Here are the top two ways to sound great playing the piano:

1) Develop and refine your piano technique.

No matter how advanced your playing develops, you’ll always benefit from returning to the basics. Returning to the basics in fact, is one of the top ways to sound great playing piano and it means practicing your scales, chords, sharps, flats, and all the other grunt work you learned as a beginner. You’ll want to be so skilled that you can repeat your lessons with your eyes closed! After you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll want to then practice playing the piano emotionally. There are several tools you can use to convey emotion in your performance, many of which manipulate volume and rhythm with range dynamics, legatos, slurs, staccatos, ties, transposes, and more.

These are some of the items you can develop and refine before you set out to play chords progressions and accompaniment. Quite often, learning pianists will rush into their lessons without taking the time to appreciate the details. As they say, the devil is in the details. So resist the temptation to skip lessons 4, 5, and 6 before you’ve even learned lesson 3! Lesson 7 after all, may introduce concepts that depend on knowledge gained from the lessons you might have “glossed over.”

2) Developing and refining your musical ear.

We know a fellow who likes to poke fun of speech and emphasize an important reality about our senses. He likes to tease people who say they have an ear for music or an eye for art. As always, this fellow’s response to such a phrase is, “Oh really? Well I have two! One on each side of my nose!” Although he’s a bit too literal for our tastes, he does make a good point. And that is to “see” clearly, or in our case, to “hear” clearly.

We suppose our friend is really saying, listen ‘twice’ as hard. At the same time that you listen to a great piece of music — and enjoy it — you’re also evaluating it . Even while you’re playing the piano yourself, you’re evaluating how faithfully you’re representing the song’s emotion and technical notation. To strengthen your listening skills however (or to listen with *both* of your ears as our friend would insist), you can record yourself playing the piano, and then evaluate the result. After enough practice, you’ll be able to do this without the aid of a tape recorder and make an immediate assessment the minute that you press a key.

Another way to strengthen your listening skills is to evaluate the music that moves you. While listening to the music of others, ask yourself what it is about that music that excites you. Then try to incorporate its characteristics into the music that you play (or at least, into your playing style). Of course you could do just the opposite as well. Evaluate what it is about music that bores you to death and then do everything you can to avoid it in your own music!

Just don’t make the mistake of believing that your opinion is the only one that matters. Seek out the opinions of others and ask for honest criticism. Don’t ask for just the sugarcoated stuff. Ask your friends and family to be a brutally honest as they care to be. Then use that criticism to improve your style.

To learn how to read piano notes it is essential to learn some basic theory. Nothing to complicated, just enough so you understand what the notes are called. This is actually easier than you might think because there are only seven notes to learn. These notes are C, D, E, F, G, A, B. These are all the white notes. The black notes are the sharps and flats and you won’t even need these to start with.

There are various ways you can learn to play the piano. There are tutor books for beginners and there are piano courses that you can download to your computer. Tuition book such as “The Complete Piano Player” and “The Complete Keyboard Player” can be ordered online or at your local music shop. Piano courses are normally downloaded from music sites, which specialise in piano lessons.

Tutor books Vs piano courses

Tutor books are probably the cheapest option and it is possible to learn to play the piano with this method. However, they are really designed to be used by a piano teacher with a pupil. Unless you have some basic knowledge of music, it is possible to pick up some bad habits, which you may not be immediately aware of. A teacher would prevent this before it starts.

A piano course or piano lessons software is by far the better option. Many of these courses include audio and video files, which can literally show you how to play the piano without those nasty bad habits, which many learners can pick up without the proper direction.

Look, listen, copy and play

Most piano learning courses come bundled with lessons that will take you from beginner to advanced. The simplicity of how these courses are laid out is one of the reasons they have become so successful. The video and audio files are the key to your success. You just copy what is on the video or audio file until what you are playing matches what is being shown and that’s it, move on to the next lesson. Don’t expect to learn to play overnight, it’s a gradual process and the piano software system is almost like having your own personal piano teacher 24/7.

Whichever method you choose, try to make your practice time a habit. If you were going to a piano teacher, you would need to practice every day. You should do the same if you intend to learn by yourself. All beginners need a minimum of half an hour per day learning and practice time, anything after that is just having fun time.

Is there any other educational area where students are taught only in a one-on-one situation, not really?

In essence, this is what classical piano students do. It is very important and monotonous for students who are learning to play the piano to practice everyday, this takes discipline which you do not see in children or parents. Both of these attitudes create artificial limitations for students that hinder their ability to grow and develop musically. Here’s the message piano students need to hear — “Your effort matters and it makes a difference.

However, about a third of parents do too much and try to take over responsibility for their child’s progress, which hinders their child’s ability to develop positive learning skills on their own. To help their children learn and accomplish their goals, parents need to focus on the process and content of the learning rather than the final product. What the young student doesn’t understand is the piano learning process.

Private lessons have good and bad connotation associated with them, sometimes children create a dependence on the teacher and it is hard for children to overcome this and children are not encouraged to develop their own independence when it comes to learning the necessary skills, on the other hand having the one on one teaching is very beneficial to the child because more can get accomplished in a shorter period of time. Plus, there is no point in having your child spend 30 minutes practicing incorrectly without learning their pieces when the material can be mastered in 10 minutes with good practice habits.

Because parents are in charge of their children’s schedule and curriculum, home school students can set their own pace and spend more time on music than in the public or private schools. Music is even more fun when you can share it with others. Young children have the ability to learn music theory and are able to learn concepts on the keyboard as the children grow and develop their musical ear.

If your children know their alphabet and how to identify numbers and count, they’re old enough to start learning music theory. With the rise of the internet more adults have learned that taking piano lesson does not have be taught in classrooms or studios it can be taught over the internet, this helps with today’s busy schedules and adults do not have to be locked into a schedule.

Well, you might find this hard to believe, but encouraging your child taking piano lessons to practice doesn’t have to be a struggle. They do want to be sure, however, that their young child is old enough to benefit from formal musical training.

One of the choices that parents have when their child is beginning piano lessons is whether to enroll their son or daughter in a private or group lesson. Over time this will make sitting down at the piano to practice feel more natural to your young child or your older beginner and make learning easier. Establish a routine practice time.

Set meaningful goals that will last, focus on the “What” and the “Why. Writing down the goals and dreams that first motivated you to give your child the gift of piano lessons provides a reminder that will keep your energy focused over the long term.

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Everyone can compose sheet music! You have to start where you are and anyone can do that. You can create your own compositions for piano! Let’s see why you should!

Where can you start?

Maybe you find it difficult to notate sheet music. Well, you don’t have to notate your music. You can record the things you do with a digital recording equipment, maybe your computer or a tape recorder.

But if you want to use sheet music? What can you do?

Let me suggest that you start by writing for piano beginners. Sheet music for piano beginners have to be very simple. Few notes and very easy rhythms. This is the place where you fit in!

If you start to write piano sheet music for beginners in progressive order you will also learn to write sheet music in progressive order. Smart idea, isn’t it!

But…, what benefits are there in writing and composing piano sheet music for your own piano playing?

Here are some of my own thoughts:

1. You own endeavors to create piano compositions will make you more aware of other composers music. Questions will arise in your mind on how to notate the things in your mind and how to arrange and so on. These questions will be in your mind and make you more aware of how other composers have written and notated their music.

You will probably look at other composers musical notation with fresh eyes trying to learn how professional composers write.

2. As you compose you will become more and more sensitive to intrinsic musical subtleties in your own music as well as in other composers music.

3. Gradually you will start to think and feel more like a composer. This will help you become a better performer as well. You will respect other composers music more, trying to convey their hearts intent to your public.

4. As you train your creative muscles by composing they will also help you as you perform piano music. Both performing and composing are creative processes requiring your heart.

5. You will become a better sight reader by composing piano sheet music. Many years ago I had an assignment to write sheet music to a musical. I encountered not a few notational problems. Problems I had not as yet solved for myself.

Afterwards I started to play piano sheet music again. To my astonishment I realized I had developed as a sight reader.

My own conclusion was that my concentrated efforts to notate my piano compositions also was a course in sight reading.

I realized I had experienced a reversed sight reading exercise by composing music with my fingers on the piano keyboard and then trying to notate the music on manuscript paper.

Do you have to buy manuscript paper?

Well, no! To notate sheet music does not need to be expensive. You can use an ordinary pencil and ordinary white paper. Sometimes I use this equipment when I have nothing else at hand. I write five lines, one bar at a time, as I compose. It works!

The musical ideas I jot down this way I can easily work more with in my notational software program on my computer later on.

To compose and write piano sheet music can be a part of your daily piano practice. Spending half an hour with piano composing, making your own piano exercices and more can increase your awareness of music and help you become a better pianist and musician.