Piano Online Lesson: Play Fur Elise – Lesson 2
How to Play Fur Elise – Piano Online Lesson 2
Welcome back everyone.
Last week I posted the first Piano Online Lesson of Fur Elise. You can find that video here: Piano Online Lesson: How To Play Fur Elise – Lesson 1.
Have you been practicing with that video for about 5 minutes each day during the past week. Either way, you may want to quickly review that video before continuing on to today’s lesson.
If you want to see Fur Elise played in its entirety, visit this blog post: Piano Online Performance: Fur Elise.
Today’s video will teach you how to finish up the first half of the first movement of Fur Elise. This will be a very short video since there are only two small parts that we need to go over.
Nonetheless, take your time as you go through the video. Rewind frequently as you learn the new parts. And don’t be afraid to go back to last week’s video if there are parts that you have forgotten.
Once again, I recommend spending about five minutes a day mastering all the parts taught in lessons 1 and 2.
As always, I will include more advanced material after the video for those of you that want to take your piano playing to the next level.
Now press play on the video below and let’s get started:
Some Theory
Since you scrolled down past the video, I’m going to assume that you want to learn some more theory.
Although it is not necessary for the lesson, some of you may want to purchase the sheet music for Fur Elise.
If you want to support this blog you can use the above affiliate link before making your purchase. This means that I make a small commission if you do decide to buy something from their website.
Now, before learning more theory, you may want to review what I taught in the last lesson: Piano Online Lesson: How To Play Fur Elise – Lesson 1.
Among the things that we learned in that lesson were staves, clefs, the 3/8 time signature, eighth and sixteenth notes, and what pp stands for.
Let’s take a look at a bigger piece of the transcription of Fur Elise this week.
Let’s continue to learn about the notation used in this transcription.
Notes
In last week’s blog post we talked about eighth notes and sixteenth notes. Let’s now talk about the quarter note. It looks like this:
In the transcription above there is only one quarter note. Do you see where it is?
That’s right! It’s the only note on the treble staff of the last measure.
Repeat Symbol
Actually, the last measure is only a partial measure. Since the quarter note is the only symbol on the treble staff, and a quarter note has the same number of beats as two eighth notes, this last measure has only two of the three beats that it is supposed to.
But observe that the last (partial) measure ends with this symbol:
This is a repeat symbol. In this case it is telling the performer to go back to the beginning of the song and start over.
Remember that the first measure of the song only has two sixteenth notes (which has the same number of beats as one eighth note). So these two partial measures together give us the three eighth notes we need to make up one complete measure.
Summary
So just to summarize the types of notes we’ve seen so far, below we have a quarter note, followed by three eighth notes, followed by four sixteenth notes:
Note that a single eighth note has one flag, and a single sixteenth note has two flags.
Next week we will take a short break from these lessons so that I can give a review of a piano learning system for beginners called Pianoforall.
In two weeks from now I will continue to teach you how to read the sheet music for Fur Elise.
~ Steve