There are many ways to break up chords into various patterns, including the open-voiced arpeggio, the 2-1 and 3-1 breakups, the pentatonic run, the Alberti bass, the Kansas City Bass, and on and on. But one of the best ways to get a contemporary and professional sound in your right hand is to use the 4-note “straddle” technique.

Instead of playing all 4 notes of a chord at once, you play just 2 and straddle the note inbetween. Then invert the chord up or down and do the same on the next inversion. It sounds complicated, but you’ll understand it when you watch this short video:

Sometimes the teacher learns more from the student than the student does from the teacher. Hopefully, not too often, but today I would like to share with you some great practicing ideas that have come from my piano students over the years:

1. A Colonel in Virginia that I taught for several years got up at 4AM every weekday morning and practiced on an electronic keyboard with headphones so he wouldn’t disturb anyone at that time of the morning. “I love the early morning”, he said, “because it’s so quiet and peaceful and I’m fresh and raring to go. No phones are ringing, no people walking into the room, no disturbances at all. I practice for a half-hour, have breakfast, and then hit it for another half-hour — all before I have to show up for work. When I get home in the evening, if I’m too tired to practice, I don’t feel guilty because I’ve already got my licks in for the day. And if I’m up to practicing some more — well, it’s a bonus!”

2. An elementary school teacher in Indiana told me she took each piece I assigned her and transposed it into all 12 keys — not written out, but at the piano — in her head. She said “It doesn’t always sound so hot, but I find that if I keep at it day after day, I can at least get by in the most difficult keys, and it makes the easier keys seem real simple. And it gives me a perspective that I just wouldn’t get it I just played it in one key — the key it is written in. I’ve learned that each key has it’s own “feel”, and some keys are bright (like “D”) and some keys are mellow (like “Db”).

3. Another piano student with a similar idea, who was the Minister of Music in a Catholic church, said he took one whole month of the year and devoted it to mastering just one key. Since there are 12 months in the year and 12 Major keys, that works out perfectly. So in January he played everything he could find in the key of C, and transposed anything that wasn’t in C into C. In February he went up 1/2 step to the key of C# (also known as Db enharmonically) and played everything in Db and searched for pieces written in the key of Db, and so on. By the time the year was up, he had a pretty fair grasp on the 12 Major keys. I suggested that he devote the next year to the 12 minor keys, and the next year to the modes, and the next year to polytonality, etc., etc. — but as I recall he decided to just recycle through the 12 major keys, since he used them so much more than the ones I suggested.

4. Still another piano student took an idea from me and twisted it a bit. I suggested that she play along with pieces she liked on tapes and CD’s, so she would get a feel for the motion of the song. (I used to do that by the hour when I was a teen-ager, and it paid off big time for me!). She took the idea and tried it and liked it so much that she started getting videos of people playing the piano. She arranged her TV and video player so that she could be at her piano while the video was playing, and she would play along with the pianist on the screen, following her/his hand motions and arm motions and finger position and thereby getting a feeling for the flow of the music. (Patterning). Her creativity is paying off for her — she is advancing rapidly. (And by the way, don’t think she is “copying” the person she is watching — not at all. It’s the same principle as watching Kyle Singler moving toward the basket, or watching Robinson Cano swing a bat — it just gets you in the right groove before you apply your own style to it.)

5. A doctor I have taught for years makes a idea file of things he has learned about piano playing over the years. He notes where in a given book or tape or video I discuss such and such a topic, and files that alphabetically. Then later when he needs to refer to that idea, he simply looks up the idea in his file, locates the video or cassette or book, and presto — he can review that idea or concept almost instantly. It’s like a card catalog in the library — makes finding things so much faster than flipping through endless books trying to find that idea you saw long ago.

With the advent of the computer a person could store and categorize ideas such as this very quickly.

Hope this gives you some ideas of your own!

What is stopping you from learning to play the piano? Do you think you are too old? Do you think your hands aren’t shaped well or your fingers are too fat (like mine!)? In my many years of teaching, I have heard all kinds of excuses, some that rival the classic “the dog ate my homework”.

What if you had no fingers or no hands or no arms? It didn’t stop this Chinese man — he plays with his toes! Click here to read his amazing story:

The man who plays the piano with his toes

Then watch the video:

Most people play the piano by reading music and playing what is on the written sheet music, and that’s fine. Others play by reading only the melody of the song, but also by using the chord symbols that appear above the written music.

Which should you do? I say BOTH. There are benefits to knowing how to do both, so don’t sacrifice one for the other. Why limit yourself to just one way? So keep learning to read music — the better you can read, the better off you will be in many situations. But also learn all you can about music theory and chords, as that will enable you to create a much bigger sound on the piano than you would get from just reading the written sheet music.

For more information on the subject, click on How To Play More Notes Without Reading More Notes.

Learning to read music is a process which involves learning to read the melody of a song as well as all the harmonic support (chords and intervals) and the rhythmic elements such as note values, time signatures, rest values, rhythm patterns and so on.
If you want a downloadable course on How To Read Music, please click on http://www.readmusicfast.com/

Learn to play Diminished 7th Chords - Doorways To Everywhere

Diminished 7th Chords - Doorways To Everywhere Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Music can be so complex and multi-faceted that it’s no wonder that the average person is lost when it comes to a basic understanding of what music is. After all, there are many different classes of classical music alone - from baroque to romantic, from Bach to Bernstein, and everthing in between. Then in jazz there is ragtime, blues, bop, west coast, Kansas City, dixieland — so many different styles all under the broad heading of “jazz”. And who can count the different styles in the world of “popular” music — from rock to country to folk to new age to….on and on.

But no matter what style or genre, all of music can be boiled down to just 3 basic elements: melody (the tune), rhythm, and harmony. If I play melody alone without any rhythm, you probably would not recognize it as a tune — you would think of it as just a meaningless succession of notes. But when I marry it to rhythm, then it becomes recognizeable. And when I add the third element of harmony, then we have “music” as we know and love it.

Watch this 5-minute video on how to learn music from a birdseye view:

One of the most useful fillers for piano playing is the 2-1 breakup. It can be used in countless situations and is very easy to do. All you do is take any 3-note chord and play the top 2 notes and then the bottom note by itself. Then invert the chord up or down and do the same until the time alloted is used up. Watch the short video below and you will quickly understand:

Sometimes it is better to hire an outside teacher even if you are capable of teaching your kids, but not always. The video below was sent to me by a lady who has learned some things from me and passed them along to her kids. Her daughter is the singer, and her sons are playing the keyboard and organ. So here is some proof that it indeed can be done, even if the children don’t particularly enjoy it at the time — they will later when they can play and sing like this!

There are so many different chords of different kinds and flavors that it’s easy to get lost and think that chords are so complex one could never begin to understand them. In this video we take a look at the various kinds of piano chords and add them up. Can you guess how many there are?

For more information on chords and chord types, please go to http://www.playpiano.com/pianocoursesgalore.htm

Even beginners can have fun on the piano playing simple jazz sounds using just 3 chords and a little bit of rhythm. Watch this short video to see how to make a simple jazz waltz out of 3 basic chords — the material from which the blues are made:

As you probably know, every major scale has a “kissing cousin” — a minor scale that is related to it’s major scale. To locate the starting point of a minor scale, find the 6th degree of any major scale and that becomes the root (the starting note) of it’s relative minor scale.

For example, in the F major scale the 6th degree of that scale is D, so D becomes the starting point of the relative minor scale to the scale of F, which of course is D minor.

Watch this short video and I think it will become clear to you:

For more information on scales, take a look at All About Scales & How To Use Them!