Lesson 1 - How To Learn Songs

"What songs do you know?"

This is one of the first questions you'll be asked when people find out you're learning to play the piano. If you admit to knowing any at all (and you should!) the next thing you'll be asked is, "Can you play it for me?"

It's at this point that many adult beginners panic and invent excuses as to why it's not possible to play anything right there and then at that moment with the most common excuse being, "I don't have my music with me." One of the primary aims of this course is to empower you with confidence to be able to play the piano - with or without music in front of you!

Developing confidence is a step-by-step process that all too often is overlooked in traditional approaches to learning the piano. The approach you'll learn in this course will be one where you are shown how to begin with something very, very simple and then transform it with incremental complexity. The example that will be used initially to demonstrate this is the theme song from the old television show, Gilligan's Island.

Step One: Listen to a recording of the song you're planning to learn to play.

LINK TO YOUTUBE

Things to listen for:

• time signature (4/4)
• "form" - i.e., 2 bar introduction followed by a number of 8 bar verses
• chord changes - i.e., how often can you hear a different chord? (in the verses, there is one chord per bar except in bar 7 where there are 2 chords)
• chord qualities - i.e., the chord changes in the verses alternate between minor and major

For the purposes of this exercise, the introduction will be ignored and only the first verse will be studied. What we will be doing in the following lessons is called "transcription" and it is arguably the most useful skill you can possess for learning to play the piano (or any musical instrument).