Have you ever played the piano before? You may recall seeing white and black keys arranged as groups of two and three across and down the keyboard.
First step to mastering middle C on piano: locate it with ring finger on key and play up and down several times with this finger.
Basics
As you start learning piano, it is essential that you familiarize yourself with its keys and music notes – this will be the basis upon which to build new songs and musical styles.
Start by finding the white keys of the piano and finding middle C. If necessary, referring to the diagram provided as a guide. When done, move onto black keys – once these have been located you can move onto reading music notation and eventually playing along with songs!
Step two is to practice playing along with songs you know in order to familiarise yourself with the notes of the C major scale and perfect its notes. Playing along will also help maintain rhythm and timing for optimal results.
Work on developing your fingerings. This will enable you to understand which fingers belong on which keys and allow for smoother keyboard movement.
Learning to count beats is another essential skill, as counting basic beats will help maintain rhythm when playing. A metronome or mental count of 1 through 4 beats should work just fine; for a different approach add the word “and” after each number in your piece if eighth notes occur in it (such as one and two and three and four and one…).
Last but not least, it’s wise to practice playing both hands together. This will enable more fluidity of movement and create a fuller sound. Although initially difficult, regular practice will enable you to create an octave scale from hand to hand.
Learning an instrument takes dedication and persistence. At times you may feel discouraged, wanting to give up. In these times it is important to remember why you began learning piano – whether it was for social connection, expression or simple love of music! Keep this goal in mind and don’t allow challenges get in the way!
Scales
Scales are essential to any pianist. They serve as a solid basis for chords and help develop a full musical vocabulary, with most pianists agreeing that learning the major and minor scales up and down, forwards and backwards is an excellent place to start learning the piano; from there a student may go on to study more advanced scales like chromatic, pentatonic and blues scales or any modal scale used for improvisation or composition.
Scale practice should be undertaken regularly and consistently in order to build finger dexterity and musicality while gradually building speed over time. Regular scale practice serves as the ideal warm-up before playing any piece of music.
C Major is an ideal starting point, since it only uses white keys and can easily be played with both hands. A student should also work on all minor scales – both natural and harmonic minor scales – both natural and harmonic minor. Remembering their construction using intervals – whole step – half step – whole step can make learning them much simpler.
Note that in order to properly play a scale, both hands should use appropriate fingerings. When practicing the C major scale on right hand, students should start from middle C with their thumb and place their second and third fingers on D and E respectively, before moving on to place fourth finger on F before crossing third finger over fifth finger to play G – this continues until thumb reaches top C again.
Fingerings should be consistent and equal between both hands to allow students to easily traverse each key’s scales with ease. A metronome may also assist students in learning the proper rhythm for each scale.
Intervals
Intervals refer to the space between two notes on a piano keyboard. As an essential component of musical theory, intervals can help you read music faster, play by ear more effortlessly, and understand relationships among notes, scales, keys, chords and beyond.
In order to better comprehend intervals, start by studying a piece of music you already know well – for instance, “Twinkle Little Star” on piano should serve as an excellent starting point. Once familiar with its sheet music and notes, consider how far apart each note is from each other on your piano keyboard and note the distances between each note as you practice playing several notes at a time from that tune on your instrument – counting whole steps between notes until you gain a firm grasp on what an interval means as well as its frequency! Once complete, this exercise should give you a firm grasp on what an interval means as well as its prevalence between notes!
As you play these intervals on the piano, take note of their sounds and what emotion each one invokes. This mental exercise will help deepen your connection to both songs you are learning as well as chords they form.
Learning intervals will also be immensely helpful when starting to play chord progressions on the piano, since chords are comprised of various intervals grouped together. Being able to identify these intervals will make picking out melodies from popular songs much simpler.
Intervals can also be useful when used alongside scales. Each interval corresponds with its own scale: C is considered a major interval because it is two whole steps away from G (minor interval); similarly for any other piano interval.
There are various approaches you can take when learning intervals on the piano. One is by memorizing intervals and their names – which is simple for beginners – while using the scale method requires more work but will help beginners quickly grasp intervals and learn them rapidly. Finally, using intervals when practicing ear training on the piano can also prove extremely helpful as this allows them to identify what kind of intervals are being used, such as perfect fourths or major sixths more easily when singing along with songs.
Music Theory
Music theory is a language for understanding music creation. It serves as the framework to facilitate our comprehension of melodies, harmonies, chords and structures of pieces of music; providing vocabulary to describe their structures as well as rules governing their relationships between notes. Without knowledge of these rules you will only ever be able to perform songs mechanically by listening or reading sheet music.
Music theory is key if you want to become a better pianist; it will allow you to understand what’s going on within a song and might even give you the tools necessary to compose original tunes some day (if that’s something that intrigues you).
Learning musical notation is the first step toward mastering piano theory. Musical notation consists of symbols used to represent pitches, lengths and relationships of notes on a staff; additionally it also assigns different durations of each note on the staff. Since musical notation has been around for centuries and continues to be widely used today.
Learn the five types of notes represented on a staff and how they’re represented using flags (dotted lines) and ties, flag length and duration modifications, time signature calculations, how measures affect how many beats it contains and writing rhythms using both basic and odd time signatures.
Musicians that lack any theory are severely limited in what songs they can perform. Even if your focus is solely pop music, having at least some basic knowledge of music theory will enable you to recognize patterns that make a song sound good and help to avoid falling into cliched tropes that have already been covered many times over.
Music theory may seem complex at first, particularly for new students. But don’t fear; music theory can make your journey as a musician much simpler!