Piano for Beginners

Playing piano, for beginners or advanced players, is more than playing notes.  Learning to play the piano requires you to learn how to sit at the piano.  There are several reasons why you need to pay attention to your posture while you play.  For one thing, you need to be able to command every key on the keyboard and your posture can affect your reach and power.  Secondly, sitting at the piano keyboard, like sitting at a computer keyboard, can cause muscle fatigue and repetitive stress injuries if you are not careful about your posture.  But most crucially, your musicality will suffer and your enjoyment of your piano-playing will diminish if poor posture causes you to have tense muscles, backaches or any other physical discomfort.  Time spent playing the piano can be the best part of anyone’s day, unless a stiff neck or tense shoulders makes you too crabby to enjoy it.  And it’s hard to let the music flow from your fingertips if your muscles are cramped.

So learning to sit correctly at the piano should be one of the first lessons in piano for beginners.  Here are my tips for sitting comfortably and correctly at the piano:

Suppose you had decided to learn to play a musical instrument. There may be a few different instruments that interest you. Guitar is popular and easy to play. Violin, if rather more difficult, has a lot of very beautiful music written for it.   And you could also study piano. How would you make the decision? Why should you learn to play keyboard?

I always encourage piano for beginners when first learning an instrument. Piano is a mainstay of almost every style of western music. Whether you are interested in classical, pop, rock, jazz, blues or gospel, you would make a smart decision if you learn to play keyboard.

Unlike most other instruments, piano is polyphonic. That is, you can play more than one note at a time. In fact, by playing a chord with each hand, you can play several notes at once.  This gives the piano a richness that most instruments don’t offer. Even when players first start to learn to play keyboard, polyphonic sound is introduced quite soon. You may only play one note with each hand, but you ordinarily play different notes with each hand. Once a player gets more advanced, the richness in tone is amplified. The complexity of tone available on a piano is unmatched by other instruments.

Piano is a great choice whether you want to go solo or play with others. One the one hand, the literature available for solo piano is breathtaking. On the other hand, it is the standard instrument to accompany voice or flute, violin or any other instrument. Pianos can also be part of a band or orchestra.

Beginning musicians who learn to play keyboard learn a lot about music in general. As a first and obvious example, the music for most instruments is written in either the treble or the bass clef. Piano music is written in the treble clef for the right hand and the bass clef for the left. So piano for beginners offers twice as much music-reading instruction as any other instrument. Playing chords and accompanying the melody (played by the right hand) with the harmony (played with the left hand) offers a student the chance to learn music theory in a very practical way. And piano requires its players to be able to use each finger of both hands independently, causing an improvement in manual dexterity.

Of course, there are some drawbacks if you learn to play keyboard. Pianos are, after all, large and heavy pieces of furniture. They are expensive and not portable. You can’t carry a piano with you to go practice with your band. And some living spaces just don’t accommodate even a small spinet piano.

One work-around to the enormity of an acoustic piano is an electronic keyboard. Since they are small and easier to carry, as well as being significantly more affordable, they may be a good investment for a student to learn to play keyboard. But since they cannot begin to match the sound quality that an acoustic piano provides, a serious piano student will find the need for an acoustic piano before too long.

Of course, the real reason to learn to play keyboard is that the piano is unmatched in beauty. The elegance of a piano cannot be duplicated by any other instrument. Anyone who chooses to learn to play keyboard has made a good choice.

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No one has ever accused me of being musically talented.  But I love music and I decided to learn to play the piano.  For beginners, mind you.  Even though I am quite a lot older than most people are when they first take up an instrument, I wanted to learn to play the piano.  Okay, so it isn’t a piano.  In the absence of a real live piano, I bought an inexpensive, portable electronic keyboard.  And I’ve been goofing around on it a little bit. 

Now, my life is busy and my schedule is packed, so I knew that private lessons wouldn’t work.  You have to practice according to the lesson schedule.  You have to get to the lesson.  It wasn’t going to work so I didn’t even try it.  I thought I could teach myself piano for beginners with a method course either from a book or online.

I looked into a couple of methods and I am making my first attempt with RocketPiano.  One of the reasons that I wanted to try that course is because they offer a six-lesson trial package.  It comes to you via email right after you sign up (you need to confirm your subscription) and the email has a link to the instruction page.  They send out a new lesson every four days until your trial period is exhausted. 

Well, I just took the first of the free lessons.  This is piano for beginners, real beginners, and they start you out with instructions on how to sit at the piano.  Practice it.  The reason it is important is that you need to be able to reach the whole keyboard, you need to be able to sit and practice for hours (well, maybe . . . ) without muscle or joint stress and you need to be pain-free or, surprise, you won’t want to practice.

After the lesson on good posture, RocketPiano moves on to show you a numbering system for your fingers.  It’s sort of like a type of shorthand for them to be able to tell you what finger to use for the note when you are playing. 

Only after they have dealt with your posture and your fingers do they turn their attention to the keyboard.  Frankly, I found that conversation illuminating.  Of course, I always knew that the piano keyboard was a series of black and white keys.  But I had never seen a pattern to them before.  It turns out that the black keys are grouped in sets of two and three keys.  A set of two, plus a set of three, plus the adjacent white keys all together make an octave.  Octaves are repeated one after the other right down the keyboard.  The “C” is the white key that comes before a set of two black keys.  Every time you see a set of two black keys, you can find a “C” right before it.  That knowledge sure helped me to get my bearings on the keyboard.  Exercises, using just one hand and then another, help you just to get the feel of the keyboard. 

Next we moved on to discuss reading music.  No discussion of pitch at all right now.  The first thing they teach you is rhythm and the relative number of beats of whole, half and quarter notes.  This is piano for beginners, after all.  So we start out a step at a time.

And then we get to play a song.  No, I’m not kidding!  I actually learned how to play a piano song in my first lesson.  I played two lines of “Mary Had A Little Lamb.”  What fun!  It’s possible to do if they tell you where on the keyboard to place your fingers, they use the finger-numbering system to tell you which keys to press and they write out the music so you can tell how long to hold each note.  I learned the song pretty quickly, then spent several minutes playing it over and over again.  It was really a lot of fun to play a song on the piano. 

The lesson finishes up with a little present.  They give you a free download of a computer game, Jayde Musica.  As a staff of music passes along the screen, you need to identify it.  Like other games, you progress from one level to the next harder one.  It’s kind of fun.  And it’s free with the free course.

The second free lesson comes via email in four days.  I’ll write more then.

In the meantime, these articles might interest you:

• Teach Yourself Piano With Online Piano Lessons Download – In this article I shall discuss how to teach yourself piano with the help of online piano lessons download and why they are becoming so increasingly popular by the day. Offline classes or taking piano lessons from a flesh and blood …

• How to teach yourself piano? | Easy Piano Lessons – To teach yourself piano the first and most obvious requirement is that you have a piano or an electronic keyboard to learn on. Ideally you should.

I’m really enjoying Jayde Musica.  Jayde Musica is an interactive online game that is intended to help you learn to read music.  And of course, you need to have good music-reading skills if you are serious about learning how to play piano songs.  As you play Jayde Musica, a little piece of a staff moves from right to left across the screen.  There is a note, or more than one, on the staff.  You click on the letter that corresponds to the note as it passes.  If you go too slowly, you might get reminded to speed up.  Okay, so I know that from experience!  If you get enough of them right, you progress on to the next level, which is harder.  In upper levels, the staff moves faster and there is more than one note on the staff. 

It’s a lot of fun, but most importantly it’s really an excellent teaching tool.  Without this aid, I would approach learning to read music very passively, staring at a line of music and expecting somehow for it to sink in.  But Jayde Musica offers a more active approach.  You have to stay alert and move fast enough.  And when you click on the letter, you commit to an answer.  In those ways, it mimics the way you need to read music when you are learning how to play piano songs.  It’s really fabulous for learning to read music.

Jayde Musica is a free download that is available from Rocket Piano when you purchase the program, or even if you just sign up for the free six-lesson trial.  Since you want to learn how to play piano songs, you have to be able to read music.  Just to have access to Jayde Musica is enough to make it worth your while to sign up for the free trial.  After all, what have you got to lose?

If you try it, leave a comment to let me know how you like it.

Read more about piano for beginners:

• Different Ways of Learning Piano for Beginners by Brian Shelton by … – Piano for beginners taught through the chord based method is enjoyable for student and teacher alike. Could you imagine listening to nothing by scales for hours each day? A teacher that instructs their students to use chords can hear …

• How to learn piano for beginners | Piano for beginners – Not all preople are equally musical orientated, but do not stop you to learn how to play piano.Many tricks of the trade exist that can have you playing the.