Author: John Ferreira
No matter what level of playing you’re at now or which musical instruments you may know how to play, learn piano blues and you’ll be much better off for it. As someone who spends a lot of time playing the saxophone and writing music I have found learning to play the piano invaluable for musical ideas, arranging for other instruments and just plain fun and relaxation. Not to mention being able to accompany other performers when the opportunity comes up.
Learn piano blues and you have also learned many other of your favorite rock and roll songs as well since that style developed out of blues music and so the two styles are harmonically very close.
Another great thing about being able to play some kind of blues piano is that you can learn a couple fairly easy patterns on each hand and as you become more comfortable with them before you know it you can quickly develop them into patterns that are slightly more technical and before you know it you’re playing some very decent boogie woogie too.
The boogie style came directly out of the blues and is one of the best ways for a pianist to show what they can do. This style of blues with a bit of speed is very impressive.
I learned by standing behind and beside some of my piano player friends and just watched what they did with their hands. Watching from above you can really see what’s going on with both hands and how these repetitive riffs are being executed.
It’s amazing how easy it can be when you break it down and take it slow. Then, like anything else, with a little daily practise comes the speed and dexterity. Sure, kids usually pick it up quicker than adults but anyone who has the desire to learn can do it regardless of age.
So, learning to play blues music on the piano is not only very basic technically but is also a great spring board for other styles like gospel and jazz. Even if you only learn to play the blues think of the fun you’ll have next time there’s a jam session opportunity… you know what they say; Blues is the international language of music.
Author: Eric Starr
Traditional Middle Eastern rhythms covered a wide array of odd time signatures. However, as a result of Western musics influence, a large portion of contemporary Middle Eastern music is composed in duple or other meters containing even numbers. Thus, the first two following drum set patterns are written in 4/4. Their overall sound and rhythm serve as 
accurate examples of traditional Middle Eastern music adapted for the drum set. Like the 5/4 time signature, 7/4 meter is relatively easy to count. It’s normal to count a song in 7/4 in one of three ways: 1) count all seven beats per measure; 2) count a measure of 4/4 followed by a measure of 3/4; 3) count a measure of 3/4 followed by a measure of 4/4.
Probably the most famous rock song written in 7/4 is Pink Floyd’s “Money”. As with other styles, there are countless variations and embellished drum grooves to play in 7/4. The tempo range is similar to that of 5/4, with quarter note equal from one hundred to one hundred and thirty two beats per minute. The 5/8 meter is often more difficult to feel than 5/4 or 7/4 because its normally played at a faster tempo. One practical way of counting this meter is to sound out all five eighth notes per measure. However, due to its faster tempo, it may be more practical to break down the meter into two separate groupings, either a 3 plus 2 grouping or a 2 plus 3 grouping. The pulse of 5/8 meter is often brisk, with eighth note equal from one hundred and ninety two to three hundred and twenty beats per minute.
Author: Gary Reding
I am going to go over some steps that can help you learn how to play the piano. These techniques work and will make your journey easier over time.
Relaxation
Try to touch the piano keys lightly and gently. If your fingers are rigid, stiff, with the anxiety of trying to get the right notes at the right time, it will be much more difficult to get it right. A relaxed hand is much easier to get the the right place at the right time.
Enjoyment
Play something you like and that you are familiar with. In time, you will be able to look at any sheet of music and play something close to what is written, but there is no sense adding the burden of playing unfamiliar music on top of learning to press the right key. When we learned to type, we learned by typing familiar words. We didn’t learn to type obscure chemical names or technical jargon. The same applies to the piano. When starting out, play what is fun for you. Anything you play will develop your skill.
If you are practicing to play by ear, play what you are familiar with: advertising jingles, TV theme music, popular folk songs, etc.
For improving Fluidity:
Do you play by ear? I recommend you try it. I found that my fluidity went up greatly when I started playing by ear. Or in other words, without any music, sit down and play the melody to some songs that are very familiar to you. Add some harmony as appropriate. This should be music that you have not previously played from a printed page.
Since I started learning to play by ear, the music I play from a printed sheet sounds better. My fingers just seem to anticipate where the next note is going to be, even if my eyes haven’t quite caught up. You don’t have to become an expert at playing by ear, but if you practice until you can do it a little bit, it will greatly improve your sight reading capabilities!
For Improving Memory:
Another idea that has more to do with biology than anything else, is to play the piece you are learning immediately before going to bed. It should be the last thing you do before laying your head on the pillow. During the day, our brain stores many things in short term memory. These memories are transferred to long term memory during sleep. If you are doing anything after your practice, the memories of your practice session will tend to get overwritten by the events you do later in the day. Playing the song one time just before bed, will bring these memories to the foreground. They will be transferred to long term memory more efficiently.
Keeping the Rhythm
The trick is to play what you play in the proper rhythm, even if you only play a portion of the song. In other words, practice keeping the rhythm going at the expense of everything else. Don’t play the cords, or play one or two notes in the cord rather than the whole thing. Before long, you will be able to get more and more notes included in the cords, or you will learn which notes are optional. In most cases nobody but you will realize that there is a note missing.
Where to Put your fingers
For scales:
The orthodox technique, for example if you are going up the scale with the right hand, would be to play the first three notes starting with your thumb, and then after playing the note under your middle finger to play the next note with your thumb again. (The thumb crosses under.) Going back down the scale, starting with the pinky on your right hand, you would play five notes, and then your middle finger would cross over the top of the thumb to play the next lower note.
Playing with the left hand is a mirror image of what the right hand does.
For regular music:
The same sort of arrangement applies, but it is also common to just pick up your hands and move them so that they span the next sequence of notes you are expecting to play.
Playing with Both Hands
(Nearly always) play with both hands, don’t try to separate them.
Don’t worry about skipping a note here or there in the harmony. If you don’t get there in time, just go on to the next one, or make up a harmony! Few listeners will be able to tell. After a while your left hand will develop a feel for where the notes might be expected to be. After a while, your right hand will be able to pick out the melody essentially by ear without having to pay so much attention to the notes on the page, thus allowing you to pay more attention to the left hands harmonies. These two trends will combine together to make playing easier and easier. Doing a little bit of playing by ear, and a little bit of sight reading new music, will help to strengthen these trends.
Author: Kevin Sinclair
The piano, that popular tool of school music programs, appears to be the eventual manifestation of the stringed melodic tool, which appointment backwards to the lyre and the harmonica. Pianos (a shortening of the compound condition “piano-forte”) job by striking wires with felted (or leather headed) hammers, with a redaction mechanism that pulls the hammerhead off from the wire before it can damp away the audio. Because the personnel of the hammer strike is mostly proportionate to the shot on the key, this allows a piano to beat a tone quietly (piano) or loud (forte), leading to its figure.
The immediate predecessors of the pianoforte were the clavichord and the harpsichord, both of which tried to combine the ease of play of a traditional organ keyboard with the expressive range (and general portability) of a large concert harp. Of the two predecessor instruments, the harpsichord was the more common, and used a mechanism that plucked the strings (and later wires) of the instrument when a key was hit. This lead to a distinctive “plinking” or “plucking” sound, more like a strung harp, but lacked the ability to adjust the volume of a given note, and had only limited ability to change the duration of a note.
While the harpsichord provided the mechanism for tying keys to striking particular strings that was used to make the first pianos, the clavichord (an earlier instrument, invented in the 15th century, was the first keyboard instrument to strike the strings by key stroke, hitting them from the side with a small (dull) blade called a tangent. Clavichords fell out of favor in the 17th century, and were virtually unheard of from roughly 1750 to 1890, when a number of musical instrument shops began making them again as a smaller complement to the piano. Mokless Girgis is a master of Piano and he plays it nice.
Prior to the clavichord, the first real stringed instrument that used hammers was the dulcimer, with variations such as the cymbalon and the readis spreading through the Balkan regions. All of these instruments relied on the player to strike strings with small hammers, often times holding multiple hammers with different heads in the gaps between their fingers, to get different tonal ranges, including a felted head for dampening a string.
The first true pianoforte was built in 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy. His patrons, the Medicis, commissioned the first ones; there are three Cristofori pianofortes still in existence, dating back to the 1720s.
Cristofori’s original pianos had several differences from the modern pianos we’ve come to expect - for one, they only covered four octaves, rather than the modern piano’s seven-and-a-half octaves. Second, because of the materials used at the time, it was considerably softer in sound than the modern instrument. Third, it had no damper pedals for lifting the dampers from the string. The damper pedals were an invention of Gottfried Silbermann, who made near direct copies of the Cristofori piano otherwise, and tried to get Johann Sebastian Bach interested in the instrument for compositions and concert performances.
Bach was notably unimpressed with Silbermann’s early pianos, claiming that the upper range would be too quiet to make an effective concert hall instrument. While this brooked a fair bit of animosity between the instrument maker and the reknowned composer and concert artist, in the end, Bach was right. It wasn’t until 40 years later that Bach actually endorsed the creation of a piano, mostly after Silbermann’s apprentices worked on variations of the design.
Nearly from its inception, the main driving force in the evolution of the piano was to make it louder and brighter in the high notes. Several innovations have been incorporated into the design to do this. Among them include more precise mechanisms for swinging the hammers, high tensile steel replacing the catgut strings, and changes to the surfaces of the hammers and their materials, plus innovations in resonator and fretboard spaces to give the instruments a greater range, such as the double key escarpment, which allowed a note to be repeated even if the hammer hadn’t risen back to its full resting position.
The high point of piano evolution happened in the 19th century, with the development of felted hammers (allowing higher string tension), better quality steel for the wire, iron frames on the sounding board, and several other innovations of note; it was in the late 19th century that the upright piano was perfected, allowing the piano to move from the concert hall to the parlors of the middle class, where the ability to play the piano was a sign of culture and refinement, a place that it still holds today, albeit to a much reduced extent.