Auld Lang Syne (Piano)

Auld Lang Syne is the song sung at midnight on New Year's Eve, and the meaning of the title is "old long since", or for old times' sake. The lyrics are Scottish, written down by Robert Burns in 1788. The tune is older, a folk melody built on five notes, which is why a whole room can sing it after one hearing.

That familiarity is what makes it a good first piece at the piano. You already know every phrase. What is left to learn is how to shape them, and shaping is the useful part. Click the sheet music to play it in Chordzy with each note checked as you go.

The melody comes from traditional folk music and is filed under irish traditional music songs and traditional irish folk music as often as under Scottish, though the words are Scottish. The tune behaves like the rest of the Celtic repertoire: modal, singable, built on a five-note scale with no semitone in it, so no two of its notes clash. Play it and you are taking a turn in a conversation that is centuries old. The sheet music above is the current turn.

F major, 4/4, 17 bars. Watch the B♭. That is the shape you need before you play a note.

Read the key first so you know which black keys are in play. Count the meter out loud. Then look at how many bars you actually have to learn.

Work through this tutorial in the order below. Fifteen minutes a day for a week is enough to get Auld Lang Syne under your hands if each chunk is actually learned.

Play it with the notes graded as you go, no account.

The key is F major: one flat (B♭). The notes are F G A B♭ C D E. Anything outside that list in the score is an accidental. Mark it.

The time signature is 4/4: 4 beats in every bar, and a quarter note gets one beat. Count that out loud before you play, and keep counting.

The score is 17 measures long. Number them in pencil. Starting at bar 9, when you need to, is the point of the numbers.

Set a tempo you can play the hardest bar at. The easy bars will feel slow. That is correct.

Split Auld Lang Syne into chunks of 4 bars and learn one chunk per session. A chunk you can play three times without a mistake is learned. A chunk you can nearly play is not.

Practice the last bar of one chunk and the first bar of the next as a chunk of their own. The joins are where it breaks.

Auld Lang Syne sits in F major. These are the chords that key is built from. Knowing them makes a slip easier to recover from, because you can hear where you are.

Play the melody in your right hand and just these chords in your left. The written left hand can wait. Hearing the harmony is the useful part.

Two hands on Auld Lang Syne are two problems. Solve them one at a time.

1. Right hand alone, slowly, until the chunk is clean three times.
2. Left hand alone, slowly. Give the left hand in F, which has to remember B♭ more time than it feels like it needs.
3. Hands together at half the speed you managed separately. If it falls apart, go back to the weaker hand.
4. Speed up in small steps, only from a tempo where nothing goes wrong.

If a bar still will not lock, play the right hand and tap the left-hand rhythm on the piano lid. The problem is usually the rhythm.

Fifteen minutes a day for a week:

1. Day 1: the key and the first four bars of the tune, hands separately.
2. Day 2: chunk 1 hands together, chunk 2 hands separately.
3. Day 3: join chunks 1 and 2, then learn chunk 3.
4. Day 4: the second half, same routine.
5. Day 5: the joins, and only the joins.
6. Day 6: the whole piece, slowly, once. Mark the two bars that went worst.
7. Day 7: those two bars, then the whole piece at tempo.

Play Auld Lang Syne in Chordzy and it will mark which notes and timings were off.

It sits under the hand. The melody moves by step and by small leaps inside one octave, so a beginner can play it from one hand position and an intermediate player can spend the time on voicing, on balance between the hands and on tone. Nothing in it needs speed. Everything in it needs a smooth line, dynamics that go somewhere, and a left hand that keeps the chords quiet under the tune. If it sounds plain on the first play-through, that is correct. The shape is what you add.

Make the piano sing with the fingers rather than the pedal. Hold each key until the next one is down, and use the pedal only to warm the sound. Every phrase in this tune rises and falls over four bars. Find the top note of each, lean toward it, and let the phrase settle after it. Breathe where a singer would, at the end of each line of the verse. Monotonous playing has no top note. Musical playing has one per phrase.

It is usually played in a calm, steady meter at a relaxed tempo. Learn it slowly, counting, until every note lands on its beat. Then experiment. A touch faster, and it loses some weight. Slower, with more space between the phrases, and it becomes a farewell. Both are legitimate. What you are training is a pulse that holds while the tempo changes, so that you never rush.

Because you know the tune, your ear flags a wrong note before your eyes do. Use that. Play a phrase, sing it back, play it again. Then sing the next phrase before you play it and see whether the piano agrees. Pitch awareness grows fast when the target is a melody you have known since you were six, and hearing a note before you play it is the habit every good pianist has.

The score repeats itself. The second phrase is a variant of the first, and the chorus uses the same shapes higher up, so after the first line your eyes are recognizing patterns instead of decoding notes. Click the sheet music to play it directly in Chordzy and the notes light up as you reach them, so you always know where you are. No account required.

Once the notes are secure, make it yours. Add a small swell through each phrase. Delay the final note of a phrase by a fraction. Play the last verse more softly, as a farewell, which is what the words are. Some of this will go wrong the first time, and that is how you find out what the tune can take.

Short sessions work best. Play one phrase well rather than the whole song carelessly. Loop the bar that trips you, then run the whole thing through once for flow. When you are ready, click the sheet music and play along in Chordzy.

Auld Lang Syne is why most people learn the piano in the first place: a tune everyone knows, played for a room that will sing along. You are making real music from the first line.