It’s okay to look for shortcuts

If you’re at the stage in your piano journey where you're still trying to become comfortable in reading new notes, it’s okay to look for shortcuts in your music as a way of helping you understand your song.

A shortcut could be anything from noticing a note on line 2 is the same one that you labelled on line 1, or noticing that a phrase, hand position, or chord progression repeats itself.

The reason why I felt I should share this is because a lot of people—teachers and students alike!— seem to believe that using shortcuts like this is somehow cheating or is a sign of laziness. The fear is that if you get too dependent on using shortcuts, you’ll never learn to read music properly.

I used to feel like this, too, actually. Back when I was a self-taught piano teacher, I did my best to make sure that my students didn’t use shortcuts, ever!

It wasn’t until I formally trained as a teacher that I realized how powerful devising and using shortcuts can actually be! What we dismiss as “shortcuts” can usually be reframed as “finding patterns” which is actually considered higher-order thought and creative problem-solving! In other words, learning how to recognize patterns in your music enhances your understanding of the music, not detracts from it.

Let me explain this in terms of educational science that more people seem to be familiar with — teaching kids how to read. You don’t have to be a teacher to notice that a lot of cherished kids’ authors like Dr. Seuss leaned heavily on rhyming words as a way to help kids learn to read books.

When we use rhymes in children's books, we're not afraid that kids are only ever going to be able to read rhyming words for the rest of their lives. Rather, we're teaching them about relationships between words and sounds that help them gain their independence in reading other, future words.

The exact same thing can happen with pattern recognition in music. If you start to recognize patterns in your music, it can help you identify the notes that you need to play and promote more accuracy in your playing. It can also help you gain a deeper understanding of where the song is trying to go, which can help you in your ability to predict what notes are coming next.

Doesn’t that just sound like a better way to learn piano??

So if you notice that you (or your student) are using shortcuts to read their music, try to think of this as creative problem-solving, not cheating! Using patterns to read music is similar to the way we use rhyming words to help kids learn how to read books.