UK Piano Page Piano Forum

Hi
just signed up to gain some advice from those knowledgable

My goal for a long time now was to learn the piano, inspired from a piece of music i heard during the godfather film.

I understand its going to be an extremely long process but i now have the drive and energy to do it.

Basically i don't want to have lessons yet, so what i need is some recommendation of good reading material to read to help me learn, play, chords, read music etc. Bearing in mind i am completely starting from scratch.

Also I will be learning from a keyboard as theres no room for a piano currently so advice on the essentials, best makes, types, equipment etc would be greatly appreciated.

many thanks in advance

junior

It really depends on what you want to do with your piano playing.

Traditional teaching methods focus on the technical aspects of note recognition and reading two lines of music from written music. I suppose many people would call this "classical training". There is another method out there - there are load of variations and names for it of but they all point to a chord piano technique.

This puts more of an emphasis on recognising notes on the right hand and making up the rest by associating a chord with it. You can easily get your right and left hand parts out of this.

Many popular musicians will use this method because it allows them to improvise and change the music slightly by being able to leave the restrictions of the written music. May blues, black gospel and jazz musicians do this. I'm not saying that they all didn't go down a traditional learning route first, but many of them will admit to not reading music at all.

There is a down side to this though. Many of the people who learn the chord piano type method also tend to be poor readers of music - they would struggle to play a piece of relatively straightforward music if it was set in front of them.

As I said, it depends on what you want to do with your piano playing. If you want to muck about and make up music, then something like a chord piano course might be okay. If reading music and taking piano relatively seriously or a little more than that, then maybe the more traditional piano lessons ma be of use to you.

There are loads of websites that can get you started with the basics of recognising notes on the keyboard, recognising written notes, basic fingering if you do a search for "learn to play piano" or "play piano". I vaguely remember Rocket Piano which apparently covers the basics. It may give you something to start with.

Whatever way you decide to go, one thing is for sure - you need to get access to some kind of instrument.