Music

The Beginner’s Guide to Learning Piano

Many piano enthusiasts, especially beginners, find the musical instrument hard to learn. Reading one clef at a time can be challenging when there is rhythm, dynamics, and note reading happening at the same time. Chord arrangement of songs can also be a problem, however, practicing scales and regular piano exercises can help overcome these difficulties over time. If you want to know how to learn piano, here are 5 steps you can follow to go from playing simple to “professional-sounding” melodies.

  1. Start with theright-hand melody– Start with just the right-hand melody so you barely have to move your right hand.  It could be anything, from an easy Christmas song to a pop song. The things that you can do to make the melody sound on a higher level are the same that you could do for so many songs, especially in the pop songs genre.
  2. Add left-hand root notes – The second step is to add a left-hand root note to the chords of the song. Also known as the base note, the root note is the lowest note heard in a chord. Once you have a melody and a bass note, you would want to add chords, especially to fill out the sound on the instrument.
  3. Use your left hand to add notes – When adding chords, use your left hand (a very common practice when learning pop songs) as it allows you to play the melody with the right hand. Use the sustain pedal so you don’t have to keep your fingers down all the time. It’s something really handy, especially as a gateway to step 4 where you start moving the chords to the right hand.
  4. Add chords to the right hand – Have the melody note at the top of the court, and then fill in as many notes as you can play underneath that. With a simple melody, it works really well. Indeed, there’s a big jump up here, but it’s really worth pursuing because that’s the only way to get to the next step.
  5. Add more rhythm and octaves – Here, you do the same thing with the chords in the right hand, however, you double up the bass with the octave, which makes you sound much more dramatic. It also adds a little bit more rhythm content, especially between the two hands. If you don’t want to sound big and dramatic, do the exact same thing with a couple of octaves up. It essentially sounds a lot more delicate.

When it comes to learning piano, you can try a lot of different things to figure what’s working best for you—and continue doing that—so you can learn fast.

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