Holly Day - Piano and Keyboard All-In-One for Dummies

Piano & Keyboard All-In-One For Dummies

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956854

ISBN 978-1-118-83742-9 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-83756-6 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-118-83744-3 (ePDF)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Chapter 1

In This Chapter

Getting acquainted with the piano and music

Discovering what you may already know about playing piano

Grasping the basic attributes of a keyboard

Understanding the benefits of reading music

Access the audio track at www.dummies.com/go/pianokeyboardaio/

The piano remains a very popular instrument, with the number of people who love the piano growing and its popularity spreading throughout the world. Even as the piano is treasured for its quality as an instrument, it also adapts itself to the changing times through technological advances.

The first half of this chapter helps you understand what makes the piano so unique and whats involved in learning to play it. You may find out that you know a lot more about music than you thought you did, even if youre a beginner. Beyond the familiar black and white keys, though, keyboards can be wildly different instruments, and looking at the front panels may not give you much of a clue as to whats inside. The second half of this chapter gives you an overview of what keyboards are and just what you can do with them.

Playing the piano involves the following fundamental musical tasks:

• Playing different pitches and melodies
• Controlling the attack and release of a note
• Playing different dynamics (relative loudness and softness)

But playing the piano is different from playing other instruments in some important respects, and the piano has several attributes that make it an ideal tool for learning and understanding music.

The piano occupies a central position in the world of music. Its the gold standard of musical instruments, utilized by composers and arrangers and featured routinely in nearly all musical styles, in chamber groups, rock bands, and jazz trios. (Okay, not marching bands.) The following characteristics make the piano a unique instrument in a great way:

• You can play many different notes at the same time. The fancy word for this is polyphonic.
• Its a complete solo instrument. You can play a complete song or other musical work without additional accompaniment or other help from your musical friends. That makes the piano satisfying and self-sufficient.
• Its the perfect accompaniment. You can accompany a singer, a choir, a dance class, a silent movie, your own opera, or your own soap opera, not to mention any other instrument.
• You can play almost anything on the piano. The piano has an unmatched repertoire of music. You name it, theres piano music for it.

The piano is an ideal instrument for learning all about music, starting with the design of the keyboard. The notes are laid out before your very eyes in a clear, organized, and orderly way. Understanding and playing musical pitches is quite easy because the keyboard presents a clear visual image for your brain to process the way musical notes go up (higher pitch), down (lower pitch), or stay the same.

Each key on the keyboard produces a single, distinct pitch, and you cant beat that for simplicity. Not much skill is required to make a nice, musical sound. Compared with some other instruments (cello, violin, clarinet, trombone, trumpet, bassoon, oboe, and tuba), playing any key on the keyboard, no matter how high or low the pitch, is as easy as playing any other key.

Another advantage of the piano is that you can play chords and layer sounds. The keyboard makes it easy to play harmonies and immediately hear how a combination of notes sounds.

After all is said and done, the reason playing piano is so special may be that its an activity that invites your full participation and rewards you just as completely. It has its mental side and its physical side. It requires both creativity and discipline, and engaging your mind and body is deeply satisfying.

As you learn to read music and play the notes on the piano (or keyboard, for that matter), you create information loops from your brain throughout your body. The first loop is from your eyes to your brain, as you take in the notes on the page and process the information. In the second loop, your brain sends signals to your hands and fingers, telling them how and where to move. Your fingers start to develop a sense of what it feels like to move around the keyboard and use different kinds of touch to produce different results from the piano. A third loop is made as your ears hear the sound from the instrument and send information back to your brain for it to process: Did I play the right notes and rhythms? Did I play a note too loudly or softy? Does what I play sound musical, overall? All this information helps you to modify the signals you send throughout your body to improve the results.