P#1 stream of praise
Watch this video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u4AAGo31a8 Recorded on March 14, 2015. After having followed the Alfred’s adult piano course books for three years, I made a radical decision to learn a popular worship song called “Stream of Praise” [1]. A decade ago, I first learned how to sing this song when I was an assistant professor at New Mexico Tech, where minister Anna Tai [4] shared a Stream of Praise CD with me. I have listened this CD more than a few hundred times. The music video of this spiritual and emotional song can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIt9n2Wjlf8 [1] on YouTube. It is worth mentioning that this song is a simple piano version of “Stream of Praise”. An advanced version of the song can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAOrSvexSJ8 [3]. It must take me at least 50 hours to learn this advanced version. This video is a pilot project for me, because “Stream of Praise” is the first song I learned outside the Alfred’s-piano-book world. When I stayed away from Alfred’s piano books, I faced three grand challenges. First, it is non-trivial to choose a song that meets my current skill level. Second, there is no fingering suggestion marked on the sheet music. Last, no sample video found on YouTube. I tried various finger positions before finalizing my own style, which is marked on the sheet music posted in this video. I am grateful to my colleague – Dr. Jeffrey Overbey [2] – for teaching me the correct finger positions of bars 4-5. I was amazed by Dr. Overbey’s sight reading skill; he read the sheet music for two seconds and immediately played the song. It took me over 19 hours to learn and practice; in contrast, he could play this song by sight-reading on the first attempt. I would like to express my gratitude to Mike eKim (https://www.youtube.com/user/mbut123) [5], who offered insightful advice on how to play the first five measures. Mike demonstrated how to play these bars in a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QeTQFviE88) posted on his YouTube channel [6]. I would like to thank Sean Fox for his advice on the fingering and tempo issues. He pointed out that I should play the sixteenth notes in bars 4-5 faster. Bars 1-5 are very difficult; I could not make them musically sound until a practice of two hours. Fortunately, Mike's magic fingering position solved this problem (see [6] for the solution). Currently, I am learning how to play and sing at the same time. Ying enjoys singing this song when I play it on our piano. The recording success rate is 19.2%, which is slightly higher than that (i.e., 12.5%) of the previous song. The tempo of this song is 83 BPM, which is marginally faster than the ideal one (i.e., 80 BPM). A Summary of the Learning Process: Tempo: 83 BPM (Ideal tempo: 80 BPM) Recording: 47 minutes (26 takes, 5 acceptable videos) Success Rate: 5/26 = 19.2%
