How To Play Piano With More Than Just Your Fingers!

It is a sad but true fact that most people who learn how to play piano use only their eyes and their fingers to play. That was true of me from the time I was 6 until I was an early teenager – probably about 14. I took piano lessons and learned to read music, but if I didn’t have printed music in front of me I had no clue what to do. In other words, I thought music was produced through my fingers.

We have to use our fingers, of course, and we need to learn to read music. But those two things alone usually result in a mindless, mechanical piano player – it certainly did in my case.

Everything changed though when I was a freshman in high school. I had the opportunity to play in my schools’ combo. The senior piano player had just graduated and the 5-piece group needed a pianist right away. I was the only person in sight who played decent piano, so they reluctantly accepted me as part of the group.

I was excited, of course, but scared because the group didn’t play from written music – they played from lead sheets – just the tune of the song and the chord symbols. So I had to learn chords in a hurry.

That turned out to be the turning point of my piano-playplaying life because once I began to learn chords I started to see and understand that music was made out of chords – broken chords, block chords, chord fragments and so on. And I had to develop my ear, too, to keep up with the leaders of the group who could improvise – make up a new melody as they went along.

Watch this short video as I share the importance of playing music with more than just your fingers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Musical_Arts
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Click on the picture below:

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And for a great course in singing: