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piano improvisation

How to Host a Creativity Showcase Recital

How to Host a Creativity Showcase Recital

When you’re teaching improvisation and composition in your piano studio, shouldn’t your performance opportunities reflect that? Often the creative stuff gets left out of recitals but shouldn’t we show off those skills too? I believe we should. Every year I host a creativity showcase recital and in this article I want to give you some…

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Filed Under: Composing & Improvising, Piano improvisation, Piano recitals, Practice & Performance Tagged With: creative music lessons, fun piano concerts, music composition, piano improvisation, planning a studio recital

CKQC039_ Simple but effective solo improvisation for beginners Blog Post Template

CKQC039: Simple but effective solo improvisation for beginners

This is another pattern from Forrest Kinney’s fabulous Create First 1. Every pattern in these books has a duet and a corresponding solo version. I like to start with the duet so my student can get a feel for the improvisation and explore a little, and then we work on the solo improvisation.  This…

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Filed Under: Colourful Keys Quick Clips, Composing & Improvising, Piano improvisation Tagged With: beginner improv, colourful keys quick clip, Create First, piano improvisation

CKQC032_ ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Moonrise’ improvisation solos for beginners Blog Post Template

CKQC032: ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Moonrise’ improvisation solos for beginners

These two patterns are the very first ones in Create First Book 1. Both the duet and solo options are simple and beautiful. Although we always do improvisation at my studio from the beginning, I’ve been working to get my students to do more improvisation solos. Several of my students even did solo improv at…

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Filed Under: Colourful Keys Quick Clips, Composing & Improvising, Piano improvisation, Scales & Technique Tagged With: Create First, creative music education, Forrest Kinney, piano improvisation, teaching improvisation to piano students

CKQC012- Simple and effective piano improvisation for beginners

CKQC012: Simple and effective piano improvisation for beginners

As an experiment during our overlapping piano buddy time, I’ve been simplifying some of the improvisation accompaniments from Create First by Forrest Kinney. This has worked out really, really well and it’s quite easy to adapt for any student level. In this video, you’ll see the bare bones arrangement of ‘For the Joy’ that I’ve…

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Filed Under: Colourful Keys Quick Clips, Composing & Improvising, Group teaching, Piano improvisation, Practice & Performance, Preschool piano teaching Tagged With: colourful keys, creativity in piano lessons, piano buddy lessons, piano improvisation, teaching improv to beginners

Using improvisation to teach the melodic minor scales

Improvise Your Way to Melodic Minor Scales Success

I think the clue to why I think improvisation is the route to success is in the name…melodic minor scales. Am I right? What are scales for if not for creating melodies? If your answer was for teaching discipline, then you should probably hop off here. Nothing wrong with discipline but that’s not the primary…

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Filed Under: Composing & Improvising, Flipped Thinking Theory, Music Theory, Piano improvisation, Scales & Technique, Teaching scales Tagged With: creative piano teaching, flipped music theory, improvising with piano students, melodic minor scales, piano improvisation, teaching piano scales

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About Nicola

Nicola Cantan is a piano teacher, author, blogger and creator of imaginative and engaging teaching resources. She loves getting piano students learning through laughter, and helping teachers to teach through games and off-bench activities, so that their students giggle their way through music theory and make faster progress.

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