- Many, many adults today learned to play the piano when they were young, but gave it up at some point. Although some of these people don’t miss it, there are others that secretly desire to play piano again.

Some have no interest, but many have a hidden goal to someday start playing the piano again. And when they do start taking up lessons again, they’d prefer it to be with a modern teacher who knows the difference between Bach and the Beatles. Also, it’s difficult to add regular lessons to their schedules which are already full.

How do you do this, then?

There are two linked circumstances present in today’s world that give adults a new chance to learn to play piano in a way that was never possible before. Today, we have the Internet, a continually growing treasure trove of information. Until around year 2000, aspiring pianists usually took lessons from teachers who were of practical distance from their residences. That’s no longer the case. Many piano teachers even give online lessons using the cyber world. There are also DVDs and CDs that have been produced to assist the learner during all stages of piano playing, from the beginner to the advanced. Also, they are simple to find. Searching for such phrases as “piano lessons for adults” or “piano playing for adults” on a site such as Google will bring forth many possibilities for those looking to learn. (Give it a try and find out for yourself)

The other step has always been around, but often hasn’t been described well enough for people to understand. To put it simply, there are three ways to learn how to play the piano, and adults may choose to use one, two, or all three in any combination, and will learn far better than if they used only one method.

The three ways are:
First) Reading music from the score which is printed. The majority of piano lessons require the ability to read sheet music and make your fingers do what your mind tells them to do. The customary way to teach piano was with repeated technical exercises and drills, and reading music pieces starting from the very simplest piece engaging only the thumbs, gradually working one’s way up to complex classical works like the “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven or the challenging “Prelude in C# minor” by Rachmaninoff. You can find an online instructor to teach you how to read musical scores. Some search terms you can try to find these people include “learn to read music” and “classical piano lessons online.”

Second) Playing something by only hearing it first. Not many people could play the piano entirely through auditory perception and these people no longer need piano lessons because they can play any piece of any style they want. Playing by ear can be taught to some extent, but anyone who thinks they can end up playing like Ray Charles is kidding himself or herself. But in reality, most people can acquire the skills of recognizing a tune by ear, and by adding a couple of chords to the melody, can have a lot of fun entertaining their family and friends.

Third) Using chord symbols to play with. “Fake books” are popular with professional pianists, especially those who specialize in jazz. Fake books are song collections in a format known as “lead sheet”, meaning that the melody is written in addition to the chord symbols needed to harmonize with the melody. This method requires merely learning some simple chords found in the songs you intend to learn; and reading the melody in the treble clef, which is considerably easier than learning to read dense clusters of musical notes in both clefs.

Most people have no idea that this kind of playing exists, or if they do, they mistakenly believe it is only for the professionals. Not true. The process is simple and will produce results fairly quickly. You might be amazing your friends in weeks instead of years with these quick results.

Any of these ways will work and are available online. Incorporating aspects of all three methods brings the best results; the combination of reading sheet music, playing by ear, and learning chords and their proper progression can help a person learn the most efficiently.

It doesn’t matter which method you pick, just pick one and start. You’ll find its great fun and boosts your self confidence.

The ability to play blues piano is usually not expected of beginning pianists. There are reasons why most beginning pianists start out playing old songs written by classical composers from centuries past. Many songs written for the piano by such composers as Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky were originally intended as pieces to be used for lessons. Plus, the conventions of classical music lead to chord structures, harmonies, and melodies that were comparatively straight-forward, perfect for students who were not musical experts.

Attempting to play blues piano presents new challenges for pianists. Many non-musicians don’t realize the technical difficulty of blues and jazz music, but in fact, to be an accomplished musician in one of these genres requires years and years of intense training and practice. Some would even say that these musical genres are actually more complicated than pre-20th century musical forms, which would mean that blues and jazz musicians are, in general, the most accomplished and versatile musicians out there.

So, as you can guess, the decision to take the plunge into playing blues piano should not be made lightly. In order to have a true understanding of blues, its scales, harmonies, and rhythms, one needs to have at least a basic understanding of more traditional musical forms. Blues isn’t a parallel form of music to Classical and other traditional genres; no, it’s an augmentation of traditional music. Just like jazz, blues actually complicates traditional music. Thus, unless you have a natural feel for the blues, your study of blues piano requires at least a solid bedrock of musical knowledge.

I presume that you already know, at the very least, about the traditional major scale. For example, in order to understand and play the C blues scale, you must know the C Major scale.

If you have that knowledge, then it’s pretty simple. The blues scale simply takes the major scale and adds three extra notes. That’s it. The three extra notes are a flatted third, a flatted fifth, and a flatted seventh. Thus, the C blues scale has all of the same notes as the C Major scale — that is, C D E F G A B — with the three additional notes being E flat (or D sharp), G flat (or F sharp) and B flat (or A sharp).

That’s right, if you look closely at the blues scale, you’ll find that there are only two notes that are not included. In the C blues scale, only C sharp and G sharp are not played.

If you want to play blues piano, learning the blues scale is your first step. Even doing nothing more than playing the scale, you’ll hear a “bluesy-ness” to the scale, and if you are a fan of blues, it will sound great to your ears.

Once you can do this, you are ready to play blues piano. The next step is to try improvising. Come up with a chord progression. C F G C is a standard blues chord progression, except — and here is another important point — it is fairly standard in blues music to turn nearly every chord into a seventh chord. So, this progression, in blues form, would be C7 F7 G7 C7. Of course, with the new notes added in, you must remember that, in most cases, these should be played as minor 7th chords. Thus, both the C7 and F7 chords use notes that are not in the traditional C Major scale.

Once you have your chord progression down, improvising is easy. Come up with a simple, bluesy melody, and go from there. Just remember that in order for the music to have that special blues quality, you need to utilize those extra three notes that are not in the traditional scale. Those are the notes that give blues its edge.

When learning how to play piano, free opportunities present themselves all over the Internet. Most notably, many websites offer quick step-by-step lessons, as well as free online sheet music, which beginning pianists can use to learn how to play piano at no cost. Obviously, like any free service, these should be approached with caution, and many should be taken with a grain of salt.

After all, they are free for a reason. In spite of everything the Internet has to offer, most of the best ways to learn piano still involve paying money to a highly qualified professional instructor of some kind.

Whether you are learning how to play piano using free lessons, or you are using a pay service, any high-quality learning process begins with the fundamentals. It is one thing to show a few diagrams and to instruct the beginning pianist where to put her fingers; it is quite another thing to instill in the pianist’s mind a real understanding of the structures, systems, and theories that every great piano player must have internalized.

Thus, when learning how to play piano, free or through a pay service, make sure that the instructions use real musical terms, rather than downgraded proxy terms. That is, for example, an instruction shouldn’t refer to notes on the piano as numbers or as fingers; instead, the instruction should use the actual names of the notes — C, D, B flat, G sharp, and so on.

In other words, a beginning pianist wants to internalize the fundamentals of music as early as possible. If you feel like your ability to play music is proceeding faster than your actual knowledge of piano and music, then there is something wrong with your instruction. Both the skills and the knowledge should go hand in hand.

When starting out, the budding pianist can expect to be assigned a lot of repetitive tasks. She will have to play a lot of scales, arpeggios, and simple songs that are designed to help piano students master the complex methods of keyboard fingering. This is normal, and in fact, it is necessary. Any piano lesson program that doesn’t involve a lot of repetitive tasks is probably not the best way to learn how to play piano. Free lesson plans are often guilty of this.

This repetition is what leads a lot of beginning pianists to give up very early, but for the more persistent, things do get better. After a while, when you have internalized the fingering techniques that every pianist must master, songs will grow more complex, and then the repetition becomes a joy. For pianists who are a little further along in the learning process, there is nothing more pleasurable than opening a book to a seemingly incomprehensible notation and working at it until it becomes a beautiful piece of music.

For now, though, most of the songs played by beginners are relatively simple and straightforward, not involving a lot of sharps or flats, and not requiring the pianist to move her hands around a lot. In fact, most songs will be in the easiest key — C major — and won’t deviate from standard hand positions.

Of course, this will all change when you begin to learn about more complex chords, more difficult keys, and more convoluted melodic structures. Once the basics are learned, it won’t take long before these fun elements come into play.

In short, what I have been driving at is that starting to learn the piano rarely offers instant gratification. When learning how to play the piano, free services tend to offer unrealistic, quick goals. In reality, learning piano is a gradual process that involves lots of practice, lots of repetition, and a strong commitment on the part of the pianist.