Learn to play piano or MIDI keyboard

By telleropnul, August 10, 2019

The easiest and most fun way to start learning to play I find is to play along using chords.

Chords

Practice playing Major and Minor Chords using your thumb, middle finger and little finger. I used to bend my index finger and ring finger into the palm of my hand so they are out of the way when I first started practicing playing chords. When you get better you can probably loosely leave them in their normal position.

C, F, G, Dmin, Amin are all played with white keys.

The difference between major and minor chords is that for minor chords the middle note is half a note lower. This gives minor chords a more sad, melancholic sound. Practice playing the major chord first, followed by the minor cord next. You should only have to adjust your middle finger.

This explains why Cmin, Fmin, Gmin are played white-black-white keys.

D, E, A, Cmin, Fmin, Gmin are all played white-black-white keys.

Tip: Click on the Overview tab in Chordify to see the entire grid:

From Chords to Melody

These piano pattern excercises bring a bit of melody to your chords:

Let’s start looking at playing melodies next.

Scales

Melodies use music scales. Music scales are like singing Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do. To the ear music scales sound like climbing a ladder of notes ascending in pitch. From a technical perspective however the ‘step distance’ between these notes is not the same. The most common formula is Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole, Half. These scales are called major scales. The most well known major scale starts at ‘C’ and is the C major scale.

Major scales

Formula: Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole, Half
Fingering: Thumb = 1, LH = Left Hand, RH = Right Hand

Starting on a different note using the same step formula introduces sharps [1-5]:

Starting on a different note using the same step formula introduces flats [1-4]:

So if the major scales contain all possible combinations of sharps and flats for any key signature, what do minor scales do?

Minor scales

https://www.pianoscales.org/minor.html

Basically, by changing the “Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole, Half” formula, we can ‘invent’ three more flavours of music scales; natural minor, harmonic minor and melodic minor.

Whomever came up with minor scales, thank you for the added complexity. Aaarghh….too much….let’s skip this for now and pretend all music uses “Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole, Half” scales only.

Reading music score

Now that we know -at least our major- scales (and the correct finger positions!), we can instantly tell what piano keys are used in music score by looking at the key signature:

Knowing which piano keys are used in a music score helps with the correct finger placement.

Next, we need to practice reading the actual notes in the music score:

Rather than remembering everything, we remember only a few and fill in the blanks:

After a while you get the hang of it. If you can read Treble cleff notes already, the Bass cleff is basically like adding +2. So what looks like an “A” on the Bass cleff is in fact a “C”. Not sure if this helps, but it helped me.

Synthesia

If you are not yet ready to read notes, but you would like to practice playing melodies and playing with both hands, I can strongly recommend Synthesia. Just find some songs for piano in MIDI format and use Synthesia to display the notes:

MIDI keyboard

My setup is as follows:

Alesis V61 keyboard
Freepiano.
VST instruments:
- Xpand!2
- Pianoteq 6
- EZkeys
- Togu Audio Line – TAL-U-NO-LX 3.2.2
- Blue
- Dune 3

ASX	18 Oct 24 314k (20k) → 333k	Z411
Getz	09 Nov 23 175k (20k) → 195k	Z79A
D22	11 Feb 24 144k (7k) → 151k	Z89A
800XCX	03 Nov 24 20k (10k) → 30k	KN204