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:
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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.
