chopin”

Ever since second year university, I’ve developed a chronic knot in my left upper-back and shoulder that comes and goes every few months. When it gets bad I can barely move my neck. I’ve also recently found that I tend to pop and pull my right shoulder pretty often playing sports, which is fairly painful and takes a while to heal.

It should also be noted that I work in the tech industry and that I’m a pretty big nerd overall. The resulting hours spent slouched in front of a computer during my working and leisure time have given me pretty bad posture.

I’ve been to acupuncturists and masseuses, who both say I have some fairly significant problems likely as a result of this. My shoulders tilt to the left and my hips tilt to the right, and my spine looks like this:

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When it should look like this:

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If you get a basic acupunctural assessment anywhere, they’ll do a similar check on your hip/shoulder alignment. Ideally they should be parallel. I’m not sure whether the spine bend is the cause or the effect of this, but either way, it wasn’t looking good.

Anyways, I was at a family Lunar New Year dinner yesterday, and I had a seat facing the mirror. Glancing at myself in a neutral sitting position, it was fairly obvious that my shoulders were tilted. Usually I just move my shoulders around, but this time, I thought I’d try something different. Just for fun, I tightening my back muscles instead, forcing my spine straighten up and re-balance my shoulders as a result. It took a while to get the knack of finding those back muscles to clench, and it’s a little tiring flexing those muscles for a period of time, but I forced myself to hold this up the rest of the evening to see what would happen.

About five minutes later, my tight upper-left back almost melted completely. My shoulders relaxed and dropped. My neck, is usually bent, loosened and straightened. Before I used to feel some of my vertebrates pushing out of the back of my neck, but I quickly checked and it seemed they had straightened themselves out. I quickly looked left and right, and it seemed that I also gained maybe 10% range of motion in my neck area. All within five minutes of straightening my posture.

This was amazing. I didn’t know consciously fixing your posture would get these kinds of results this quickly. Today, my right shoulder which I had injured last week playing volleybal feels about back to normal…which was way better than a few days ago. My back is a little tired from holding my spine up straight, but it’s a small price to pay for magically fixing other parts of your body. Who knows what will happen next? Maybe I’ll run faster, jump higher, get girls, throw fireballs…..the possibilities are endless. I’m excited.

If anybody has chronic back/neck/shoulder problems, you might want to give this a try:

1) Get a chair and sit in front of a mirror. Get into a relaxed, comfortable position….what you think is ’straight’

2) Look in the mirror, and make note of the slant in your shoulders.

3) If your shoulders are not horizontal and tilted one way or the other, try to work your muscles in your back to push your spine in such a way as to straighten your shoulders. Do not straighten your shoulders directly; they should align themselves as a result of you re-aligning your spine.

4) Wait 5 minutes

5) All your chronic physical problems will mysteriously evaporate. Or not.

Happy experimenting!

*I am not a health care professional, follow my ‘advice’ at your own risk, consult a physician before doing anything, ever.

The most popular item on this website so far has been Jay Chou’s single off his self-directed movie, Secret. Most youTube views, most downloads, and also, the most number of related requests.

To be honest I had heard the song a few times and thought it’d be fun to play, but I had no idea how big a deal this movie seemed to be. Is it really that popular? Am I really that ignorant? I figured it was time to see what the fuss was all about.

Today, after finishing up some editing on my next video (jay chou mashup! Feng vs Ge Qian!) I got myself a copy of the movie and the soundtrack. It’s a pretty decent movie, although I regret not seeing it with a girl. Not bad for a directorial debut.

Now I finally know what all these requests have been about! Finally, I can answer some of your questions about them:

1) I can’t do the Piano Battle because it is Impossible.

Have you seen that thing?!  It’s freakin impossible!  Even watching Jay do that one-handed left hand thing scared me.  I get hand cramps just from playing Guitar Hero; attempting something like this would hospitalize me.  Also, for the site, I’d rather stick to easy/medium material that most people can play, and play well, instead of posting something I can barely hit the notes to, let alone perform.  Sorry guys.

2) Time Travel sequence

I’ve gotten a handful of requests for this one, and it looks like something I can do.  The soundtrack comes with two versions:  One version sounds fairly mechanical, like it was sight read, and the other sounds like it was performed by Jay.  I’ll probably do something in the middle, but leaning towards the easier side.  I can see the video for this being pretty fun….look out for it in the future.

3) I am two hands short of the Piano Duet

There’s been one or two requests for the Piano Duet, which i think refers to the scene where Jay and the girl are both playing the same piano at the same time.  Awww.  Anyways, there’s only one of me, so pulling this off would be a bit challenging.  Maybe when I meet SheetMusicGal.  One day.  *sigh*.

4) There’s other good stuff on here y’know

Listening to the soundtrack (and the movie), there are two instrumentals that really stick out, which I think would be really fun to try.  One of them starts when Jay is playing with the girl as a ‘ghost’, and then segueways into a nice instrumental sequence.  I don’t remember where the other one’s from…but it’s nice too, ok.  Anyways, keep an eye out for these ones too.

Thanks everybody, for all the support!