The Tale Teller Club free classes run daily and cover a range of musical methods.

hello tail tellers welcome welcome to a beginner's class for piano we're using the suzuki method today and we're going to be looking at the first study for the right hand hopefully you've heard uh the recording of twinkle twinkle little star with all the variations hopefully you kind of know them already before you're even sitting at your piano i'd like to welcome claudine who's uh our backing uh guitarist today playing acoustic guitar uh c major arpeggio we'll be doing lots of c major arpeggios today as well actually because they're so pretty aren't they can really hear how wonderful they sound i do love an arpeggio so this exercise is going to involve quavers and semiquavers so the semiquavers are the ones with two big thick black lines joining them together and the quavers just have the one and the quavers are twice as long as the semiquavers so it would go something like this

okay so that just gives us an idea of the pace and the distance of the notes and and how they are going to be placed on our bar the big squirrely thing at the beginning a rather grand looking thing it's called a treble clef you should practice drawing them they're really good fun you can impress people when you when you draw them i i used to have some earrings with treble clefs on actually i think i might i might get some more because it's such a pretty sign isn't it there's a little knack to drawing them but you can do it in one go with your pen it's really exciting actually to be able to draw that that c thing means common time which means four beats to a bar i can see you're probably thinking well there's more than four beats to a bar well that's because we've got all these half beats and quarter beats and everything's split up and it's all funny but you just have to understand that in the whole bar there are four quarter notes don't worry too much about that at the moment what else do we need to know we're going to be playing the c above middle c which is this one and then we're going to play the d and then the e and then the f and then the g and we're going to be using our first our second our third our fourth and our fifth fingers it's quite good actually because we don't really have to move very far all we've got to do is put fingers up and down and what i do suggest is that you don't fly too high up in the sky after you've played your staccato notes because although staccato means treat the notice if it's a bit hot if you lift it too far up and move your hand out of position you'll find it's shifted and you won't be able to get back down again on target okay so i'm not going to play the repeats because i like to keep these classes quite short but i'm going to play each bar and i'll explain the name of the note and the finger so the first bar c with your thumb

okay the second you'd repeat that there's a repeat at the end that that thing that if you turn your head sideways it looks a bit like a robot face that's a repeat with the two dots but i won't do the repeats so the next bar your second finger on the d

and you'd play that twice

the next bar with your third finger on the e and you play that twice now we're too to play an f with our fourth now fourth fingers are sometimes a bit weak and wishy-washy when you first start playing piano so make sure you give it some just a little bit of extra pressure maybe

bravo and now another finger that's a bit weak sometimes little pinky he needs some exercise on the g

and you'd play that twice too did you notice that after the c and the d and the e

something sounded a bit different with the f well that's because there's no black note in between and we call this a semitone

the distance between notes is a semitone but there's no black note so there's no semitone there so where we've had whole tones for the other notes we've...