Tips on Choosing the Right Piano Piece for Your Level

It’s very common for students to ask what piece they should pick to play and how difficult should it be and how will they know if they will enjoy playing it. This is a great question because it addresses an important issue. We need to always work on music that matches our level of playing yet challenges us a bit at the same time so we continue to grow in our playing.

A lot of students will hear a piece and decide that it is the one for them, yet when they see the sheet music for it, they’re just overwhelmed at the skills required to play the piece. It’s not that they can’t play it…they just can’t play it yet.

Or sometimes students continue to pick out music that is really easy and they end up a little bored because they aren’t learning anything new and can’t play more advanced music.
Here are some really helpful tips to help you pick out the best piano pieces to fit where you are and where you want to go with your playing.
​
Tip #1:

• Look for density in your sheet music. What density means in this particular situation is to look at how much information you have on each page of music. What you don’t want is too much density…or too much information on the page. Look for visual simplicity…larger notes, easy to understand explanations if any are given, and the music isn’t too complicated to incorporate the new technique being learned. *I will show examples of this in some sheet music in the following video*

Tip #2:

• Look at what the key signature is and make sure you know what key the piece is in, the specific notes in the key signature and where they are on the piano keyboard. If you pick a piece in the key of E major and don’t know how to play the E major scale, then don’t start with that piece; pick one instead in the key of C, or G, or D. It’s important to keep working on your music theory and learning all of your key signatures and also how to play those scales. When you learn a new key signature and the scale in that key, then you should look for a piece that has that same key signature to help reinforce that knowledge and increase your ability to play those specific sharps or flats.

Tip #3:

• Find a familiar time signature that you already know how to count and play. This is much like the key signature tip, only this time you’re looking for a time signature that isn’t too complicated or that doesn’t change a lot during the piece. Again, knowing how to count in all different types of time signatures is something that every piano student will continue working on, so as you learn a new time signature, find a piece that has that same time signature in it either all the way through or in some section of the piece. You also need to really know note values and how many beats each different type of note gets to be able to successfully play in different time signature.

Remember that you are adding in new pieces to help build on the skills you’re learning and working on in your scales and technical studies. New pieces just merge everything together into something fun to play and allow you to see how far you’ve grown in your playing. You want them to be a little challenging…watch the following video to see what I mean by this and how you can learn to define the “unknowns” that you want to look for in any piece that you’re interested in learning. 

If you like my tips and lessons, you will love the courses over on my website. Whether you are a beginner looking to get a solid foundation to build on or you are looking to take your existing skills to that next level, the online music courses on my website https://www.pianolessonsontheweb.com will help you do just that.