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February 10, 2011

Cadence Chart


My brother is my most advanced piano student. He is 13 and has been taking lessons since he was about 6 years old. He is a great piano player!

Recently we've been working on scales, arpeggios, and cadences in several different keys. Let me just say that I did not know what a arpeggio or cadence was until I went to college. So sometimes I feel very, very inadequate to teach these things to him. Very. Nevertheless, it must be taught, and I enjoy refreshing my own mind with these things as well.

Cadences are difficult, in my opinion. In case you aren't sure what I mean by a cadence, you basically play the I chord, then the IV chord, then the I chord again, then the V7, and back to I. But you play each in a close position. This requires knowing the inversions for each of these chords as well. (Is this making any sense??)

To help with this, I made the following chart for him to try to help figure out the finger positions:
I wasn't sure if this would help...but it did! I think just stopping to figure out each chord and the fingering, and then seeing it visually, helped the most. Once he filled it out, he really didn't need to refer back to it too much. I noticed a DRASTIC difference in his cadences in just one week...and he hadn't even filled out the chords for every key!

So there you have it. Nothing drastic or eye-opening, but something that worked for me this week! If you would like to use this sheet, just leave me your email address and I'll be glad to send it to you!

1 comment:

  1. This is pretty neat! I had Alfred's scale book which wrote out all the cadences on staff paper but this looks like another good way of learning them too! barbergirl211@yahoo.com -I don't have any students doing cadences yet but its always good to have things on file for the future.

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