African American Christian Wedding Songs : A Piano Lesson for Beginners

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

If you're thinking of trying the piano, and have no idea where to start, you will probably type "piano lesson for beginners" on a search engine. But the results are dizzying. Where do you start? Whose advice do you take? What method is best for you?

If you take my generalized advice, you'll listen to what thousands of people have told me who were in exactly the same position as you.

KIDS

For kids, the conclusion they come to is that reading music is too complicated to handle and have any significant degree of pleasure in simply making music at the piano, especially at the very beginning.

The two tasks are really separate: reading music and making music. Most piano beginners are totally unaware of this fact, and it creates lots of problems for kids with piano teachers who insist on only reading music.

If kids could look back on their piano lessons, they would say, "I wish it had been more fun." It's simple childish nature to desire fun, and piano is an elective activity for them. But this is a fact that almost all piano teachers ignore, to the detriment of their young students.

To most piano teachers, the skill they are selling is musical literacy, and if you happen to enjoy the music during the process, it's entirely an accident. These piano teachers do not believe that they should ever enter into the realm of "fun," and that to do so would weaken and dilute their precious musical curriculum and standards. That attitude is poison to children's enthusiasm for the piano.

ADULTS

Adults are often on their own, without a teacher, and have to sort it out for themselves by picking up a "teach yourself piano" type of method.

The comment I hear the most is, "I was okay until about page 30, and then it got so complicated I couldn't have any fun, so I quit."

Actually, the only mistake they made was to assume they had to go at the pace that the books set out for them. And that's going about it the wrong way.

You should go as slowly as you want. Your first goal should be to play familiar songs you have always liked. It may be corny, but just mastering "Greensleeves" is a huge accomplishment, and you can take as long as you like to do it.

The easiest way to get started is to number your piano keys and forget about reading music until you have a couple of dozen songs you can enjoy playing.

If you don't enjoy just playing simple music, you will not stick around to learn the complex stuff.

Here's a link to a piano method for beginners that goes at just the right pace: Piano By Number. http://www.pianoiseasy2.com/

John Aschenbrenner is the author of the Piano By Number series.