Piano Note

Music boxes have always come in all shapes and sizes. Some are small enough to fit in your hand, while others are designed to hold jewelry, and still others are large enough to stand alone like a piece of furniture. Wood, metal, glass, and stone; jewelry boxes are familiar to all of us. Equally familiar is the musical jewelry box. In fact, it is almost rare to see one without the other. A piano music box is another variation on that theme, and what a unique and intriguing variation it is!

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Long before radios, movies, television and the Internet popularized music, sheet music made compositions of the good old days popular, or at least, known.

Defined, sheet music is a printed musical composition. Musicians back then publish their songs in these unbound sheets of paper. Performers also used these as they played a musical piece to an audience.

Today, sheet music is still made. However, it is used mainly by musicians such as singers, pianists and guitarists. For many, they are just mere sheets of paper. You will often find old sheet music hidden in piano benches or placed in a box, untouched for ages, collecting dust.

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Country music sensation Trace Adkins has released his latest CD entitled Songs About Me.

One song makes this CD well worth the listen, Honky Tonk Badonkadonk. Awesome baby!

Now, I’m not a huge country music fan, in fact it’s more like I just like to explore any and all genres of music and whatever I find that I like, I like. Regardless of genre. I stumbled across Honky Tonk Badonkadonk on somewhat of a lark and just had to check out the entire CD. Wow, am I ever glad I did.

The CD launches with the title track, Songs About Me on which the silky smooth voiced Adkins basically tells his life story. Which by the way is I think what makes him

work so well with country music fans. He’s a guy who has lived the music he sings. That never hurts.

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Certainly one of the best ways of learning how to play the guitar is by using some simple guitar songs that makes it much easier for you to comprehend guitar tablatures. Certainly there are certain benefits to be had from using easy songs to learn on guitar in order that you can play the instrument properly and these are as follows: -

1. By using an easy song a beginner is able to learn the proper pace and rhythm of a song, which makes it much easier for them to learn how to play the guitar. Often just by listening to a song a beginner will be able to make use of some of the strings and so try to

associate them with the tempo and pattern of the notes being played.

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Piano lessons provide a wide range of benefits to young children. Here are my Top Five.

1. Piano lessons help preserve and develop children s natural creative abilities.

The best analogy of how children learn through music that I ve found is from Donald Kroodsma s book The Singing Life of Birds. Every songbird can be identified by the unique song it sings, but a baby bird has to be taught by its parents to sing the family song. Baby birds, like humans, just babble at first. Mother birds sing the family song over and over to the baby birds as they try to repeat it back. At first, the baby

birds are only able to sing back one or two notes, but they gradually learn to sing the whole song. And birds with two voice boxes even learn to sing their own harmony parts! Once baby birds learn the family song, they can start developing their very own songs. Similarly, I encourage students to compose their own music after developing needed skills. In my experience, young children in piano are a lot like baby songbirds!

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