Piano for Beginners: Learning the Piano by Playing Songs

One of the reasons that I chose RocketPiano as my online piano for beginners course is that they teach you to play the piano by teaching you to play songs. In fact, it's a motto on their sales page. "The best way to learn piano," they write, "is by playing songs. And in two classes I can play a total of two -- count 'em, two! -- songs. I wrote last time that I was playing Mary Had a Little Lamb before the first lesson was over. Now I can also play Merrily We Roll Along.

Not quite a Beethoven piano sonata. Nor are these songs in the Top 40. But still. They are songs I couldn't play less than a week ago.

And I am not ashamed to say that I am quite impressed with myself for being such a sterling student of piano for beginners.

As I wrote in a previous post, I decided to learn to play the piano using the RocketPiano online course. They offer a six-lesson free trial and I have started that. In fact, I have now had two whole lessons.

In the second lesson, the instruction about reading music has been expanded. They presented dynamic marks and time signatures and advanced reading the treble clef and bass clef. Frankly, the presentation in the lesson was pretty predictable. A string of quarter notes sweeping up the staff and, under each note, the letter identifying it. Then another image lining the keyboard up with the notes on the staffs.

Where RocketPiano excels in teaching you to read music, though, is with the interactive game Jayde Musica. This is a download that is given to you free during the first lesson. Snatches of staffs with one or two notes on them move across the screen. You need to identify the notes as they pass. If you go too slowly you'll get a message box suggesting that you speed up. That happened to me once. Or more than once. You can choose to play with the treble clef, the bass clef or both at once. My first impression was that it was fun. But now I like it because it is an excellent learning tool. Instead of letting your eyes glaze over as you try to memorize the notes in a static image on a page, the game keeps you alert and reacting swiftly. It isolates the notes so that you can pinpoint what they look like in relation to the staff and learn them faster. It makes learning to read music much easier and it makes the process of learning piano for beginners that much more pleasant.

In addition to playing Merrily We Roll Along (which, ahem, yes, I can play), there were a couple of exercises to familiarize you with hand placement on the keyboard and further educate you in identifying the keys on the piano. And, in keeping with the theme of learning to play songs, these exercises were in the form of tunes. I didn't recognize them, so maybe they were written as exercises. But they weren't scales. They were melodies. I practiced them before I listened to the MP3 snippet that demonstrates a real pianist playing them and I got the tunes right. More or less.

So this piano for beginners jazz is great. You should hear me play. Or maybe you shouldn't. But I'm have a great time so far. You should do it, too.

RocketPiano will be sending me the third lesson by email in another couple of days. After I take that lesson, I'll be blogging more. See you then.