Canon in D

Johann Pachelbel

  • One of the most important things you can do as you learn piano to avoid injury and increase your quality of play is to make a special effort to keep your wrists relaxed and free to strain. The bridge of the hand should be firm and gently rounded but the wrist should be relaxed and supple.

    You will notice that your fifth and fourth fingers are weaker and less reliable than the rest of the hand. They will take more time to train, and if you are a beginner, they will be especially frustrating to work with. Don't strain or push - be patient and work with them diligently and tactfully, and they will catch up.

    The two most important tools you can use to improve the efficiency of your practice is the speed at which you practice a section, and in the manner in which you divide up the piece you are working on. You must work with the piece in fragments before you stitch the fragments up to make a whole. The sections of the piece as fragments to work on has to be strategically and intelligently chosen. Once you have selected a fragment to practice, you should be flexible with your tempo. If it is a difficult section, begin practicing it at a slow tempo to allow your brain to make accurate and definitive connections. As you progress with the piece, begin to work at increasingly faster tempos. If you are interested in understanding more deeply these systems of practice, I made a series called 'Blueprint for Perfect Technique' which dives deeper into these principles.

Sheet Music

  • 00:00:00 - 00:02:18

    [Music] the Canon and D really needs no introduction and a lot of people have been asking for it so um here it is finally it's been a long time coming let me play the first 20 seconds or so of the music I give you a sense of it and the particular Arrangement that we're doing and then I'll jump it from the beginning and I'll break it apart so that you can learn it alongside me so you can learn it yourself here it is the Canon n d by packo Bell [Music] right the first two phrases the nice thing about this music

    00:01:11 - 00:02:27

    is that the left hand it Cycles through a lot of um uh a lot of different harmonies but they're always the same harmonies so once you nail down the positions for all of these there are only one two 3 four five six seven eight four bars worth four bars worth of harmonies and then you'll just have to focus on learning the right hand the left hand will be finished uh I think we should nail down the left hand first yeah and then we can play around with the right the melody we are in D Major so we

    00:01:49 - 00:03:21

    begin with D major 5 2 [Music] 1 and then across the One 2 to an FP now this is going to be the technique that you will be employing everywhere you know crossing your thumb so be sure that you try and do that with one motion so from the beginning the very first note there's a sense of everything traveling without any Interruption it's not three notes in position and then suddenly you move to the fourth everything should be in movement [Music] that's one movement and then same kind of thing those

    00:02:37 - 00:04:45

    notes a two on E A above on the thumb and then across the same way do a second finger on C Shar [Music] next B same fingering 5 2 1 across the thumb to [Music] D now this one's a little different and uh it's possible to play it with the same fingering but um it's a good thing to learn right away whenever you have something like an F minor which this is um it's much easier to play it with 53 pivoting on three and ending up on 21 one it's a much easier fingering than trying to find the space between these two

    00:03:52 - 00:05:39

    black notes yeah so again those four in order [Music] each one is one [Music] movement the pedaling for this whole piece is per Harmony so this is one Harmony so it gets one pedal then you move into the next one you change on the first note of the next Harmony change same thing moving on change change change and what I mean by change is lift and reapply The Petal and make sure you do it on the Note not before it it's a common mistake when you're re when you're uh changing the pedal you have to

    00:04:48 - 00:06:13

    change on the note so the moment that you press that first note down of the next Harmony the foot shoots up up down I'm be preaching to the choir this is more or less common knowledge but every now and again I like to throw this little bit in there because um I know that not everybody knows and this is a very popular piece so I might get a lot of amateurs watching it all right so those are your first [Music] four each one gets a pedal moving on we then go to G major locally say fingering 5 2

    00:05:37 - 00:07:22

    1 across the thumb to a two all in one motion [Music] next as D major the same one you started with but an octave [Music] lower next next back to G major and the final one a major which is also [Music] familiar that's your skeleton your harmonic skeleton all the way through the piece is in 44 time at least um I mean it is I don't think that this Arrangement has anything to do with a change in time signature but uh yeah four4 time what we're playing here are eighth notes which means when you count

    00:06:31 - 00:08:27

    it out you'll have 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and one and two and three and four and and then as we travel into the next bar it's the same thing etc etc cool so there's the left uh I'd recommend taking as much time as you need to really nail down the left hand one small detail when you're moving from one Harmony one position say this moving from this to the next next one try and make it so that the last note of one grouping is

    00:07:34 - 00:08:56

    like a bridge to the next one see so that it doesn't feel like you have to then scramble to find it make it feel as though the last note of one grouping connects to the beginning of the next grouping right B [Music] so there there's always a feeling of transition moving from one to the other if you don't have that feeling it'll always feel as though you're looking for the group like there as if they don't have any relationship to one another as far as piano technique goes it always

    00:08:15 - 00:10:14

    look feel like you're fishing okay that's pretty good simple enough now right hand We Begin [Music] simply so let's nail down with the right hand is up to here five on FP for the first grouping of the left hand then you just begin descending note by note four on [Music] E three on D 2 on C sharp one on B second finger over a a a back to the B on your first and the final note is a c Shar you know this piece very well I'm sure so you can tell that now we're going to double it up with thirds and same Melody

    00:09:18 - 00:11:00

    same Contour right so quite straightforward all you now have to do is sync up the right hand each of these right hand notes with the beginning of every grouping of the left hand [Music] together together take your time find it together don't be rushing any of this find it when you find it and arrive gently and with control try not to accumulate any tension [Music] very intuitive so once you've learned the right hand putting it together should be pretty straightforward once you get to the end

    00:10:22 - 00:11:59

    of the first phrase We then move into the next which is as we've seen before uh doubled up in the right hand we got thirds descending these are called thirds because this is an interval of a third either a major third or a minor third but they're all thirds so [Music] as you can see the left hand is all the same so in the next part of the tutorial um I'll say a few words about the right hand here I'll go into some detail about how to control these thirds you have to voice one note over the other and then

    00:11:24 - 00:11:43

    we'll head further into the piece but I think we have a good solid base that we're starting from for now so let's continue forward see in just a bit