Play Piano Online: Fur Elise – Lesson 6
Play Piano Online – How to Play Fur Elise – Lesson 6
Welcome back everybody! Let’s continue learning to play piano online..
Today we will continue learning the second movement of Beethoven’s Fur Elise. I hope that you have been practicing with the last two videos, but if you need a refresher, here are some links:
Online Piano Lessons: How To Play Fur Elise – Lesson 4
Online Piano Lessons: How To Play Fur Elise – Lesson 5
And once again, for your convenience, here are links to the three lessons that teach the first movement:
Online Piano Lessons: How To Play Fur Elise – Lesson 1
Online Piano Lessons: How To Play Fur Elise – Lesson 2
Online Piano Lessons: How To Play Fur Elise – Lesson 3
And you can watch me play the whole composition here: Online Piano Performance: Fur Elise.
Remember – do not be afraid to keep rewinding until you internalize each part, and please practice for five minutes every single day.
Now let’s learn to play piano online with the third online piano lesson for the second movement of Fur Elise:
Some Theory
It’s time to continue learning to read the sheet music for Fur Elise.
If you want to purchase the sheet music for Fur Elise, you can click on the following link: Fur Elise sheet music.
Below is a transcription of the first half of the second movement of Fur Elise.
Grace Notes
Note that in the transcription above, the second measure begins with two notes that are a bit smaller than the other notes in the measure. Furthermore if we add those note values to the other notes in the measure we get more than 3/8 (we get an extra 2/16 = 1/8). What is going on here?
Well, those two smaller notes are called grace notes. In this instance these notes are to be played very quickly as a lead in to that first quarter note in the measure. These notes do not contribute to the duration.
There is one more grace note in the transcription above. See if you can find it.
Notes on the Treble Staff
Recall that the top staff is called the treble staff and the bottom staff is called the bass staff.
Each of the lines and spaces on these staves represents a different musical note. Let’s focus on the treble staff in this lessons.
Starting from the bottom of the treble staff the lines represent the notes E, G, B, D, and F. Many people remember this with the help of the phrase “Every Good Boy Does Fine.”
Again, starting from the bottom of the treble staff, the spaces represent the notes F, A, C, and E. This is pretty easy to remember since these notes spell the word FACE.
Here is a picture to help you memorize these notes.
Now let’s practice. Let’s look at just the treble staff from the transcription above. See if you can name all of the notes in the second measure.
Let’s see how you did. The first grace note is an F and the second grace note is an A. The two grace notes are then followed by a quarter note which is a C.
The dotted sixteenth note is a higher F and finally, the thirty-second note at the end of the measure is an E.
Now try to play those notes while reading the sheet music, and then try to go through the whole treble staff in the above transcription and play the part with your right hand. You may get stuck at a few places. Some of the notes do go above the staff, and there are a couple of symbols that you may not recognize. Don’t worry though – we will be going over all of this soon.
Well that is all for today. Continue practicing this part of the second movement of Fur Elise throughout this week.
If you are interested in a more formal system of learning how to play the piano you may want to read my review of the PianoForAll system here: PianoForAll review
Until next week…
~ Steve