From uncovering the secrets of optimal posture and finger positioning to exploring the art of chord learning and mastering the sustain pedal, this video covers the essentials that every aspiring pianist must focus on.
I won’t give away too much here because the true magic lies in watching the video and experiencing the transformative power of these techniques firsthand!
So, are you ready to discover the secrets to rapid piano learning? Grab your headphones, set aside some time, and immerse yourself in this captivating tutorial. The journey starts here, and I can’t wait to see you on the other side of extraordinary musical growth.
📺 CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO 📺
Don’t delay, because the sooner you dive in, the sooner you’ll witness the incredible impact these techniques will have on your piano playing.
Wishing you a harmonious and transformative piano journey!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
Are you just now learning the piano, but you feel like you’re going way too slow? This video is perfect for you. This is going to help you find five techniques that are so important for beginners to focus on for them to be able to learn the piano fast. And if you like more videos on how to go from zero to playing your favorite songs in months, not years, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell because I post a video every single week.
I’ve taught piano for over a decade. I have a music degree and have been playing piano for years.
Wow.
I have a music school with hundreds of students and an online piano program. And over the years, I’ve learned exactly what things that beginners need to focus on for them to be able to make a very productive learning and be able to play their favorite songs much faster.
Now you’re probably watching a lot of YouTube videos, which is great, obviously, but if you’d like a real roadmap on exactly the order of things to take in order to learn the piano fast, I highly recommend watching my free training. So definitely go find that in the link in the description.
All right, let’s get started. Technique number one is actually sitting up straight, having curved fingers and just sitting correctly at the piano. I know I sound like the grandma next door, but it’s just so true. And if you don’t focus on it from the very beginning, you’re going to just struggle the entire time. So watch me as I play the piano with bad posture. What’s going to happen is you’re not going to have any arm weight to play the chords very well and you’re going to do something like this.
If you sit up straight. You need to use your arm weight to play the chords really well. This is good technique. So watch as I play a chord now sitting up straight using my arm. I tell my students to think of their fingers as a cookie cutter, and the arm is all the weights just like making cookies. That’s how you’re going to play your chords. So this is why posture is so important because you need that arm weight to play good clean chords. So to sit correctly at the piano, stretch your arms straight and put your knuckles at the very end of your keys. That’s how far away you should be from the piano. And then you want to sit on the front half of the bench, sit up straight and feet flat on the floor. Don’t skip this step.
Moving on to technique number two, we’ve got chords. If you’re just starting out, sheet music is going to be really overwhelming and most piano teachers are going to have you starting off with Mary Had a Little Lamb, Ode to Joy, and things like this. So I tell my students to focus on chords first because they can do things like go to ultimateguitar.com and find one of their favorite songs and be able to play it immediately. This is so important. I think a lot of piano teachers just focus on what is the right thing to do in their mind and kind of teach them as if they’re children. But in my opinion, it’s also really important to keep people engaged in their learning. And if they’re really bored, they’re going to quit. Especially adult students, they are starting later in life, so they don’t want to be playing children’s music for years. Start with chords first.
And if you have no idea what chords are, I recommend going to my playlist called Chords, Chords, Chords. You’re going to learn all about chords. I have so many good videos about it. But for a quick overview, chords are basically when you’re playing multiple notes at the same time. And if you learn all about chords, you’re going to be able to play your favorite songs in a snap. So definitely go to ultimateguitar.com or another website that has chords for your favorite songs, and you can play your favorite songs like immediately. So for example, a lot of people really like the song Fix You by Cold Play, so I’m going to play that with just chord, and so forth.
Technique number three is often very ignored, and a lot of piano teachers have students learn the sustained pedal in year two, but I don’t recommend this. Yes, learning the sustained pedal at first can be really challenging because you’re playing with your hands and your feet at the same time, which can be overwhelming. But I simplify it and I just say this, students should play the chord first, put the pedal down. And when they’re going to the next chord, they’re going to play the chord first, lift the pedal. Chord first, lift the pedal. Chord first, lift the pedal. I have a whole video about this, so if what I just said was blowing your mind, watch my sustained pedal video right here. It is so important. If you could just play chords and the sustained pedal well, you could do so many amazing things on the piano seriously, you would sound really good.
She’s really good.
Before we continue to the rest of the techniques, let me know why do you want to learn the piano in the first place. Some people have a certain song they want to play for their wedding, they want to play for their family, they just want a personal outlet. What is your reason? Let me know in the comments.
Next up, technique number four is reading music using what we call intervals. Intervals are the distance between two notes. So what I have my students do is learn chords first, I have them learn how to improvise on those chords and kind of jazz up their songs. And after that, I then get them into reading music and I do this again because that is a lot more of an engaging way to start the piano. And that way you’re never playing songs you hate, you’re always playing songs you enjoy the entire time.
So what are intervals? I’m going to show you an example with a song. Now, I’m only going to play the right hand of this song. Let me show you how it works. So the first note is going to be G, and the next note is going to be D. This is an interval of a fifth. And if you memorize intervals, you’ll know that fifths go from a line note to not the next line note, but the one after that. And then I can see if I’m reading using intervals, I’m going a fifth down back to G. The next note, I would call that a step, it’s going from a line to a space. So that means it is going from G to A. It’s doing it again to B and to C. Those were all what we call steps.
So a way to simplify it is intervals are a series of steps, notes that are right next to each other, and skips. You can find ways to basically memorize how those look on the staff, and it’s a much faster way of reading music. If you would like to learn more about that, I would watch this video. A lot of people use Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE on the staff, which I do recommend doing. But when you’re reading music itself, it’s really helpful to think of it in intervals as well. So use both of those things and you’re going to be a superhero with reading music.
All right, technique number five is learn to read music with lead sheets. So I’m going to show you another example of what this looks like. Here is a lead sheet. On the top of the staff, we’ll see the cord up here, and the right hand just plays the melody. We don’t have a left-hand staff at all. So basically, your right hand plays the melody and your left hand plays the chord. This is like the cliff notes of reading music. But honestly, a lot of pop pianists, like the ones you see at piano bars and things like that, they’re actually playing from lead sheets. So don’t feel like you’re not becoming a real musician if you play with lead sheets. Actually, I would say that you are becoming a real musician if you’re playing with lead sheets because if you just read every single note, you’re kind of being a-
Sheet music robot.
But if you play with lead sheets, you can be really creative and kind of make the song your own. So here’s an example of a lead sheet for Hey, Jude, of Let It Be. This is an example of me playing it with just chords in my left hand, melody in my right hand. So again, I just played melody in my right hand and the chords in my left hand, but you can really expand upon that and improvise a little bit. I didn’t do that in my example, but that is something that I do teach in my online piano program called The Piano Accelerator.
Now, if all of this sounds really cool but you feel a little bit overwhelmed on where to begin or what to really do, again I highly recommend taking my free training that shows you the exact roadmap that I use with my students when I take them from zero to playing their favorite songs in just a few months. The link is in the description below. And be sure to subscribe and hit the bell if you’d like more videos just like this where I teach students how to learn the piano fast, and I will see you next time.
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