The very best way to learn to play piano is a composite of reading music and  using chords.

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAYjL07rSKA&feature=youtu.be

Good morning. This is Duane and today I’d like to take up a question that a lot of people have asked me over the years. That is, what is the very best way to learn to play piano. As you probably know, there is two basic tracks that you can take. Visualize 2 train tracks, 1 track over here, 1 track over here. The track to the left is the traditional way where you take piano lessons and you learn scales and sometimes you learn chords and so on. That’s the traditional way. The other track is via your ear or chords, or chord playing. The very best way to learn piano is to combine the 2 if you possibly can.

It’s so nice to be able to read music to some degree. Let me just give you and example here. Say that you’ve taken piano lessons and you want to be able to play as written. It’s awfully nice to be able to look at the music and so on. It’s nice to be able to play songs as they’re written because there’s lots of cases to do that. Same way in pop music. It’s nice play the songs as they’re written. An example here is Over the Rainbow. As written, it’s like this. That’s awfully nice to be able to do that, but if you master the second track and master chords, combining your ear with chords, instead of being limited to just the notes on the sheet you can add things to it. For example, I don’t know if you can see it from there, but above most printed sheet music there are chord symbols. That says E flat and that little symbol is the guitar symbol for e flat and that’s C minor seventh.

Piano players don’t use the guitar symbols unless they’re a guitar player and know how to read it. All you need to know is that e flat is in force for 2 beats here and c minor is in force for 2 beats and then g minor and so on. Instead of playing it like this … Instead of doing that, if you know chords and you can play the e flat chord that way, the c minor chord that way. You ‘re not limited to just the notes on the page. There’s another plus too to knowing chords and that is that you can play them out of fake books. A fake book is a book such as this has a hundred tunes, but there’s fake books that have like a thousand or more. All it has is, if you can see it, this is the song, Ain’t she sweet. All it has is the melody, a line, and the chord symbols. If you know chords and can read a little bit then you can do this.

This is the only thing that’s written, but because I know chords and so on, I can add those chords there and then I learn some techniques such as to break up chords … And so on. There’s 2 tracks and the best way to go is to learn to read music and to play, to learn chords, to play it that way. Now that’s not possible for everybody so if you’re an adult and you don’t have time to learn how to read music and take lessons and so on, then you should probably take the chord track so you can get playing faster that way. However if it’s possible to take a few lessons and learn how to read music too, that’s a real bonus because those 2 combine together and they’re a much more powerful track than either one alone.

I have a course called the crash course in exciting piano playing which covers both sight reading and chords and music theory and all that so that the tracks are combined. That’s pretty rare. You don’t find that very much. I’ll put the link to that down below the video here just in case you want to check it out. http://www.pianolessonsbyvideo.com In any case that’s my advice to take the chord track if you’re an adult and don’t have time to take lessons. If you’re a child though, or if you have children, I would definitely have them learn to read music and then … I would insist too that the teacher teaches them chords along with reading music because then they won’t be limited to just playing it as written. That Is The Very Best Way To Learn To Play Piano.

Okay, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed that and if you do come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for our entire video series if you will. Hope to see you there. Bye bye for now.

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAYjL07rSKA&feature=youtu.be

For the very best way to learn piano with a 2-track system please go to:  http://www.pianolessonsbyvideo.com

***For lots more good stuff on piano playing come on over to my website at https://www.playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips – “Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions!”

Here’s a great little book on chords and chord progressions on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Chords-Chord-Progressions-Exciting-ebook/dp/B0076OUGDE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404158669&sr=1-1&keywords=piano+chords+duane+shinn

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