Piano Playing Made Easy
Since my daughter’s newly adopted interest in piano playing emerged, I find myself searching for information and instructional tutorials on how to improve and expand an average persons existing skills. Recently, I found a webpage that introduced another aspect of the art that is usually overlooked and at times never even pursued. It’s another way of delivering a musical rendition that’s very often never taught, and isn’t even envisioned as a possible line of study by the majority of pianst.
Some instructors believe improvisation, to be an inate quality that cannot be taught, but unbeknowst to most, this is just not true. Delivering piano chords without using sheet music is a skill most can master. Anyone that can read notes, can learn the elusive art of improvisational playing. From day one, a novice pianist learns to play by reading and closely following the sequence of piano chords from sheet music. Some never realizing that there are techniques that can be applied that would expand the quality of any piece that they performed. In these particular video tutorial that I discovered, a student would learn to use triplet rythms which produce a 50’s sound; change a melody in 3/4 meter into 4/4th or an astounding 9/8th; switch from quarter notes to eight notes thereby producing a tango or combinations of both for a latin beat; learn how to infuse your pieces with special effects that will add even more interest to any basic song … and there is still so much more that can be learned from these tutorials.And by learning chord structures and inversions, sight reading becomes ‘a breeze’.
And she [my daughter] would not only learn all that I have mentioned so far but she would also learn to change the mood of a song just by changing which scale the song is played in. My daughter is gonna just love this program, she enjoys things that are detailed and intricate. The scope of this tutorial is phenominal, I am sure she will be dazzled by this package.
Aeolian modes, modal scales, piano chords, dominant 7th color chords, tremolo … exactly what are these terms all about, you might ask, beats me … but this and more is covered in the lessons. The amount of information offered in this video classroom is mind boogling. I just never realized the scope of this art, and I am sure just one semester of study only minutely touched on a few of the possible avenues that exist for someone who chooses to learn how to play a piano.
Now, the only question that remains is whether I should surprise her with this program or first show her what I found … hmmm?
