You're Never Too Old to Take Beginner Piano Lessons

You've probably heard the old saying that goes: "You are only as old as you feel." If you feel it is too late for you to consider to learn to play the piano, you are probably wrong.

Music has long been associated with the field of mathematics in the way it builds neuron connections in the brain and challenges your mind to remain youthful and flexible. Children who are good at one are often considered to be at an advantage with the other. So, any age might actually be appropriate to begin such an undertaking.

Perhaps you feel that it takes many years to really excel in playing the piano and that you are in the twilight of your life today, with insufficient time remaining to have it make sense. This is simply not the case either.

Sure, it might be unrealistic to imagine you playing with a famous orchestra, but this does not mean that you cannot learn to play simple pieces that you love. Pop, blues, and even classical music can be learned relatively easily and the playing of these types of music has the potential to bring great joy into your life.

For mef, the MOST enjoyable type of music is not written down and has never existed before I play it. I'm talking, of course, about improvisation, or impromptu composition. This is possible in many genres of music, including classical, albeit rare. Beethoven did this at the advanced age of only sixteen on the harpsichord, to the amazement of everyone within earshot.

The most common genre for improvisation is jazz music, which has evolved over the last eighty or so years to the point that you are freely allowed to express yourself in almost every way imaginable. As long as the listener is offered an occasional glimpse of the structure of the background chord and time frames, you are OK. This is not to be understood as "anything goes" although that is nearly the case.Learning to play piano should begin with a working knowledge of the chord progressions of the piece of music you are playing, and the associated scales of those chords. The beginner student should first adhere strongly to the notes in the appropriate scales while learning the craft of interesting melodic and harmonic 'riffs'. More advanced players eventually learn to drift away from the designated scales in an artful and creative manner, before coming back to the original keys. This is known as 'going outside' of the framework of the keys and when done properly, is a magical thing, indeed. Don't ignore another really important aspect of improvising: syncopation. The best players almost NEVER play notes on the actual beat.

Start with beginnerpianolessons and go from there.

Famous Pianist Dies At 94

Earl Wild, a world-renowned classical pianist and leader of the Romantic revival, died at his home in Palm Springs at age 94 of heart failure

Wild performed for six presidents, including John F. Kennedy at his 1961 inauguration. He served as the musical director of the Palm Springs Desert Museum -- now the Palm Springs Art Museum -- during the 1970s. In 1976, he organized the Palm Springs Desert Museum Piano Festival to showcase new international piano talent.

Wild was born on Nov. 26, 1915, in Pittsburgh, and began taking piano lessons when he was 4 years old. When he was 12, he studied under a protege Franz Liszt, who helped create the Romantic movement in music. Wild began giving radio recitals in Pittsburgh when he was 12 and began playing with the Pittsburgh Symphony when he was 14.

In 1937, Wild joined the NBC network as a staff pianist, and in 1939 he became the first pianist to give a recital on television. After he left the Navy in 1944, Wild became a staff pianist, conductor and composer at ABC, a position he held until 1968.

In the following years, Wild toured and recorded prolifically. Many of his recordings are available on his own imprint, Ivory Classics. He also taught at the Eastman School of Music, Penn State University, Ohio State University, Carnegie Mellon, the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School.

Wild's last performance was at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on Feb. 5, 2008, when he was awarded the President's Merit Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Wild was an inspiration for millions of students of easy beginner piano lessons and will be missed by scores of fans.

Seven Tips To Help Find the Best Beginner Piano Lessons

Leaning to play piano can be one of the most satisfying things one can do in life. Following are seven tips to help you find a great source of piano lessons.

1. Contact your local elementary school and ask if they have a qualified music teacher who offers private instruction. Most music teachers are qualified to play/teach numerous band and orchestral instruments such as piano.

2. Locate your Local Musicians Union to search for a qualified teacher--doing a search on Google for your local union is the easiest way to contact them. Although being a professional musician doesn't immediately guarantee that you are a patient, understanding teacher, experience and mastery of many types of musical idioms, along with the demand for superb "sight reading" gives them an edge. At the very least, this will be a great source for a reference.

3. If you live in or near a college town that has a school which offers a professional music curriculum, there are typically scores of advanced students who will offer their services to teach piano. And, this is often the least costly source of private lessons. Alternatively, the department heads will usually be a good source for this information--you might even find a professor who will offer lessons in his/her spare time.

4. Look on Craigslist. There are frequently ads by qualified teachers in your area offering to teach piano. Alternatively, you could place a 'want ad' for piano instruction--you are likely to be overwhelmed by the responses, but you will at least have a place to start.

5. Search in the phone book for piano tuners. Piano tuners are frequently "keyed-in" to the local music scene and can be a terrific source of information. Many are musicians and teachers just tuning pianos to earn spare cash.

6. Visit your closest source of retail piano sales. As with tuners, stores that sell pianos are usually knowledgeable about local teachers. You might even find a deal to buy or lease a piano in the bargain.

7. Google has a pretty new feature called "local search" which uses your computer's AP address to furnish you with local vendors and sources of searched items. Include your town and state to assist Google in focusing on your particular neck of the woods.

Sighning-up for private lessons is considered the best way to learn piano by most people because teaching it requires such a vast set of skills. Reading music, learning different keys and time signatures, getting used to two hand playing and fingering, setting-up good practicing patterns, and just finding time to devote to improving over time can be a challenge, but very rewarding when mastered.

There are many piano instruction books as well as online courses for those who are not sure if they have the skills, funds, or commitment for an undertaking like learning the piano. Some are quite good, others less so. We like a system of videos, sound files and music learning game which goes under the name of Rocket Piano. Click Here to learn more about it.

Consider a quality downloadable beginner piano lessons system as an inexpensive alternative to private lessons. Go to http://www.squidoo.com/easybeginnerpianolessons for more information.

Are Beginner Piano Lessons Right For You? - Maybe You Were Meant to Play Sax Or Guitar

Many people have learned to play musical instruments, but the majority have concentrated on only one. Which one you choose depends on many factors, but you should know some things about each one before you jump in with both feet.

Have you ever thought about taking easy beginner piano lessons, or even beginner lessons for another instrument?

Because learning any instrument is like learning a second language, you need to decide if you want to play popular music, classical, jazz, or even new age music and see if the instrument fits in with the genre. Some, like the harpsichord with rock and roll, or the clarinet with gospel just don't fit, obviously.

Take the tenor saxophone. This reed instrument has been heard in an amazing variety of musical disciplines in everything from early Motown to the most refined classical music, from big band jazz to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Clearly, this is a universally loved and broadly used instrument.

The guitar is another instrument that is an integral part of nearly every type of music you could name. In the form of bass guitar, which originally emulated the double bass fiddle, this pillar of the small ensemble will always be in demand. Can you imagine ANY rock and roll band without a bass guitar? Surely, not.

In classic acoustic or even hollow bodied jazz forms, the guitar has evolved to be everything from a sidebar to the entire ensemble for generations. A competent guitar player will always find work somewhere.

Should you consider an instrument like the French horn or even a woodwind such as the bassoon, your choice will most probably limit you to an orchestral environment to play in, which is where you'll find music written specifically for these instruments. There has been the occasional jazz French horn player, but because this horn is especially difficult to play, most are found in traditional classical environments. The French horn is one of the most difficult instruments to play properly that you'll ever find.

We shouldn't forget the percussion instruments in our coverage of possible musical entries. This application is populated with dozens of examples from bongos to timpani's to standard drum sets and even vibes. This group also includes bells, cymbals, tambourine, chimes and many more. Learning this group of instruments and being able to switch capably from one to another takes years to learn but can be enormously rewarding and fun. Anyone who has ever seen Buddy Rich play will know what I'm talking about. And this from a man who never learned to read music!

So, which will it be for you? Online piano lessons could be a great place to start terrific start.

Seven Advantages Of Easy Beginner Piano Lessons

If you are thinking of beginner piano lessons for children or adults, who do you ask? The following are a list ofthings that learning piano properly can teach you:

1. You find out the proper way to train your ear and learn how to play melodies with your right hand
2. You learn how to play scales with both hands in all twelve keys, and in both directions up and down the keyboard
3. You learn all about major and minor modes and how to apply them to any key
4. You begin to understand the concept of the 1—4—5 chord progression that ALL popular music emulates, with the use of substitution chords if not a straight out blues progression
5. You begin to appreciate the proper way to express chords using both hands, utilizing the root and fifth in the left hand and the third and seventh tones in the right as a basis
6. You develop the ability to diagnose and interpret music you hear on the radio as being composed of specific root keys and fourths or fifths before the bridge resolves back to the root
7. You learn to understand that most popular songs are extremely basic in design, and you recognize the patterns you hear are repeated over and over

The above mostly refers to popular music, but can be applicable to classical music at times as well. Classical music usually entails the use of a theme (motif), for which variations are used repeatedly throughout the piece. It is very exciting how to learn to recognize these types of patterns and bolsters your ability to appreciate the complexity of the writing when you understand what the composer intended. Listening to Beethoven, for example, is very much heightened by a basic understanding of themes as well as tonality.

A quality teacher, whether it be in the form of a private teacher or a well-developed system to learn keyboard online, will enhance your understanding of the above and enhance your learning experience. Becoming a discerning listener is what separates the musician from the masses.

If you think about the musical place your favorite artists are in, whether it be Elton John, Billy Joel, or even the band Blues Traveler, their concept of harmonic progressions are far advanced when compared to the average listener, and rightly so. These musicians have progressed from “playing tunes” stage to where they can identify major and minor progressions instantly. In other words, they know what works and what doesn’t in the same way you (hopefully) know what colors of clothes go together.

Music history shows us that in the beginning of recorded music, (written music) only specific types of intervals are considered acceptable. Gregorian chant is a good example of early recorded music, and only major fifths, thirds, and octaves were considered appropriate intervals. Major fourths were taboo, and weren’t accepted for many years. Eventually, fourths, sevenths (both major and minor) were considered usable and led to the use of minor thirds. The music you hear today would have given people of this period convulsions, (and rightly so-just joking).

Over time, more and more laxness was pervasive in the allowance of advanced progressions, ending up where we are today. Today, anything goes, literally. You can write music that involves pulling a chair across the floor (John Cage), or combines the use of tuned recorded laughs (sampling), it is all acceptable, but not necessarily enjoyable. It totally depends on your state of taste and mind.

Fortunately, there exists today so many musical genres that there is something available for every taste, however good or bad it may be.

Even Beethoven Needed Beginner Piano Lessons

The music of Ludwig Von Beethoven is beloved throughout the world and for centuries has been considered one of our finest composers of all time. In fact, students of many different genres of music have studied his compositions for insight into his musical genius for inspiration. Players of classical, jazz, fusion, rock, and latin music studied Beethoven before going off to explore their individual areas of expression.

So, do musical geniuses need lessons or are they simply born with innate ability to play any instrument automatically and express themselves freely, nearly from birth? Well, history shows us that there have been a select few people who didn’t need much tutoring before being able to recite, note for note, nearly any tune they wanted to play. Some even could play the piano with both hands competently, but these are the extremely rare exceptions. The rest of us (as well as most of the geniuses) needed lessons.

Beethoven gave his first performance at age 8 on the harpsichord but this was under duress from his father who exerted great pressure on his young son to develop quickly.

At the age of 16, Ludwig already had somewhat of a reputation in Bonn, the city he was born in. He taught music lessons and held concerts at aristocratic residences, as well as at court. His fervent harpsichord improvisations held his audience in complete awe. His keyboard playing ability fused with his genius for improvisation generated impromptu variations on a theme that must have seemed otherworldly at the time.

Beethoven sought the guidance of one of his famous contemporaries, Mozart, in Vienna. In 1787 Mozart found time to listen to him although at that time he was completely absorbed by his work on the composition of Don Juan. The not-yet mature Ludwig brilliantly improvised on a theme suggested by Mozart, astonishing his entire audience. After having listened to him, Mozart said: "watch out for that boy. One day he will give the world something to talk about". Beethoven began taking lessons with Mozart, and later studied with Haydn.

History shows us that Beethoven’s facility on the keyboard was every bit as developed as his creative compositions would later be revered. But, without beginner piano lessons and hours of practice even Beethoven’s genius would have faltered, and the world might not have benefited from the volumes of pieces he wrote.

Thelonius Monk Played Piano Before Taking Beginner Piano Lessons

Thelonious Monk was the subject of an NPR interview in which Biographer Robin D.G. Kelley tries to clear the air about his favorite subject.

"Monk's story challenges a very tired idea of the tortured artist ... committed to making an art by any means necessary," Kelley says.

Kelley teaches history and American studies at the University of Southern California. He says Monk wanted people to enjoy his music — and purchase it, too.

"He was someone who thought of music as a vocation: to keep his family afloat; his wife, Nellie; his two kids," Kelley says. "And so he took his work seriously."

Sometimes thought of as an offbeat composer, Thelonious Monk, who died more than 25 years ago, is well respected today and his music is still played and heard around the world.

But in his new book, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Kelley tackles those myths about Monk being a loner and difficult. He argues that Monk was not an isolated genius but was connected to his New York City community, and he played benefits for the social causes of the day.

"Well, I always did want to play the piano — the first piano I saw, I tried to play it," Monk said on a 1963 public television broadcast on New York's Channel 13. "I learned how to read before I took lessons, you know, watching my sister practice her lessons over her shoulder."

That recording is but one of Kelley's discoveries over the 14 years he spent researching his book. In scouring roughly 300 interviews, he says he learned that Monk may have started reading music when he was 10. By the time he was 11, he began studying with a classically trained pianist named Simon Wolf.

"The kinds of eay beginner piano lessons he gave Thelonious came out of the books of Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff," Kelley says. "These were the composers Monk was drawn to; Bach, Beethoven to a lesser degree."

So, even a genius like Thelonius Monk had to start somewhere.