Being ready to learn to play the piano obviously means having a piano keyboard of some sort, so for the purpose of this article we will assume you have access to a piano, organ or keyboard. Before you start to play the piano properly, you need to learn a few basics, just a bit of theory, nothing too difficult, in fact very easy to pick up, but extremely essential.
What are the basics?
The basics are in fact very simple and include
The Staff
Notes Names On A Keyboard And Note Names On The Staff
Note Values
Bars And Bar Lines
The Treble Clef
Time Signatures
If you learn these basics first, you have a better chance of succeeding with your piano playing. They are important because every time you play a piece of music whether as a learner or a professional player you will use every thing that is on the above list. Every time you pick up a piece of music, you will see the staff and on that, you will see musical notes and also a treble clef. You will see bars and bar lines, which are part of the staff and you will see a time signature, which will tell you how many beats there are in each bar. All these things interact with each other and that's why it's important to learn these first.
How long will I take to learn the basics?
Surprisingly it won't take very long at all to learn the basics. They are very easy to learn. In fact, you could learn all these basics in one day, but, would you remember them. My pupils generally have the whole thing done, memorized in about a month, and once you have learned it, you've got it for life. The best way to approach learning these items is to commit yourself to about half an hour per day. This gives you a chance to learn and memorize what you need. To be on the safe side, give yourself between one and three months to completely learn and memorize the basics listed above. When you do actually start to play your first piece of music you can start with confidence and you can concentrate on different aspects of learning music such as left hand chords, different timing values and learning music phrases, which is what learning to read music is all about.
So before diving in head first in to a complex piano learning course, learn the basics. |
