Piano Key2

There are so many areas in life where one must do things right. Thankfully, art is an area where great discoveries are made by making mistakes!

Take improvisation for example. We sit at our piano or keyboard without any thought of what is to come. Our fingers touch a certain chord that calls to us and we are gone. We are transported into a nonverbal world where anything is possible.

Surprises happily come our way as we let go and observe how the music is created before us. And we are always amazed that the “best” music happens when we do not care if it is good or bad.

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Do you know why playing guitar is so much easier than playing piano? It’s because guitar players learn how to use chords first. Even before note reading!

They usually learn how to play chords in the first position. Called open position chords, the beginning guitarist quickly learns how to finger this position and can immediately create music. That’s why so many people love the guitar and want to learn it!

They don’t waste time learning “the masters” or anything like that at all. Nope. It’s all contemporary. Unless of course it’s classical guitar.

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Why is it that after years of studying something as a child, we forget later in life what we learned? Such is the common question of how to play piano despite years of lesson. Here i get you back to playing music even if you think you’ve lost it, and have begun to give up on how to play piano despite years of lesson.

First, realize that you have had lesson in piano, years of it perhaps, and that DOES count for a whole lot. How to play piano despite years of lesson entails mentally realizing that you really are only a step or two away from being able to play piano. The problem is that it

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The piano is an amazing instrument. So many notes, so many keys! That’s why the crossover or arpeggio technique is employed frequently. It allows the pianist to use much of the keyboard and the left hand.

The trick to using this technique is in the crossover itself. Usually, the left hands initial position will span an octave and then the index or ring finger will be used to crossover the thumb to continue playing more notes of the chord.

A good example of this is the piece “Thanksgiving” by George Winston. Here, a whole harmonic background is created by the left-hand crossover technique while the right improvises a melody line. And the results are a beautiful piece of music! Nothing complicated here.

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How would you like to spend 4 years in a University learning how to play other peoples music? If you think this is ridiculous, you’re right! Because that’s what thousands of piano music students do each day.

They sit in front of their piano or keyboard with sheet music of a dead composer in front of them. Then they are told to “play it right.” Have you ever heard of such nonsense? Imagine a budding writer forced to copy another novelists work? In essence, this is what classical piano students do. They copy.

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