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Easy Piano Tutorial

August 18, 2010 By Crissy

It’s almost impossible to talk about all the wonderful things that you can do with a piano musically into one little easy piano tutorial. Since that’s the case, I’m not even going to try. But I can give you a couple of easy tips that will make practicing the piano much more effective in the long run. By knowing how to get the most efficient use of your time and effort you will be able to progress faster than you thought was possible.

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The first thing that you need to have to the practice piano or any other art form is a comfortable place with plenty of light that is also completely free of noise and distractions. I know some people who can read a book with the television turned on and other people having a conversation nearby, but it’s certainly not me. I like to have a little peace and a little space before I read or practice the piano or even at my job. So make sure that your piano practicing spot is a haven for you. It’ll make your practice sessions much more fun and enjoyable.

Be sure that you practice even a little bit every single day. Most instruments, and the piano is no exception, require a little bit of muscle memory. In the case of a piano were talking about raising the dexterity of your fingers. Your mind is going to be able to process the information faster than your fingers are going to be able to duplicate. By exercising them every day at the piano they will learn that dexterity in a much shorter period of time.

Lastly, you should do what professional musicians to when they are practicing new pieces of music. The way professionals practice is to take the piece and chop it up into smaller parts. They practice each segment of the music separately from the others until they have mastered just one portion. By taking your music in bite-size chunks your fingers will be able to more effectively process their new skills.

These little tips will save you a lot of time and effort because you will be able to learn how to play the piano much faster if you have a little peace and quiet, practice every day and learn new pieces of music one section at a time instead of trying to learn an entire score in one sitting.

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Learn Classical Piano

August 18, 2010 By Crissy

Playing classical piano can be a challenge. Honestly, mastering any instrument is going to take an awful lot of practice. But the piano is very different from many instruments in the fact that there are some ways to play the piano that don’t require perfection. It’s much the same with the guitar. You don’t have to be a virtuoso in order to play good chord music with the piano or guitar. However, playing classical piano is an entirely different thing altogether.

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If you really want to know where to begin practicing classical piano, the answer is really much simpler than you might think. Yes, your practice time needs to include more sight reading, and you should also send more time practicing sections of a piece of music as opposed to entire pieces of music so that you master one little part at a time, but there is another element that you should absolutely add to your practice without fail. This one practice tip is used by almost every concert level pianist in the world to begin their daily practice routine.

It’s called Hanon and it was written quite a long time ago, but it will never go out of style. Hanon was written to help concert pianists master the fingering for the note runs in some of the world’s most challenging classical music. It will increase finger strength, dexterity and even muscle memory for those very difficult note runs that even give the very best pianists fits.  A concert pianist will begin his practice sessions by playing all the way through the entire book. While that is not entirely necessary for the amateur pianist, it certainly wouldn’t hurt you one little bit.

Practice is all about learning and improving what you happen to be practicing on. And the best way to improve certain aspects of your classic piano ability is to use Hanon to master the most difficult scales from the most difficult music in the world. If you can master Hanon, you can play just about anything.

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Jazz Piano Lessons

August 18, 2010 By Crissy

If you’ve ever watched a guy like Harry Connick Junior play jazz piano and sing, you begin to understand just what makes him so cool. I mean, a jazz pianist who is really good is really cool. And while you might be thinking that you would have to move to New Orleans or some other jazz-centric location, that’s not necessarily the case. While you can go and learn from master jazz performers live there are also plenty of good jazz piano lessons that you can find right from your computer.

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Part of learning to play good jazz has to do with your use of scales. And that is going to require that you understand some music theory, and then practice that theory by using scales. If your fingers are stiff and don’t have a lot of dexterity, you’re really going to have some work cut out for you when it comes to playing jazz scales.

One thing that can help tremendously, and should be included in any jazz piano lessons, is the circle of fifths. All songs are built around a musical element called a key. A key is the notes that make that particular key different from every other key. You know how some songs may be more difficult for you to sing than others? One song may be in a higher key, while others are in lower Keys. If you have a naturally high voice, low-key songs they be more difficult for you to manage, and the same thing in reverse if you’re not a tenor or soprano.

The circle of fifths is something that you can use to quickly and easily play through every single key on the piano. Since many jazz and blues scales rely heavily on fifths and fourths, playing your way through the scales on the circle of fifths both clockwise and counterclockwise is a magnificent way to start any practice session.

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Easy Piano Lessons

August 18, 2010 By Crissy

Easy and piano don’t always belong in the same sentence. I’m not going to pull your leg here, mastering the piano, which is one of the more difficult instruments to learn to play, is going to take a while. However there are a couple of easy piano lessons that you can keep in mind when you are first beginning to play. You’ve heard of people wanting to learn to play the piano by ear, but that’s probably just going to hold you back later on. It’s better to do the hard work up front and then the rest will just be practice.

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So let’s talk for just a little while about developing feel when playing the piano. Having a feel for where your hands are on the keyboard means that you’re not looking at your hands all the time to know where to place them. If you can master feel you will be able to read pieces of music and play them without having any idea what this song is supposed to sound like when you play it. Playing piano by ear is actually a handicap and you really should learn how to read music, but you can start with just learning how to play without looking at your hands.

Most piano teachers will have you begin your lessons by finding middle C. and working on a C. major scale. They do this because middle C. is the easiest note to find on the keyboard and the C. major scale is the easiest to play. By learning the C. major scale you can learn a little bit about reading music, a little bit about fingering, and a touch of music theory when it comes to scales and octaves.

But since the C. major scale doesn’t contain any of the black keys it is also a terrible place to start because it the black keys on the piano are much easier to find. Every octave as five of them. One group of three and one group of two. Each of the black keys since has two white keys on either side of it, if you begin with a scale that uses the black keys instead of C. major you will learn a much better feel for where your hands are on the piano. It won’t take very long before you will be able to feel all of the notes by knowing where your fingers are in relation to the black keys.

You may have seen professional pianists who tend to play with their fingers closer to the black keys, almost playing the white notes in between the black keys. The reason for this is that it makes certain finger combination’s and locating your hands on the keyboard much easier. Probably the best scale to begin with is B natural instead of C. major. By learning a few major scales your fingers will begin to develop a feel for where they are on the piano.  It turns out this little piano lesson was easy after all.

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How To Play Piano By Ear

August 18, 2010 By Crissy

It’s always best if you plan on becoming a musician to learn how to read music. It will also help your development to take a class or read a book about music theory. Music is a fantastic blend of both mathematics and language. All of those little dots and words on the page are there for a reason, and that is to help anyone know how the artist intended the song to be played.

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But the interesting part about music is that you can reproduce a song without ever having seen the sheet music. As a matter of fact you can play almost any song in the world, and have it be instantly recognizable by anyone else who also knows the song if you learn something about Chords.

There are 12 major and 12 minor keys in music. Each key has eight notes that forms the scale. Within those eight notes three determine the chord. In other words, out of the 88 keys on the average piano all you really have to do is learn how to play the right three together and you’ve got the beginnings of learning how to play music by ear.

Now this is where understanding something about how music works will certainly help. Each key is defined by the tonic, the third and the fifth notes out of the 8 notes that make up the octave of the key. The major third is always full half step above the tonic while the major fifth is always 7 half steps above the tonic. Don’t get worried, it’s really not that hard. What that basically means is that your thumb, middle finger and pinky finger can be used to play any one of the 24 chords. All you have to do is learn the 12 major and 12 minor chords and you will be able to follow along with any piece of music ever written.

Once you’ve learned the chords, all you have to do to play piano by ear is find the key the music is being played in, and then follow along playing the chords that change as the melody changes. This is certainly not very difficult to do, even with just a few months of practice. At that point you can actually begin to embellish just about anything you can imagine, that’s where your own creativity will come into playing piano by ear.

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Learn To Play Piano Part 2

August 18, 2010 By Crissy

If you’re scared of learning to read music, don’t be. It’s really not that hard. But whatever you do, don’t open up a piece of sheet music with complicated piano parts. That will scare you. The hardest thing a pianist has to do is read both the bass clef and treble clef at the same time. Bass clef is usually played with the left hand and treble clef the right. If you don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say “clef” don’t worry about it. I had no idea how to read music or what a clef was when I started either.

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So learning to play the piano is actually learning music in general as well.  But don’t get overwhelmed. Baby steps, remember?

So, once you’ve mastered those nursery songs in your beginner’s music book, it will be time to start learning some chords. You will need to practice every day so that each chord imprints itself into your mind and your muscle memory. If you practice every day you will be able to play any chord in your sleep.

Learning chords has a lot of benefits which will be expanded on later as you learn more complicated songs.

Generally speaking, chords are played with the left hand and the melody is played with the right. This doesn’t fit every song, by far, but usually that is the case. Still, both of your hands will benefit from your learning chords, because lots of melodies use chords as their base. Melodies have the tendency to follow chords in a certain pattern that may or may not be slightly varied in some way.

After chords, you will need to learn octaves and chromatic scales. Once you master these, you start to become an actual musician. The secret to an awesome piano solo is really the chromatic scale. Experienced pianists can sit down and play a completely on-the-spot piano solo simply by knowing what key the rest of the song is in. They don’t write the solo beforehand and then memorize it, they use the chromatic scale and combine it with their knowledge of chords and octaves to create unique and beautiful solos without any rehearsal. All they need to know is the key.

This is the point that is truly the most enjoyable about playing the piano, or any instrument for that matter. This is when you will be actually making music, rather than performing from rote memory. You can do this too, if you follow the small steps, if you have the determination to do the boring things like learn chords and scales, and if you have the tenacity to learn to read music.

See why that practice schedule is so important?

My inspirational picture of Fats Domino helped me get to where I am today.  Even though I never had any desire to be a rock star or famous musician (I still have my same old day job) I can rightfully call myself a musician because I can make music come right out of my hands with the piano.

In my opinion there is no instrument that is more rewarding to play. It was a long road to get here, but it’s not impossible. Just keep at it, and you can be here too. Let me tell you, it was all worth it.

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Learn To Play Piano Part 1

August 18, 2010 By Crissy

Playing the piano is a great hobby to have. It is the perfect creative outlet that can relieve stress. It is a pastime that anyone can be proud of, and playing an old favorite on those ivory and ebony keys is a wonderful party trick. But, no matter what your motivations for learning to play the piano are, you’re going to have to take it slow.

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Yes there are those rare people who can sit down at a piano having never played it before and play Beethoven, but statistically speaking it is very unlikely that you are one of those people. Those people have some kind of natural gift, but that doesn’t mean you will never SOUND as good as they do. All it means is that your road to becoming a piano virtuoso is going to be long and filled with lots of little baby steps.

Just like anything that takes a lot of abilities to do, learning to play the piano is going to take a lot of practice. Learning to do anything that’s worth learning is going to take daily devotion, disciple, and self-motivation. If these are not your fortes, then learning to play piano can have the side benefits of improving your self-discipline.

The thing is, you will have to learn icky, boring songs in the beginning because they are easy to play. Playing “Hot Crossed Buns” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb” a thousand times doesn’t sound like fun, but if you want to sound like Elton John or Billy Joel, you’re going to have to start with those old nursery songs to help get your mechanics down right.

So, make yourself a little schedule. Actually writing it down and hanging it up by your computer or work desk or kitchen table is best. Put it somewhere you can see it every day to remind yourself to practice. Put an inspirational picture on it. My practice schedule (I still keep one after playing the piano for 12 years) has a picture of Fats Domino on it because Fats is awesome.

Also, you’re going to need to be able to read music. There’s just no way around this part of learning to play the piano. Rock star wannabes don’t really need to learn music to play the guitar because of guitar tablature. Guitar “Tab,” as it’s also called, just shows what fret your finger needs to be on for any given string for any given note. Since there are only five strings on a standard guitar, this is a much easier thing to read than actual sheet music.

For budding pianists, however, there really is no substitute for reading music. If the piano was a guitar it would have 88 strings! And since piano players use both hands to play rather than using one to hold notes while the other one picks or strums.

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