William Hay » noteflight

Raindrops develop from CDE beginnings

Will — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:48:10 +0000

Many of my students will recollect the “CDE song” as one of the first pieces I taught them on the piano. The song is actually published in “Music Lessons Have Begun, by Leila Fletcher” which was a tutor book I learned from myself as a child, yes it was published that long ago! I don’t use the whole publication as I feel that Pauline Hall’s “Oxford Piano Method” series is visually more user friendly and enticing, though much of Leila’s musical content is very catchy.

“CDE song” was the first piece Oliver learned nearly four years ago and the noteflight arrangement below is his latest piece of work which pays homage to this early experience. This is the second time his work has been featured on my website but the first time in his own notation. See African Elephant

I hope that seeing this will encourage my other students who are using noteflight to experiment with their ideas and share their creative work!

5-finger Fur Elise

Will — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 01:00:52 +0000

For some beginners, five-finger arrangements of popular pops and classics prove to be more motivational than lesser known tunes serving purely as exercises.
This simplified version of Beethoven’s Fur Elise for the absolute beginner requires only a slight change of finger in bars 9-13 where RH finger 4 moves from D# to E and RH finger 5 moves from E to F. At bar 14 the fingers return to their original position.
Changing the metre from three to four eliminates the need for a pickup bar and though it elongates the rests, it is an easier rhythm to feel and play along with the backing track below.

To download the backing track you will need to right-click on the download link then click save as…

Fur Elise Backing Track

Fur Elise Backing Track (100bpm)

5 finger Fur Elise

African Elephant Composition by Oliver, age 8

Will — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 23:30:07 +0000

Oliver showed me his composition today, which I think was pretty good for an 8 year old. This is the first time I have used Noteflight which is a bit like google docs for musical scores; making the score viewable, searchable and printable on the noteflight site and producing an embeddable, printable flash score for websites and blogs.

It is able to import music xml from other score editors but currently doesn’t support midi input for editing or allow the export of scores once produced.